This week, news broke that WeightWatchers has filed for bankruptcy in the US. In 1968, five years after its launch, the group boasted more than 1 million members around the world. A decade later, the business would sell for more than $71m. Then it peaked at 5 million subscribers in 2020, but has struggled since the pandemic which coincided with the rise of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro. The legal process will see roughly £860m of the 60-year-old diet brand’s debt written off while it agrees new terms for paying back its lenders, and the company will be acquired by a group of investors.

The ‘weight loss programme’ has said it will remain “fully operational” during the process with “no impact to members”. So, it’s not clear yet whether the doors of this weight-loss giant will shut for good, but many of us are celebrating this news anyway. Why? Because WeightWatchers feels like the Moby Dick of diet culture.

Any young woman growing up in the UK will have a similar memory of the brand as I do – it lorded over us in public consciousness as a place fat women should go. It was pervasive and insidious. I knew about WeightWatchers ‘smart points’ despite never joining the programme, I knew that they called some foods ‘syns’, promoting to millions the unhelpful and untrue idea that food can be attached to morality.

Every plus-sized woman I knew as a teenager would attend WeightWatchers in phases – they’d go, lose weight, leave, put the weight back on, and eventually join again. The brand may not attach itself to yo-yo dieting or see itself as a toxic overlord of dieting, but that was its material impact for many.

WeightWatchers has always been heavily skewed and marketed towards women, with us making up 90% of its membership. This fact in itself is evidence of how patriarchal beauty standards are – weight loss is always targeting women, and fatphobia disproportionately affects women irregardless of our weight. The 2022 Health Survey for England estimated that men were more likely than women to be overweight or obese (67% of men compared with 61% of women).

Despite, in recent years, the brand trying to shift its approach to a more ‘holistic’ focus on wellness versus just weight loss, the damage is too little too late and much of its historic characteristics are still present, just now with some snazzy new marketing.