There are lots of food tracking and wellness apps available. Some track calories, some give you personalized meal plans and some monitor steps and activity. Others, like the Healthi app, do all the above.
Healthi (formerly called iTrackBites) has been around for several years, but it got a major rebranding in the last couple. While the name changed, many of the features—and the general approach to food tracking—stayed the same.
In this Healthi app review, we’ll discuss everything the app can do (and some things it can’t), highlight the pros and cons and provide recommendations on who might want to use it. We’ll also go over the differences between the free and Pro versions, and compare it to other popular options, like Noom and the WeightWatchers app.
Healthi is a calorie-counting and weight loss app that can help with healthy eating. At its core, it’s a food tracker. You input everything you need for all your meals and snacks, and compare that to a daily allotment that’s based on your current weight and future goals. In addition to food tracking, it also has an activity monitor and a healthy habit check, where you can monitor how much water you’re drinking or whether or not you’ve taken your supplements for the day.
While it’s not a social network per se, there is a social aspect to it. Signing up for the app gives you access to community forums where you can connect with other users and coaches. The forums are built around common interests or characteristics, so you might see one that’s just for 30-year-olds or “Motivated Moms.” You can also post to a general feed, where other users can comment or “like” your posts.
Healthi is a pretty straightforward app. When you sign up, there are prompts that walk you through the initial registration. From there, you choose a plan and then start tracking.
When you sign up for the first time, the app asks for some personal information, like your height, weight and goal weight. It then asks you to choose from a list of things that are “standing in your way,” such as junk food, social pressure and/or emotional eating. You can choose as many as you want, and then the app will recommend a personalized weight loss plan for you, based on those answers.
There are six different plans: Carb Conscious, Conquer Cravings, Sugar Smart, Better Balance, Calorie Command and Keeping Keto. Depending on your plan, you’ll be tracking food items in different ways. For example, Calorie Command tracks calories, while Keeping Keto looks at net carbs. The others use a point system called “bites.”
You can change your plan at any time, but the Keeping Keto and Better Balance diet plans are only part of the Healthi Pro version.
For most plans, Healthi uses a points system to help with portion control and weight loss. To utilize this system, different foods are assigned a certain value, called “bites.” For example, a cup of broccoli may count as one “bite,” while a piece of pizza may count as six. You get a daily bite value, and then as you track your food, the apps will tell you how many bites you have left for the day. If you’re on the Calorie Command program, you’ll track exact calories instead of bites. If you’re doing the low-carb keto program, you’ll look at net carbs instead.
To actually track your intake, you’ll sign onto the app and choose the foods you ate for your last meal. You search the online food database, choose the specific food and then adjust the serving size for accuracy. There’s also a recipe database (only available in the Pro version). If you use a recipe from the app, you can input the whole thing at once, rather than each ingredient individually.
Once you’ve added everything you’ve eaten, you’ll see your daily remaining calories, carbs or bites (depending on which plan you’re on). You can make adjustments throughout the day if needed, or mark certain foods as “zero bite foods”—foods that don’t count against your calorie or bites goals.
You can also enter your workouts throughout the day for extra activity points. For example, 25 minutes of playing basketball will give you back three bites.
There’s a healthy habit tracker, too. As you go through your day, you can check off servings of water, fruits, vegetables, dairy, lean protein, oil and whole grains to make sure you’re hitting your goals. There’s also an option to track multivitamins if you need help remembering to take them.
Once you’ve added enough data, the app will also create bar charts that allow you to track your progress throughout the week, month, quarter and year.
Coaches are available to help you with your weight loss goals, but you don’t get one-on-one time like you do with Noom or the upgraded WeightWatchers program. Instead, Healthi coaches contribute to chats and discussions in the community forums. There are also meeting leaders that initiate weekly member meetings to help with current issues and roadblocks.
The Healthi app is free to download and use, but the free version has limited features. It allows you to track your food and calorie intake, as well as your activity, but nothing beyond that.
The Pro version is a yearly subscription. In addition to food and activity tracking, it has macronutrient tracking, premium weight loss plans and access to coaches and a support community where you can connect with other people using the app.
The Pro version also makes meal tracking and macro counting easier by giving you access to a food database of more than one million foods and brands. There’s a recipe builder that allows you to browse over 500,000 recipes and create your own within the app for easier logging. There are also restaurant guides, snack and beer guides and specialized meals plans, like the Better Balance Plan and a Keeping Keto plan, that aren’t included in the free version.
