Latest news with #dieting
Daily Mail
20 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Bankrupt WeightWatchers seeks salvation with 'complementary' deal on fat jabs that nearly destroyed it
WeightWatchers is joining the fat-jab revolution as it seeks to reinvent itself after going bust. The storied U.S. dieting firm - which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month - has teamed up with a UK-based anti-obesity drug firm named CheqUp. As part of the tie-up, CheqUp members will get access to a new WeightWatchers app designed to assist those taking weight-loss injections. WeightWatchers has helped millions lose weight by selling low-calorie foods, diet and exercise advice. However, the company has failed to compete with Ozempic and other breakthrough drugs that mean overweight consumers can shed weight quicker and with less effort. Its new app will support customers through the journey by recommending food choices that minimize the side effects of the medication while promoting healthy weight loss. These 'complementary offerings' will help those 'seeking sustainable weight loss through GLP-1 medication and behavioral support,' the two companies said in a joint statement. 'There is no doubt that the addition of WW breakthrough GLP-1 companion program will add enormously to our patients' ability to achieve sustainable weight loss,' James Hunt, deputy chief executive of CheqUp, said of the partnership. 'This partnership offers the most attractive proposition in the market for those looking to benefit from the incredible potential of GLP-1 medications and behavior change' Hunt added. CheqUp provides both semaglutide jabs, the active ingredient in Ozempic, and Wegovy and Mounjaro, which contains tirzepatide. WeightWatchers filed for bankruptcy in May after months of negotiations with its lenders. The weight loss company has been struggling under $1.6 billion of debt and a sinking stock price. The company, now known as WW, has already negotiated a deal with its creditors so it will enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a pre-packaged filing. The company will be taken over by the institutional investors that own its debts. This should allow the company to move out of bankruptcy quickly and keep its business running as normal in the process. Weight Watchers was founded in 1963 by Jean Nidetch, a housewife from Queens, New York. It all began in her kitchen, where she invited a group of friends over to talk about dieting and offer each other support. At the time, Jean was following a diet prescribed by the New York City Board of Health, but she realized that support and accountability made all the difference. The company has influenced millions of people in the U.S. and around the world, selling diet meals, magazines, books, and memberships to its weight-loss programs. Over the years, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Jessica Simpson have helped market the brand. In 2014, Simpson appeared in ads at age 33, showing off her post-baby weight loss in a form-fitting black dress. Alarm bells first rang for the company in March 2023, when shares hit an all-time low amid declining sales. The situation worsened when longtime investor Winfrey — who admitted to using weight-loss medication — stepped down from the board. Since then, the stock has continued its downward spiral. WeightWatchers' stock fell so low following the announcement of its bankruptcy that it was delisted by the Nasdaq index and has suspended trading. By comparison, Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk is valued at around $297 billion.
