This week, I was surprised and heartened to see that Oprah Winfrey, Empress of Everywoman, has purchased a 10-per-cent stake in Weight Watchers, the flailing U.S. weight-loss program. Remember Weight Watchers, the Alcoholics Anonymous of dieting? Flogged by both Sarah Ferguson and Jessica Simpson, the brand was the purveyor of processed foods and branded candy bars the size of your finger. It also worked – mostly by getting overweight people to commit to eating less and moving more.
Despite its historic success, Weight Watchers has fallen out of fashion in recent years. Profits are down and its popularity is waning among the nutritionally enlightened minority. The community-meeting aspect – once so revolutionary – has been supplanted by online fitness apps, such as Fitbit, that allow friends to contrast and compare the details of their diet and exercise regimes all day, every day.
Perhaps more important, the program's guiding nutritional ethos – that weight loss is primarily a matter of calories in and calories out (as evidenced by its infamous and punishing "points system") – has been largely discarded by the body-conscious public.
The fact is, diets are horrifically out of fashion. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone admit that he or she was on one.
These days, if urban professionals need to lose a few pounds, they tell everyone that they are "cleansing" or "detoxing" or "eating clean." I know people seeking to "alkalinize" their bodies and others who claim to be intolerant of gluten, yeast, wheat, fermented foods and nightshade plants. We live in a world in which cauliflower rice, zucchini pasta and black bean brownies have all but replaced the original sugar and starch.
Food writer Michael Pollan is the Moses of the real-food movement, with his commandments etched on a tablet of hand-churned heirloom butter: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Processed anything is verboten and "real food" is king. Farmers' markets are the new superstores.
It's all a bit much, these paleo lifestyle zealots with their healthy-eating mania. But, generally speaking, I am all for it. As someone who grew up watching my mother lose weight on crash diets of Tab, olestra chips and cigarettes, I think it's a form of social progress that my children will grow up in a world in which trans fat and aspartame are viewed as the true evil.
It's slightly delusional, of course, but humans have always been prone to collective delusion when it comes to food. Just a couple of decades back, it was the low-fat craze. Before that, everyone seemed to be lactose-intolerant. The Victorians ate tapeworms and drank tumblers of vinegar in pursuit of slim waists and good health.
But Oprah – now there's woman who has run the dieting gauntlet over the years. In 1988, she pulled a wagon full of 67 pounds of quivering fat onto the stage to show what she had lost on a liquid diet. Then she ballooned up to 200 pounds after a thyroid malfunction, before running the Marine Corps Marathon at a healthy zaftig size. Today, she looks great. Not thin, but healthy, robust and happy. In Oprah, we can see our own collective weight struggles writ large.
This week, she said in a statement that she bought into Weight Watchers because she believes in the company, saying it 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."
But the big O must realize that the issue of obesity has shifted in North America since Weight Watchers' heyday. As the obesity epidemic widens the gap between the rich and thin and poor and fat, weight is increasingly linked to class. Multiple studies have found that increasingly in the United States (and to a lesser extent in Canada), there is an inverse relationship between weight and wages.
The reasons for this are multifold, including the high cost and limited availability of healthy fresh food, and the fact that poor people can't afford gym memberships and rarely have time for Pilates.
But statistics show that the cause and effect between fat and income actually runs both ways. According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington, "Lower wages may make it harder to maintain a healthy weight, but obesity also has a significant negative effect on wages, particularly for white women."
So being poor makes you fat, but, conversely, being fat can keep you poor. Oprah Winfrey, who started off poor and became the most powerful woman in American media, has experienced the weight/class spectrum from every possible perspective.
In an increasingly divided world, in which the affluent obsess about buying local and the state of their lower intestinal tract while the poor get off their double shifts to double down on a cheap, tasty supersize meal, Winfrey is in for a challenge. Will Oprah walk around disadvantaged neighbourhoods, waving her mighty finger and proclaiming, "And you get a farmers market! And you get a farmers market!"? Or will she find an even more compelling way to persuade the burgeoning masses to trade in the pleasure of fast food for the rigours of old-fashioned dieting?