The Healthi App and WW work on a similar “point” system. Healthi gives you a daily “bites'' allowance, while WW calls them Smart Points. Both apps have food tracking, access to coaches, recipes and community support. However, while the WW app does offer a 30-day free trial, you have to pay to use any of its features after that. You can choose a digital-only membership where you go through the program largely on your own (with the help of the app’s food tracking), or workshops or coaching options that offer a little more support.
Related: WeightWatchers (WW) Review: Does It Work?
Noom also offers food tracking, but it emphasizes coaching and psychological support more than the Healthi app. While Healthi does give you a coaching option, the Noom program is built around it. When you sign up, your coach will check in with you weekly, and you can sign up for video calls to chat through your progress and/or any roadblocks. The Noom app also offers more educational content, including weekly challenges and informational sessions around nutrition, stress management, goal setting and forming healthy habits.
Related: Noom Diet Review: Is Noom The Right Weight Loss App for You?
Zero bite foods are foods that aren’t assigned any bite value. These foods are low in calories, high in water content and “extra good for you,” according to Healthi. Because of this, you can eat these foods freely, without counting them against your daily bite allowance. Asparagus, broccoli, lettuce, pumpkin, berries, melons and zucchini are all examples of zero bite foods.
There are two versions of the app: a free version and an upgraded Pro version. The free version isn’t a trial—it’s always free—but the features are very limited. The Pro version is fully functional and includes extras like specialized meal plans, step tracking, restaurant guides, snack and beer guides and meal plans. It costs $24.99 for a six-month subscription, or $29.99 per year.
It depends on your plan. Four out of six of the plans convert calories to “bites.” Each food is assigned a bite value based on its calorie content and overall nutritional value. One plan—Calorie Command—tracks calories directly. Each food you log will show exact calories, and you can track your daily calorie progress on the home screen.
Healthi is the same as iTrackBites—just under a new name. The app was rebranded in 2019, but has the same features and functionality as the original.
Healthi is a food tracking app that also functions like a social network. If you like the idea of counting calories or tracking points, and want to connect with others who are doing the same, it’s likely a good option for you. Because the free version is quite limited, you’ll likely have to upgrade to the Pro version to get the most out of the app.
The women at the rogue WeightWatchers meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut, were livid. For years they’d faithfully gathered, like about a million other members, at WeightWatchers locations across the United States to conduct the weekly rites: step on the scales, share the latest wins and woes, and swap tips on how to hack points or resist that happy-hour margarita.
Some had been coming for 15 years; two had been on and off WeightWatchers since the 1970s. They’d lost 21, 25, 28 and 36 kilograms; they’d supported one another through retirements, children leaving for college and deaths in the family. Then in March, WW International shut down thousands of in-person locations, leaving the group to either make an hour-plus drive to a meeting across Long Island Sound or, worse, assemble online.
So one evening in April, about a dozen of them gathered in a windowless room at a local ShopRite for their second self-organised meeting. As they munched on Slim & Trim brand popcorn (three WeightWatchers points per serving), they fumed about another fresh wound – one that seemed like an even bigger betrayal. The company was getting in on the hottest new thing in weight loss: obesity medications.
In March, the same month WeightWatchers clamped down on its rent costs, it agreed to pay $US132 million ($195 million) to acquire Sequence, a two-year-old telemedicine start-up that prescribes a new, much-hyped set of medications called GLP-1s that can basically melt the kilos away. The drugs, which go by Wegovy, Ozempic and other brand names, have come to be regarded in the past year as a magic weight-loss solution.
Shrinking celebs such as billionaire Elon Musk and comedian Chelsea Handler were injecting themselves with the stuff; some doctors and scientists were predicting the drugs could upend America’s obesity crisis; and now WeightWatchers – the arbiter of self-restraint – was diving in, too.
“They’re not practising what they preached … and now all of a sudden there’s a drug involved,” Christine Sisterhenm, who’s been on the program for four years, said at the April meeting. “WeightWatchers has kicked us to the kerb,” said Bob Kline, the lone male member of the group that day, who joined WeightWatchers about 15 years ago.
For decades, WeightWatchers taught dieters there was only one way to shed the kilos: hard-won behavioural change. It was a long game, one fought with pre-portioned baby carrots and an accountant’s worth of spreadsheets for meal-logging. But battling food for your whole life is exhausting, and the weight almost always creeps back up for most dieters.