The Sun
3 days ago
- General
- The Sun
I tried every diet going but finally lost 8st using 5 simple principles – you can do it too, and more really is more
AT her heaviest, Nicole Dvoracek tipped the scales at 17st 8lbs. She was constantly dieting, bingeing in secret, crying in dressing rooms and living in a body she desperately wanted to escape. 5 5 Now, aged 40 and a trim 9st 2lbs, she is more confident than ever. And she says it's all down to more, not less. 'It took me 15 years to get here, but it didn't need to take that long,' says Nicole, from Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. 'If I could go back and talk to my 25-year-old self, I'd say: 'You're not broken, the plan is'. 'I tried everything, and it all failed' Nicole's story is painfully familiar. Like many women, she entered adulthood bombarded with toxic diet culture. 'Eat less. Move more. Starve to be worthy.' That was the message. The result? Years wasted bouncing between keto, Whole30, fasting, Optavia, HCG drops, and extreme calorie restriction. 'They all worked… until they didn't,' Nicole shrugs. 'I'd lose the weight, feel hopeful, then gain it all back, plus the 'courtesy 10lbs'. Over and over again.' Eventually, she found herself trapped in a cycle of emotional eating, shame, and burnout. Everything changed the day Nicole hired a coach, not for another crash diet, but for a custom strategy that considered her hormones, her stress, her sleep, and her lifestyle. 'That man didn't just change my life, he saved it,' she says. 'He finally gave me the tools to stop dieting, and start living.' Since then, Nicole hasn't just kept the weight off for good, she's helped hundreds of women do the same. Her masterclass teaches what she calls 'cheat codes' to sustainable fat loss. And spoiler: none of them involve starving. 'The fastest way to your dream body? A slow, sustainable plan that actually works long term. Shocker, right?' she says. Nicole's five 'no BS' fat loss rules 1. Protein is queen 'Eat 0.7 to 1g per pound of your goal weight,' Nicole says. 'Every day. No exceptions.' This could be as simple as swapping your usual breakfast cereal and milk for Greek yoghurt sprinkled with nuts, or your pasta salad lunch for one with chicken breast or tuna. 2. Track like a ninja 'You're eating more than you think,' Nicole says. 'Macros matter - especially protein and fibre.' Macronutrients, or macros, are the main types of nutrients your body needs to function properly: protein, carbohydrates (including fibre) and fats. Some experts suggest tracking macros instead of calories is a better way to losing weight. To calculate your macros, first work out your approximate calorie needs. You can use a tool like the TDEE Calculator. Then divide this figure into proportions for each macronutrient based on a set target. This could be: 30/30/40 - 30 per cent from protein, 30 per cent from fat and 40 per cent from carbs 40/40/20 - 40 per cent protein, 40 per cent carbs and 20 per cent fat 50/30/20 - 50 per cent from carbs, 30 per cent from protein and 20 per cent fat Convert these targets into the number of grams of each macronutrient you need to eat to meet your calorie requirements. 3. Lift heavy s*** It's time to ditch the treadmill and head for the weights. 'Cardio won't build your dream body. Strength training will,' Nicole says. Join a gym, or buy some dumbbells or kettlebells which you can use at home. You can try one of The Sun's at-home strength sessions to get you started. After A-list abs? Give our ' flat tummy plan ' a go. Want toned shoulders to look good in strappy tops and bandeaus this summer? You can get ready for sunny season with these five exercises. And if slender legs are your goal, try these simple moves in front of the TV. 4. Walk every damn day 'Walking 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day is free, easy, and insanely effective,' Nicole says. If you are nowhere near 2,000 steps a day, let alone 10,000, or the recommended 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week, it is time to get moving. Moderate activity raises your heart rate, makes you breathe faster and feel warmer – while vigorous movement takes it further, so you really get a sweat on. Moderate intensity activities include: brisk walking, riding a bike, dancing, pushing a lawn mower and doubles tennis. Vigorous activities include: running, swimming, walking up the stairs, football and aerobics. Chores such as changing bed sheets, vacuuming, scrubbing floors and washing the car, and even standing up and walking around the house when you're on the phone, rather than sinking into the sofa, will all add to your exercise tally too. So if you are not a Lycra bunny, there are still ways to start fitting more movement – and more steps – into your daily routine. 5. Ditch the diet mentality The days of hellish restriction are over. 'It's not about less - it's about more,' Nicole says. 'I'm talking more food, more muscle, more freedom.' 