Oprah’s Breakup With WeightWatchers Shows Turnaround Won’t be Easy
When Oprah Winfrey buys or sells stock, investors tend to pay attention. In 2015, Oprah sent WeightWatchers’ shares doubling in a single day after she decided to take a 10% stake in the company. “Weight Watchers has given me the tools to begin to make the lasting shift that I and so many of us who are struggling with weight have longed for," she said at the time.
That was back in a pre-Ozempic universe where people struggling with obesity were told that the only way to lose weight was by exercising more willpower. Now, Oprah is parting ways with WeightWatchers, renamed WW International, announcing last week that she will step down from the board and donate her remaining 1.4% stake (she reduced her stake over the years, netting over $200 million from the partnership). The stock took an 18% beating the next trading day.
Oprah says she still uses the WeightWatchers point system, but it is hard not to connect her decision to leave WeightWatchers with her own shifting approach to weight loss: in December, she told People magazine that she was using a medication. “Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower—it’s about the brain," she said.
It isn’t just Oprah with a change of heart. WeightWatchers pivoted last year, buying digital health company Sequence to prescribe weight-loss drugs. For a company that once preached self restraint as the path to shedding pounds, WeightWatchers is going all in on the GLP-1 craze, with some even accusing it of being too aggressive in how it markets its new drug business.
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