Now, after 60 years, the company was reversing course, proclaiming that jabbing a drug into your thigh once a week could do the trick. GLP-1s, which mimic a naturally occurring appetite suppressant, activate pathways in the brain that make you want to put down the fork even if there’s still food on your plate. The cravings just disappear, along with the kilos.
WeightWatchers’ sharp turn to pharmaceuticals is the work of its new chief executive, Sima Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran who took the top job last year. The company has been fighting for relevance for about a decade, mostly by going all-in on wellness trends rather than by transforming itself for the digital age.
That allowed upstarts such as subscription-based slimming app Noom to siphon off customers, leaving WeightWatchers flat-footed when the coronavirus pandemic shoved everything online. Late last year, nine months after Sistani became CEO, WeightWatchers’ stock price dipped to $US3.38 a share, its lowest level in about 20 years.
Sistani had made a name for herself after selling the video-chat app Houseparty, which she co-founded, to a big gaming company for an undisclosed sum. WeightWatchers’ board hired her to save the company, and within weeks of taking the job in March last year, she started looking at GLP-1s, which were just going mainstream. Sistani says that when she heard these drugs could eradicate obesity in her lifetime, “I was just like, ‘Wow, that is a big statement. … We need to catalyse this.’ ”
The strategy seems as audacious as it does desperate, but WeightWatchers has little to lose. The company long succeeded by surfing each wave of diet culture, from low-carb to fat-free. Now it has about $US1.5 billion ($2.2 billion) in debt, more than 10 times its expected 2023 earnings. Its bonds are trading at distressed levels, which suggests investors think the company may have trouble paying back its creditors. (WeightWatchers said earlier this year that it has more than sufficient liquidity.)
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs have been rushing to embrace GLP-1s since 2021, when Wegovy became the first highly effective obesity medication to win US Food and Drug Administration approval. Dozens of slickly branded telemedicine start-ups such as Sequence have surfaced, acting as digital matchmakers between patients eager to take weight-loss meds and clinicians who can prescribe them. The start-ups are trying to capitalise on a drug category that analysts at Jefferies Financial Group predict will be worth more than $US100 billion by 2032.
Since the WeightWatchers-Sequence announcement, the traditional weight-loss category has only continued to free fall: longtime competitor Jenny Craig, also saddled with debt, filed for bankruptcy, and WeightWatchers’ biggest shareholder, Artal Group SA, sold its remaining stake, ending a relationship that began in 1999. “Obviously, it’s not a vote of confidence,” says Mike Holland, a senior credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
All of this raises the question: what even is WeightWatchers if it becomes just another hawker of diet drugs? It may not matter. Sistani says: “It’s not like Blockbuster didn’t see Netflix coming.”
Before WeightWatchers-branded postal scales and recipe cards became staples of the American kitchen, a housewife in Queens, New York, was mistaken for being pregnant. The woman, Jean Nidetch, joined a local weight-loss program and began meeting with her mahjong crew of fellow dieters, eventually losing more than 30 kilograms and turning the weekly support group into a format that could be replicated. Businessman Al Lippert and his wife, Felice, became fans and helped Nidetch and her husband, Marty, found WeightWatchers in 1963. It soon expanded internationally, and in less than a decade, it went public.
The original WeightWatchers plan was strict, banning many processed carbs and emphasising protein and fruit. Dieters measured out their food and were required to eat liver – the closest thing to a superfood at the time – at least once a week. By the ’70s, as convenience foods were starting to boom, WeightWatchers began to loosen up, licensing its name for use on frozen meals and other products.
Ketchup maker H.J. Heinz was in the process of acquiring a line of WeightWatchers-branded packaged foods in 1978 when it decided to buy the company, too, for about $US71 million. Under its new owner, WeightWatchers dived deeper into selling in supermarkets – where it faced off against rivals such as Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine and Jenny Craig – and became Heinz’s fastest-growing line by 1989.
Then, in the ’90s, researchers discovered a drug combination that could help people lose weight. Millions of people flocked to clinics and doctors willing to churn out prescriptions of fen-phen, an amphetamine-like combination of fenfluramine and phentermine that worked to suppress appetite. Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem soon joined the frenzy, getting into the prescription business by enlisting doctors to prescribe fen-phen to their customers.