5 5 5 Nicole is now a no-nonsense, tough-love fat loss coach who's become a lifeline for thousands of frustrated women battling their bodies and their mindsets. On TikTok, she has over 1.2million likes. Her signature program, the Fat Loss After 40 masterclass, is flipping the script on everything we thought we knew about weight loss. Nicole's work doesn't stop at nutrition and training. Understanding how often women are dismissed by traditional healthcare systems, she's added a hormone optimisation team to her coaching services. 'We create truly customised plans, going far beyond the tired 'eat less, move more' advice,' she says. 'It's the reason behind the life-changing transformations my team has produced.' 'This is the secret sauce,' Nicole adds. 'It's not just about fat loss anymore. It's about building a foundation for lifelong health.' Nicole is blunt when it comes to the lies women have been sold. She says that quick-fix plans often leave women looking like 'melted candlesticks'. 'If you're losing weight without strength training or protein, you're just a smaller, squishier version of your old self,' she says. 'That's not toned. That's skinny fat.' 'You're not lazy, you're misled' Now, her focus is on building muscle, restoring metabolic health, and empowering women to stop obsessing over the scale. 'Your metabolism isn't broken. Your plan is,' she says. Nicole's transformation didn't just change her physique; it changed her purpose. She now works with women navigating menopause, hormonal imbalances, and burnout, giving them real tools to get their bodies (and lives) back. 'You can't diet the way you did at 25,' she says. 'You need a plan for this season of life.' And she's clear on one thing: you're not lazy, you're misled. 'You're not undisciplined. You've just been fed bulls***',' she says. 'The quick fix is what's keeping you stuck.' Down 120lbs and radiating confidence, Nicole is living proof that transformation is possible, without sacrificing your sanity, your social life, or your favourite foods. 'This isn't just about fat loss,' she says. 'This is about freedom. About showing up in your life fully, confident, strong, and finally in control. 'Once we get it off, we keep it off. That's my promise.'
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘If dieting works, where's the evidence?' How weightlifting helped Casey Johnston love her body again
Before Casey Johnston started weightlifting, she had assumed it was the preserve of 'people who already had some sort of talent or need for it – like you're a football player, a firefighter or in the military, and you need to be physically capable in that specific way'. Getting started seemed intimidating: the technique, the gym environment. Cardio, however, had always felt intuitive. 'You go out the door and you run until you can't run any more, and that's it,' she says. As was the idea that it should be punishing. As a younger woman always obsessively trying to lose weight, she ran half-marathons in sub-zero temperatures and feared eating even the calories burned by any run in case it 'undid' her hard work – never mind how cold her extremities and faint her head. After years on the exertion/deprivation treadmill, Johnston felt like a failure: 'Like I'm doing this wrong, or my body is especially difficult to wrangle.' But as a science fiend and engineering graduate, something had started to smell off about the eternal glittering promise of diet and exercise. 'If dieting works, where's the evidence? That was a bit of a watershed moment for me. We're all so used to taking out a lot of guilt [on ourselves] like, I'm not doing it right.' Then, in 2014, Johnston came across a Reddit post by a woman sharing how weightlifting had changed her life: that she felt strong – despite 'only' doing five reps each of a few movements per gym session – and rested heaps and ate tons. Johnston was doubtful but, sick of the relentless misery of endless runs, found her local spit-and-sawdust gym and had a go. Hunger overwhelmed her: how much she immediately needed to eat to replenish her energy and repair her muscles, and how excited she was to do it all again. 'I really did feel different very quickly,' she says. Johnston, who's now 38 and lives in Los Angeles, is my equivalent of her Reddit woman. I also started lifting around then, so badly that I soon slipped a disc from rubbish form. When Johnston started writing a column in 2016, for a now defunct website called the Hairpin, she was the font of good sense I needed, not just about technique, but also the importance of eating 'like a big beautiful horse', of disregarding wellness bullshit, self-punishment and pointless gym machines that only target one muscle at a time. She had a captivatingly funny, no-more-nonsense approach and a talent for accessibly interpreting scientific research. (Her canonical investigation on running without a sports bra convinced me to ditch mine, and I've never looked back.) Like many women who grew up in the 2000s, I'd had a purely poisonous relationship with my body since childhood: I have tried every restriction, had a destructive relationship with the MyFitnessPal food-monitoring app, exercised through injury. No one has had a more positive impact on that relationship than Johnston. So I feel a bit starstruck when she appears on my screen from her home office. In 2021 Johnston's columns became a twice-weekly email newsletter, She's a Beast. She self-published Liftoff, a pdf intro to lifting. Now her first proper book, A Physical Education, is a memoir of how lifting undid a lifetime not just of restrictive diet and exercise, but of her tendency towards self-diminishment from growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who prized thinness: 'Handling all these weights had taught me to know when I was handling too much,' she writes. Having read her authoritative, disruptive work for years, I was surprised to learn of her self-doubt, and that she had felt confident to start writing about her discoveries in spite of it. 