Jean Nidetch, whose displeasure with her 214-pound figure led to the creation of what is Weight Watchers International Inc., which hosts 50,000 meetings of the calorie-conscious each week around the globe, has died. She was 91.
She died Wednesday at her home near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, according to the Associated Press, which cited her son, David Nidetch. She spent her retirement years at a Parkland, Florida, senior community.
In 1961, 38 years old and living in the New York City community of Little Neck, Queens, Nidetch was, in her words, an “overweight housewife obsessed with eating cookies.” Diets and diet pills hadn’t kept off the pounds. As she embarked on yet another attempt — a high-protein regimen recommended by a New York City Board of Health obesity clinic — she enlisted six overweight friends to meet weekly to discuss their progress and struggles with food.
“It seemed to help,” she told the New York Times in 1967. “We discovered that other people hid cookies in the laundry basket, suffered from heredity — even though we had to ignore 20 thin relatives to find the fat one we took after — and sought permission not to diet.”
Nidetch lost 72 pounds by October 1962 and began giving lectures, for free. One of those talks was to a group of Long Island friends convened by Albert Lippert, a garment-industry executive, and his wife, Felice.
When Nidetch returned the next week, Albert had lost seven pounds and Felice four, according to the 1998 Times obituary of Albert Lippert.
Lippert encouraged Nidetch and her husband, Marty, to think like entrepreneurs. He helped them devise a business plan and an alliterative company name, and Weight Watchers Inc. was born in May 1963.
The two couples became partners, charging $2 for weekly Weight Watchers meetings, then selling Weight Watchers franchises. Cookbooks and a line of frozen foods followed. Lippert ran the company, while Nidetch was president and spokeswoman.
The company went public in 1968 and was sold 10 years later to the H.J. Heinz Co. for about $71.2 million. The Times estimated Nidetch earned roughly $7 million from the sale.
In 1997, Weight Watchers introduced its points-based system of keeping track of food intake, with penalties for fat and credits for fiber. Heinz sold the Weight Watchers diet-meeting business in 1999 to European investment firm Artal Luxembourg for $735 million, keeping the Weight Watchers prepared-foods lines.
A 1989 article in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine found Nidetch in “a fashionable Fifth Avenue apartment” in Manhattan, still svelte and still preaching the benefits of willpower over fad dieting.
“You have to make the decision to lose weight in your head, not your stomach,” she said.
Jean Slutsky was born Oct. 12, 1923, in Brooklyn to David Slutsky, a taxi driver, and the former May Rodin.
In 1947 she married Marty Nidetch, a bus driver, and they had two children. They divorced in 1971, a split partially caused, she later wrote, by the time she dedicated to Weight Watchers. Her second marriage also ended in divorce.
To mark the 10th anniversary of Weight Watchers in 1973, 15,000 people gathered at Madison Square Garden and gave a standing ovation to Nidetch, turning her “into the star of her own party despite the presence of Bob Hope, Pearl Bailey, Roberta Peters, Ruth Buzzi and other entertainers,” according to an account in the Times.
“Isn’t this something?” Nidetch called out, according to the Times. “A few years ago these same people probably couldn’t have fit into even this enormous place.”