WeightWatchers stayed away, though, causing its membership and sales numbers to drop. But taking a hard line paid off when fen-phen was later linked to heart damage, a discovery that led to recalls and lawsuits. “We’re not a medical organisation, and we never pretended to be,” a WeightWatchers spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “Medical decisions about prescription drugs should be left to people and their personal physicians.”
WeightWatchers’ offerings fluctuated over the years, from weight-loss camps to working-woman-friendly recipes, even as the weekly in‑person meetings remained constant. In the late ’90s the company introduced the points system, which gave foods different numeric values based on calories, fibre and fat, that could serve as a simple shorthand for tracking what people put in their bodies. Dieters received a budget of points, allowing for some indulgences – just not too many. (In 2017, WeightWatchers even created a menu with more than 200 zero-points foods – including eggs, fish and beans – with the implication that one could, but probably wouldn’t, gorge on them endlessly.)
The company itself shape-shifted, too: Heinz sold it to the investment firm Artal Group in 1999, and Artal took the company public again in 2001.
By 2015, WeightWatchers was in trouble. Loaded with debt, largely from purchasing its own stock over the previous decade, and struggling to compete with free online weight-loss and fitness tools, the company needed to get people excited about joining again. And nobody, WeightWatchers concluded, was better at getting people excited than Oprah Winfrey. The influential talk show host had long struggled publicly with her weight, trying just about every diet out there.
After WeightWatchers approached her, Winfrey bought a 10 per cent stake – which would have been worth about $US43 million before she joined the company – and became a board member.
In commercials, she flaunted the 18 kilograms she’d lost on the program and praised its flexibility. “I have bread every day,” she declared. Her endorsement provided a much-needed facelift to an ageing brand, but the core, slightly boring tenets of pursuing a healthy lifestyle remained. “I truly wish there was a magic pill,” former CEO David Kirchhoff told analysts a few years earlier. “But there isn’t.”
How people were approaching weight loss, meanwhile, was changing. The body positivity movement was shifting emphasis from the scale to overall health, which might now mean eating like a caveman, meditating, sporting a Fitbit, swapping alcohol for green juice or turning to Goop for your medical ailments.
Wellness culture ran on good vibes, and dieting had bad vibes, as Deb Benovitz, who heads WeightWatchers’ insights and innovation, learnt when she surveyed consumers. People no longer wanted to talk just about “diet” – which inevitably implied failure – and instead said things like, “I want you to look at the whole me.”
In 2017, Mindy Grossman, the retail executive who had reinvented television shopping at HSN, took the helm and continued the wellness makeover. (She also marked the third CEO in 10 years.) WeightWatchers scrubbed the “d”-word from its materials, replacing it with “healthy eating”; got rid of artificial sweeteners, colours and preservatives in its products; and, for the first time, let people join without specifying a goal weight. Members could also attend wellness workshops and go on a WeightWatchers cruise. In 2018, the company even temporarily scrapped the WeightWatchers name, truncating it to WW with a new slogan: “Wellness that works.”
WeightWatchers had an app, which it updated with Headspace meditations and new online groups where members with similar interests could connect, but those changes went largely unnoticed. Ultimately, says Benovitz, wellness “didn’t translate into sales”. (Grossman did not respond to a request for comment.)
Noom, meanwhile, using psychology to help dieters develop and keep healthy habits, was suddenly becoming cool. Then, during the pandemic, people were packing on kilos snacking anxiously at home, while hundreds of leased WeightWatchers locations across the US sat empty. By the time Grossman stepped down early last year, the company’s membership was declining, and even Winfrey, still a board member, had offloaded most of her stock.
Early in the pandemic, Sistani was taking a walk around her neighbourhood in Menlo Park, California, to mark another day of working from home. After a meandering career with stops at Creative Artists Agency and Tumblr, she had recently achieved a milestone many in Silicon Valley dream of: selling a company. In this case it was Houseparty, a group video-chat app popular with gamers and college students, which Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, had purchased.
As she walked, Sistani listened to an episode of Winfrey’s Super Soul podcast and heard comedian Tina Fey confess her affection for WeightWatchers. Fey told Winfrey that her favourite low-points treat was a banana and strawberries with Cool Whip and chocolate drizzle on top. She said she’d posted about it under a pseudonym on the WeightWatchers app, where she also cheered on other members.
It dawned on Sistani, who’d used WeightWatchers after giving birth, that the company was more than a fading brand for middle-aged dieters – it was a social network. “I hadn’t really connected those dots,” she recalls thinking. “And I got really excited about that.”