'I developed this compulsion to tell everyone about this thing I had found that changed so fast how I saw myself,' she says. 'That working out could be totally different from how everyone talked about it as this horrible chore. While I was not super-confident in myself, I was very confident in the process.' Johnston grew up in upstate New York, and studied at Columbia University. She graduated in 2010, into the recession. She couldn't get an engineering job and wound up in the media, writing about technology. Her affinity with 'knowing how everything actually works' prompted her to investigate the mechanics behind the muscle. 'There is so much beautiful science here that is not leveraged at all,' she says. 'I felt like everything I'd heard [about my body] was about shame and guilt and reinforced the mystery of this destructive relationship. When I found out there could be something different, I was like, I gotta understand how all of this works.' The most immediate discovery was that the cravings Johnston had always thought were normal – and normal to suppress – disappeared once she started eating 50% more to fuel her workouts and recovery. 'I could spend an entire day thinking: I want cookies, or I can't have cookies. When can I have cookies? How will I acquire them? Which cookies will I get?' she says. 'I thought that was a normal part of being an adult, to deny your cravings as a way of managing your weight, only to find out that it was a medical symptom of being malnourished from dieting for too long, and not even in a way that's putting you on death's door. There's this middle ground where you're substantially mentally and emotionally affected – rigid about rules, hyper-vigilant. Once I started eating more, those things went away without me having to be on my toes all the time. Everything about my mental state changed.' Johnston's writing about the relative peace to be found in weightlifting hits hard because it was so hard won. In one painful chapter, she tries to introduce it to her mum, a 'staunch exerciser' and 'dedicated dieter'. She is resistant, especially to eating more than her minuscule calorific intake: 'No one likes fat old women.' Johnston tells her there are plenty of fat old women that people love. Her mum replies: 'But they wouldn't love me.' Even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary, it's easy to perceive your unruly body as the exception to healthier approaches: that you alone must overexercise and undereat to avoid some perceived disaster. Johnston has been there. 'When I was at a certain point with dieting, and I wanted to do whatever it takes to be not even hot, but physically acceptable, I didn't care what anyone said I should or shouldn't do,' she says. 'As a woman, I felt that people judged my appearance before anything else, and I didn't want that to be the main, valuable thing about myself. To get credit for anything else, I had to manage that first. So I completely understand this mentality of not feeling like you can trust anyone to appreciate you if you don't manage your appearance. All we can do is help people understand they are worth caring for, which I didn't understand about myself for a long time. I had no foundation other than suffering in this way, because that was my mom's relationship to herself. It's not a moral failing to struggle with this stuff, because so many of us do.' In a culture that remains fixated on women's bodies, it's barely possible not to. For a heartbeat around the turn of the 2020s, it looked as though strong might replace skinny as the new ideal; that body positivity or at least neutrality might become the norm. Then GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro swept in and once-buff celebs reverted to waif-like type, and denied that the drugs had anything to do with it. Will the body ideal always arc back towards skinniness? 'If you look back through history, our aesthetic ideals have oscillated a lot,' says Johnston. 'And a lot of times, tellingly, things switch up as soon as everyone gets comfortable or has stuff figured out.' The democratisation of strength training via Instagram and YouTube showed Johnston how happy thousands of people were eschewing thinness as an ideal: 'They just didn't, and still don't, get the same visibility as the people who sow shame and guilt.' And she's sceptical about appetite-suppressing drugs. 