Episode Details

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I’ve been getting a lot of requests to write about Weight Watchers’ acquisition of Sequence, so here we go. One note that, in order to keep this from becoming Tolstoy-esque in length, there are a lot of links so that you can dig in more where you want!

I’ve been writing about Weight Watchers (aka WW) for more than a decade and I’ve noticed that one thing you can always count on Weight Watchers to do is…anything it takes to keep their stock prices up.

Using celebrities to create body shameAdvertising to people with eating disordersCreating an entire campaign to gaslight us into believing that they are solving weight stigma rather than creating it

Marketing a dangerous weight loss app to childrenChanging their name to try to co-opt the work of anti-weight stigma activists to claim they are about “health,” not weight (while selling the same old fatphobia-driven weight loss) Keeping that going publicly while moving back to their old weight-focused messaging (and name!) in individual communications

Funding research that grossly and purposefully misrepresents the data that shows their abject failure to create significant, long-term weight loss

And now…taking advantage of proposed legislation to increase access to telehealth, and piggybacking on Novo Nordisk’s massive marketing campaign for their dangerous new weight loss drug, by purchasing a telehealth company whose focus is prescribing dangerous weight loss drugs.

What is this company they are acquiring? Sequence is one of the scavenger companies that have popped up to capitalize on the massive marketing campaign around the new GLP-1 agonist class of weight loss drugs. Essentially the company employs a group of doctors and practitioners who prescribe weight loss drugs (including the new drugs as well as older drugs) with dangerous side effects and no long-term efficacy data, as well as a diet and exercise plan to people who pay a monthly subscription of $99 (which may or may not include their drugs.)

Their marketing gives us the same old thing – big print that claims that people lose 15% of their body weight on average, small print that points out that this is for a people who have been on the program for at least 26 weeks, conveniently capturing the period when weight loss is expected (about the first year,) and not capturing the 2-5 years after when research shows that about 95% regain all of the weight that they lost, without any link to the actual study to see if they are ignoring drop out rates or using other sketchy research practices. And even that claim is contradicted on their “FAQ’s page” which says “Sequence members lose 5% of their body weight within 3 months, and 10% of their bod