She contacted WeightWatchers’ board, hoping she might persuade them to bring her on. That didn’t happen, but two years later, when the company was in desperate need of a reinvention, the board invited her to interview for the CEO role. Sistani’s pitch: not only did she understand digital communities, but she could also turn WeightWatchers into a tech company.
Its customers were already getting used to doing things online: once more evenly split between in-person and not, members had shifted dramatically during the pandemic, such that more than 80 per cent of subscribers opted to pay only for digital access.
But often, customers weren’t connecting with one another on WeightWatchers’ app, instead using places such as Facebook and Reddit. To start, she told the board, the app would have to improve. “You can’t even DM people,” she said. It was a diagnosis more commonly heard in 2010 than in 2022, but it got her the job.
By the time Sistani joined, Ozempic and Wegovy were becoming household names, and hashtags such as
Benovitz, the head of customer insight, was interviewing GLP-1 patients, who were calling the drugs “magic”. Hearing their stories of losing weight after many futile years of trying was so moving that she cried. “It felt like, I’m living through an inflection point where we may be able to cure a problem in this world that has been getting worse and worse,” says Benovitz, who has been with WeightWatchers for almost a decade.
It wasn’t just GLP-1 patients. Despite all the talk about body positivity, people seemed to have moved on, and they wanted to slim down again. They felt like they finally had permission to speak about it more bluntly. The company quietly began calling itself WeightWatchers again; suddenly wellness was out and science was in, especially science that explained the biological factors of obesity.
In October, Sistani met WeightWatchers’ scientific advisory board, which is made up of outside academics and physicians. (Some of them have taken tens of thousands of dollars from either Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly, both makers of GLP-1s. WeightWatchers says it looks for the best scientific experts and hires them based on their expertise, regardless of affiliations.) Sistani came away determined to move swiftly, but the company’s board was tentative, mindful of the fen-phen fiasco WeightWatchers had dodged decades earlier.
Sistani convinced some longer-tenured members that GLP-1s were different. And Gary Foster, the company’s chief scientific officer, was reassured that GLP-1s’ primary side effects – nausea, diarrhoea and vomiting – were generally mild and that the drugs had been used for almost two decades by people with diabetes without any safety scandals. “Other medications had things that were more nervous-system-related, or agitation or increased heart rate,” he says. With GLP-1s “you’re not seeing any of that”.
Of course, it remains to be seen what happens long term when GLP-1s are used by many more patients, including already-thin people wanting to lose weight, a cohort on whom these drugs have yet to be tested. (This month, a European regulator began investigating some GLP-1s after the drugs were linked to a small number of reports of suicidal thoughts.)
The fastest way to move into GLP-1s was an acquisition, and by that time, Sistani had plenty of options. Telemedicine had boomed during COVID-19; to spin up a digital prescription provider, all you needed was a sleek website, some science-y language branding, contract clinicians and a marketing budget. After considering more than 30 different GLP-1 start-ups, Sistani was sold on Sequence, which she thought had the best approach to automating insurance appeals, arguably the most labour-intensive part of the process.
“They had a team of engineers who’d come from working on AI-driven cars and have figured out a complete automation platform,” she says. Sistani decided to buy the company, she says, because of its “tech stack” and a feeling of kinship with its co-founders, two ex-Google software engineers who’d come along with the deal.
Remi Cossart, the CEO and co-founder of Sequence’s parent company, Weekend Health, says: “I truly believe that five to 10 years from now, we’ll look back on weight management in a very different way than we did, say, a few years ago.”
Wall Street cheered the deal, but for many WeightWatchers lifers the news stung. The acquisition “is an antithesis to what I thought they believed in”, says Nadine Lee, who’s been a member for the past 13 years. “Switching to medications feels like a quick-fix shift in their philosophy.” With the program, every food – from an ice-cream sundae to a piece of broccoli – had a points value. In this new WeightWatchers era, how many points was a shot of Ozempic?
With the deal moving so quickly to purchase Sequence, it remains uncertain just how WeightWatchers will handle the integration. Sistani says her experience at acquired companies – not just at Houseparty, but also at Tumblr after Yahoo! bought it in 2013 – will help smooth the transition. “Two-thirds of acquisitions don’t go well,” she says. “I’m really lucky to have been part of one that did and one that didn’t.” (Tumblr was acquired for $US1 billion in 2013 and sold for $US3 million in 2019; Epic shut down Houseparty in 2021.)