'We have yet to see any pharmaceutical or medical 'weight-loss' method reliably bear out as effective, sustainable and lasting. I will be surprised if GLP-1s are the exception.' A Physical Education is a manifesto for learning to reconnect brain and body, to reclaim that relationship from the billion-dollar diet industry that profits from breaking it, keeping us hungry and insecure. 'Lifting was constructive for me because of the atomic unit of it,' says Johnston. 'You're doing a rep or a set, you pause and go, how did that feel? Was that too heavy? Too light? How was my form? The practice of noticing how I felt was something I never had before, and learning to do that within lifting radiated outward into the rest of my life.' Writing the book allowed Johnston to examine why it's so easy to lose body awareness to external forces. 'The stew of our upbringings and cultural messaging can be very overwhelming, and the feedback loops between them are very difficult to see and challenge,' she says. 'It requires having, or building, an immense amount of trust in yourself and in people who actually love and appreciate you, which is exactly what those forces work to destroy. But they wouldn't be working to destroy it if it weren't an immensely powerful thing to have. If there is anything that animates me, it's defiance, so the idea that I'm taking something that many forces don't want me to have only inspires me to fight harder.' Johnston's newsletter readers witnessed her defiance recently when she wrote about weightlifting through her first pregnancy, something women have historically been – incorrectly – uniformly advised against. 'As someone who enjoys bullshit detection, cannot stand being talked down to and generally enjoys being angry and indignant, pregnancy is acres of rich, fertile soil to till,' she wrote at the outset. Her son is now five months old. 'I heard from readers on both ends of the spectrum,' she says. ''Good for you that you're lifting', and others who are like, 'You're actively killing your baby.' I was excited to write about it and assert my experience, for people to know that I'm not speaking to this in an abstract way.' Johnston's work feels to me of a piece with Miranda July's All Fours (her protagonist also takes up weightlifting) and Lucy Jones's radical book on pregnancy and motherhood, Matrescence – startling prompts that have allowed many women to escape traditional gender scripts. At the same time, particularly in the US, there's growing traditionalism around gender and aesthetic norms. It's a striking schism. Johnston makes sense of it by not trying to make sense of it. 'You don't need everyone to be doing the same thing for you to be doing what's right for you,' she says firmly. 'So many people suffer for wanting coherence from these disparate groups who are never going to want the same things, but we're still looking outward for the right answer. That answer is actually to look ye inward. I really suffered for needing to make sense of what everyone is telling me and apply it all, without regard for myself. What I really needed was to develop that regard.' Johnston's regard is powerful, and radiates outward. In A Physical Education, she writes about the importance of rest and that limits aren't 'something to be ashamed of': her evangelism convinced me that I was still wildly overexercising – often 10 times a week – and prompted me to seriously pare back. She never does sponsored content and barely does social media – practically terminal for 'building a brand'. After decades of having my brain scrambled by body positivity, Kayla Itsines and protein mania, Johnston's work feels reassuringly steady, sound – and on your side. 'There's a lot of opportunities to pivot into courting virality,' she says. 'But I understand the much less quantifiable if not more important aspect of feeling like you can trust somebody. I have built credibility by continuing to stay in this lane and say what I'm saying. I think my sheer stubbornness has won people over.' A Physical Education is published by Grand Central on 29 May.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE How I look this good at 74... JANE SEYMOUR reveals powder she has for breakfast, her slimming secrets and beauty trick she'd NEVER do that doctors say have knocked 15 years off her biological age
She's observed from afar the decades of endless weight-loss fads among her famous rivals - no doubt, with something of a self-satisfied smile. Because Jane Seymour - who at 74, was born in the postwar rationing era - has had neither the need nor desire to experiment with anything remotely resembling a dieting 'trend'.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Ultimate battle of the fat jabs: One of these women picked Mounjaro to lose weight, the other Wegovy. Now, six months later, they reveal their astonishing results... and which one really is the best
They have changed the face – and figure – of the dieting industry in recent years. But which of the weight-loss jabs would you choose – Mounjaro or Wegovy? These two weight loss heavy hitters, the brand names for the drugs tirzepatide and semaglutide respectively, have come to dominate the UK market.
