https://www.yahoo.com/news/body-shaming-outlawed-144035843.html
Can Body Shaming Be Outlawed?
In 1961 at age 37, Jean Nidetch, who struggled with her weight for most of her life, signed up for a 10-week program offered by the New York City Board of Health called the “Prudent Diet.” Nidetch lost 20 pounds, but she grew disillusioned — to keep going, she would need the kind of motivation that she believed could only come from community. Borrowing the central tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, she began inviting friends in a similar predicament to weekly meetings at her Queens apartment, where they would talk about the emotional roots of overeating and generally buttress one another in a shared commitment toward what was then so often pitifully called “reducing.”
The group grew and grew; the result was Weight Watchers, which, by 1968, could count 5 million members worldwide.
A half-century later, the notion of watching your weight, of subjecting your body to daily metric surveillance for the sole purpose of becoming thin, had come to seem retrograde — a capitulation to the debased mandates of the patriarchy, another useless foray into self-reproof. In 2018, in an effort to meet the moment, Weight Watchers rebranded as WW, with the tagline “Wellness that works.”
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