Since the purchase announcement in March, WeightWatchers hasn’t communicated much about its move into pharmaceuticals. Sistani, who posts videos on TikTok sharing her go-to two-point smoothie recipe and sporting a sweatshirt that reads “saving my points for wine”, says she’s been surprised by the backlash among WeightWatchers loyalists. But some die-hards who reach and maintain their goal weight don’t pay the company a cent, and even if they did, she’s fine rubbing them the wrong way to win over a new crowd.
“Some of the pushback we heard, our members for instance, was like, ‘I did it the hard way.’ And that’s not a reason to not help people,” Sistani says, comparing their complaints to people griping about student loan forgiveness.
Based on conversations with Sistani and her team, it’s likely the new WeightWatchers will look like some version of this: a traditional membership now costs about $US25 to $US50 a month; for access to the GLP-1s, you upgrade to a Sequence membership, bringing your monthly fee to $US99. (Existing Sequence members, already paying this amount, automatically become WeightWatchers members.) A Sequence membership comes with medical consultations and help from a dietitian but doesn’t actually include GLP-1s.
To be eligible for a GLP-1 prescription through the company, you need to have a body mass index of 30 or higher (or 27 or so with a weight-related condition). Once on the drugs, Sequence members have access to WeightWatchers’ new lifestyle services to help with things such as managing side effects and rebuilding strength as weight drops (along with fat, muscle inevitably disappears, too). The company envisions also marketing these behavioural services to GLP-1 patients who have obtained the drugs elsewhere. “There are plenty of people who are getting these medications from their doctors and not having the right support,” Sistani says. Members who aren’t on GLP-1s will continue using its traditional program – the points system and virtual or in-person meetings.
WeightWatchers had about 3.5 million online and in-person members last year, more than half of whom would qualify for a GLP-1 prescription based on their BMI. That group, along with a segment of the company’s 20 million or so lapsed customers, could be interested in upgrading to a Sequence membership.
But that doesn’t guarantee health insurance will cover the GLP-1s, which can add $US900 to $US1400 in out-of-pocket costs a month, an unrealistic expense for most. (WeightWatchers says in cases where people can’t get coverage, Sequence can provide access to less expensive medications typically covered by insurance.)
Sistani also concedes that while WeightWatchers has dramatically cut its real estate expenses – reducing from about 3000 locations before the pandemic to about 800 – the new business’ margins are similar, with costs such as employing clinicians, as well as staff to fight insurance companies that deny coverage to members.
But a bigger threat to WeightWatchers is how rapidly the drugs are being commoditised. Noom recently launched a $US120 monthly subscription for GLP-1 users, while the telemedicine start-up Ro – better known for selling erectile dysfunction medications – plastered New York City subway stations with ads featuring weight-loss drug injections. Med spas and plastic surgery clinics are pitching Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro alongside facials, tummy tucks and nose jobs and blanketing Instagram and Facebook with ads. (One nail salon in New Orleans advertises nurse-administered injections for “Semaglutide Saturdays”, a reference to the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy.) The drugs seem to be following the Botox trajectory, leaping from medical intervention to cosmetic elective, and Ozempic injection parties are not far behind.
Drug companies can barely keep up with demand as they deal with product shortages and knockoffs put out by so-called compounding pharmacies, which sell cheaper and questionable versions. (Novo Nordisk recently sued several providers and pharmacies over trademark infringement and other complaints.)
Soon enough there should also be GLP-1 pills for obesity and probably next-generation versions that help people lose even more weight. Middlemen such as WeightWatchers could find themselves in a race to the bottom, competing on price, access and marketing. “The uniqueness of this WeightWatchers offer is still a question from my end,” says Brian Nagel, a managing director and senior analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.
In the best-case scenario, WeightWatchers members who try Ozempic will encourage friends to sign up for the new program, where they can get drugs and support and discover the wonders of points. Those who are – and aren’t – on GLP-1s thrive together without resentment. In the worst-case scenario, long-time members, whose only elixir all these years has been willpower, quit en masse.
But it doesn’t end there: the new people who swarm to the brand for access to the drugs can’t get their insurer to cover them, then abandon it just as quickly. Eventually, some members fear, leaders at weekly meetings sling GLP-1 pens as newly skinny Ozempic users complain about losing too much weight too quickly. Everyone else grinds bitterly through another daily points log on their phone, including one-time Ozempic takers whose kilos have piled back on. What’s left is the illusion of a venerable brand that’s turned into a prescription factory with perks.
Already, versions of the latter scenario are playing out. Cindy Borges, a 54-year-old in Visalia, California, joined Sequence after she heard it had been acquired by WeightWatchers. Sequence couldn’t help her secure insurance coverage, though, and she quit soon after. She says she told two co-workers who were interested in her experience that it was a scam. “At the end of the day, until the insurances will start paying for it, what’s the point?” she asks.
Even if WeightWatchers can satisfy Sequence customers, it could still fade into irrelevance. Kelly Steffee, a 46-year-old mum who lives in an Orlando suburb, was a WeightWatchers member on and off for years before she joined Sequence last year. A clinician there prescribed Mounjaro, and she lost more than 23 kilograms in six months. But the most dramatic results were the ones she felt inside. “That food noise, the lady in your head telling you to eat all the time – ‘Get a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, it’s really, really good’ – she’s not there any more,” Steffee says.
Although Sequence helped WeightWatchers recapture her as a customer, it wasn’t a stable situation. For one, Steffee’s insurance wasn’t covering Mounjaro, and a coupon she’d been using, issued by the drug company, expired in June. She also wanted to keep losing weight, but her Sequence-appointed doctor didn’t want her to drop any more. So she quit and found another telemedicine provider that prescribed her Ozempic, at a dose she wanted. This time, her insurance covered it.
As for WeightWatchers, Steffee isn’t interested in going back to paying for the warm and fuzzy sense of community it monetised for so long. She already gets that on TikTok, where she’s constantly swapping tips and life updates with fellow weight-loss-drug takers. “That,” she says, “is my WeightWatchers meeting.”
Welcome to the age of Ozempic. Diet drugs have upended the weight loss business. The number of Americans taking semaglutide medication has increased 40-fold over the past five years, a contrast from decades of diet and exercise advice on how to lose pounds.
Wegovy and similar drugs threaten to forever change the $76 billion diet industry and the fabric on which it has stacked its riches. They even have consumer staples and retail titans like Coca Cola and Walmart fretting.
Sima Sistani, the 44-year-old CEO of WeightWatchers, is aware of this, and she recognized WeightWatchers had to evolve – or else. She knows she can’t beat Wegovy. That’s why she’s joining forces with it.
After she joined the company last year, Sistani began making radical changes: She ended thousands of the company’s notorious in-person workshops, closed storefronts and shifted the company’s focus to new weight-management drugs like Wegovy. She also landed a massive deal to buy a telehealth business that can issue virtual prescriptions to patients for these weight loss drugs.
It was a change that threatened to upend what WeightWatchers was best known for – the kind of risk CEOs rarely take unless they see an existential threat around the corner. But Sistani says the company isn’t losing its footing.
“What we do best is help people with weight management. That is the anchor,” she said. “I think we have to be true and authentic to that and who we are.”
And with that anchor, the company has been able to chart a path forward, even as the ground under it has shifted.
“I think we’ve been very intentional about our evolution,” Sistani told CNN. “We can ensure that all of our stakeholders see the benefit of this transformation and this change.”
Changes were already underway when, in March 2022, she took control of a company in crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic halted in-person meetings for a while, the company had tried on – and failed at – body positivity – and the emergence of semaglutide-fueled weight-loss phenomenon had just begun.
The legacy diet brand, more than half a century old, was on track to lose about $250 million for 2022.
The company had tried glomming onto the growing body positivity movement, haphazardly rebranding into a holistic wellness brand to keep up with changing attitudes toward body acceptance in 2018. That didn’t work.
“Part of the reason the wellness pivot didn’t work is because it was a marketing move. It wasn’t a product, and we didn’t change enough of how we showed up to really be a wellness company,” said Sistani.
The emphasis on in-person workshops and lack of a digital footprint was also hurting the company’s bottom line, especially in the social-distancing era.
“About 80% of the membership had moved to digital only, and yet we still had this app that functioned as though it was a companion to in-person meetings,” she said.
Sistani made radical changes, including ending many in-person meetings, closing stores and promoting semaglutide drugs.
In March, she made an even more radical change to revamp the company: WeightWatchers made a $100 million-plus deal to buy Sequence, a telehealth business that offers virtual prescriptions to patients for these weight loss drugs where appropriate.
“These medications have shown, and science has evolved to say, that living with obesity is a chronic condition. It’s important, no matter what it means for our business, to just be clear about that. It’s not willpower alone,” she said. “And what we are now saying is we know better and it’s on us to do better so that we can help people feel positive and destigmatize this conversation around obesity.”
Goldman Sachs analysts say that buying Sequence and embracing semaglutides is keeping the company from collapse. Analysts at the bank project that 15 million adults in the US will be on these medications by 2031, or about 13% of all adults in the country – not including diabetic patients.
They believe that these changes could generate $455 million in new revenue for WeightWatchers by 2025.
Sistani thinks if she hadn’t come in, the company would have followed in the footsteps of competitors like Jenny Craig, the weight management company that declared bankruptcy in the spring of 2023. Pieces of Jenny Craig company have since been sold to Wellful, the parent company of Nutrisystem.
The market seems to agree; shares of the company are up about 78% so far this year. In 2022, the stock tumbled about 76%.
Adam Rockmore of Fandango, Sima Sistani and Ged Tarpey of Twitter in 2015 in Los Angeles.
Sistani says that while weight loss medications have exploded in popularity, there’s still a lack of knowledgeable practitioners safely prescribing them. That’s a role, she said, that WeightWatchers can fill.
Semaglutide was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat type 2 diabetes as Ozempic, but it was also used off-label for weight loss. Wegovy, the version that treats weight loss, was approved in 2021. They work by mimicking a hormone that makes users feel full, but their use carries potential side effects like gastrointestinal discomfort. Long-term risks also remain under study. These medications are not stand-alone solutions and require a comprehensive approach to diet and exercise for sustained weight control. If you stop taking them, the weight often returns.
Most US doctors aren’t trained in obesity medication, and “there’s not a clear, safe, trusted way for people to understand whether they should be on these medications,” said Sistani.
WeightWatchers, she said, can be that source. “We’re a public company and so we have transparency of operations. We believe we can provide a much better experience for people on these medications.”
WeightWatchers has clinicians and researchers on staff and a scientific advisory board and medical advisory board to ensure that the experience is safe, she said, that that any side effects or complications are well-managed and that the medications are going to people who need them.
Still, WeightWatchers is a company that has shapeshifted more than once over the past decade as it struggles to find its identity.
Even longtime spokesperson and investor Oprah Winfrey had to walk back previous comments about weight loss drugs being an “easy way out” after WeightWatchers started selling them.
Some longtime users of the program feel betrayed by the pivot away from in-person meetings and toward medication-based solutions.
“WeightWatchers’ acquisition of Sequence really rattled many members,” said Jamie Yonash, who runs the lifestyle blog Life is Sweeter by Design, which focuses heavily on WeightWatchers-related content. “
“The feedback I have received is that they feel somewhat betrayed that WeightWatchers would promote medications for weight loss because it seems to go against the core values the company has held for so long,” she said.
Of the loss of in-person meetings, she said, “I believe that the move to almost totally digital programming is not in the best interests of all members. People need human connections and interactions, and those aren’t always achieved in a digital environment.”
Other WeightWatchers influencers were also confused by the changes. Biz Velanti, who runs popular blog and social media account MyBizzyKitchen, told CNN that “everyone is looking for the quick fix,” with medication. “Sadly, they don’t want to do the work,” she said, of tracking food or exercising to achieve weight loss goals.
While the future of WeightWatchers is still being written, Sistani is certain of what it won’t be: It won’t be centered around weekly meetings and weigh-ins. It won’t be a consumer packaged-goods company selling diet snacks.
Evolution, said Sistani, is inherently difficult. But this isn’t a gamble, she added; it’s a “bold bet that is informed with data and then infused in every single part of what we do.”
In its most recent corporate earnings report, the company reported net income for the third quarter of 2023 at about $43.7 million. WeightWatchers reported a net loss of $206 million in the same period last year. Operating income came in at $30.6 million, compared to an operating loss of $254.5 million in 2022.
Subscriber growth also increased by 6% year-over-year to 4 million. Still, the company lost money on subscription revenues and its gross profit was down for the year.
WeightWatchers was a marketing-driven company when she took over, said Sistani. Now, with a new outlook, it’s a consumer-first enterprise.
“We’re going to grow in ways that resonate with a more digitally forward consumer,” said Sistani. “There will be community building and workshops, but they won’t have to be coach driven. It’s more about being in the places where people want to connect. Sunday walks in the park, or maybe even a trip to the grocery store. There are so many ways that we can create those relationships organically and meet people where they are.”