Jean Nidetch: Entrepreneur who went from self-confessed 'fat housewife' to dieting evangelist with Weight Watchers International

Nidetch's operation became an empire with trademarked packaged foods, best-selling cookbooks, summer camps for children, franchises and millions of followers around the world

Nidetch: her empire took in packaged foods, cookbooks and summer camps (Reuters)

"I was a fat housewife married to an overweight bus driver raising two very overweight kids with a fat group of friends and an overweight poodle," Jean Nidetch once confessed, describing her life before she started a support group that would become one of the best-known weight-loss programmes in the world. The group was Weight Watchers International and Nidetch had been the organisation's chief evangelist since it was incorporated in 1963.

Nidetch had no formal training as a nutritionist and peddled no revolutionary weight-loss regime. Instead, she offered many dieters a new way to shed pounds – not in shame and alone, but in companionship forged through common struggle, and with regular meetings where they could share their setbacks and triumphs.

Her insight came from her own long battle with weight, first as a chubby child and later as a homemaker in Queens, New York, gorging on biscuits at night. She was 5ft 7in and weighed 15 stone when, by her own account, she hit a low point. A fellow supermarket shopper told her that she looked "marvellous," then asked when she was due. Nidetch was not pregnant.

In 1961, after repeated failures at fad dieting, she enrolled in a public obesity clinic. The meal plan promoted there – heavy on fish, vegetables and fruit – was appealing and effective. But she described the emotional experience as devastating. "I was one of the fattest people in the group," she recalled. "The leader was a nutritionist who was very thin. She said things like, 'When I look at a big display of food, I get sick to my stomach.' When she said that, we all looked at each other. It was a secret look. Nobody in that group got sick looking at food."

Endeavouring to stick to her diet, Nidetch invited six overweight friends to her home, where they formed an impromptu support network whose ranks steadily grew. The members bought a scale for weigh-ins. Nidetch developed a rewards system including prizes for weight-loss milestones. "It seemed to help," she said. "We discovered that other people hid cookies in the laundry basket."

In October 1962, Nidetch reached her target weight of 10st 2lb. News travelled about her skill as a motivator. Two dieters at one session, a garment executive named Albert Lippert and his wife, Felice, encouraged her to form a business. Together, the Lipperts and the Nidetches founded Weight Watchers, an operation that became an empire with trademarked packaged foods, best-selling cookbooks, summer camps for children, franchises and millions of followers around the world.

Regular member meetings remained a hallmark of the programme, which has been compared to Alcoholics Anonymous. Dieters greeted one another with the salutation "See you lighter." People who were not overweight were called "civilians" because they were not similarly embattled.

Weight Watchers went public in 1968 and celebrated its 10th anniversary with an extravaganza at Madison Square Garden featuring entertainers such as Bob Hope. By then Nidetch was herself a celebrity, greeted where she went by cheers of "Jean the Queen!" and "Be lean with Jean!" Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson interviewed her on their television programmes.

"You take away the handicap of obesity and this person becomes someone else," she said in 1993. "Take a jolly fat man for instance. You talk to him and his heart is breaking. He wants to be thin."

Jean Evelyn Slutsky was born in Brooklyn, the daughter of a cab driver and a manicurist, in 1923. "I'm sure that my compulsive eating habits began when I was a baby," she wrote in her memoir, The Story of Weight Watchers. "I don't really remember, but I'm positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat. I'm sure that whenever I had a fight with the little girl next door, or it was raining and I couldn't go out, or I wasn't invited to a birthday party, my mother gave me a piece of candy to make me feel better."

She worked for a company that printed horse racing tip sheets and for the Internal Revenue Service before marrying Mortimer "Marty" Nidetch in 1947. Their courtship, she wrote, consisted largely of eating together. Her wedding dress was size 18. "We developed a whole act about our size and we were the life of every party," she recalled. "People waited for us to say something funny, and we usually did. After all, if you're fat, you have to make a joke about your weight before somebody else does."

Heinz bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for a reported $71.2m and sold its diet classes to the private European investment company Artal Luxembourg in 1999 for $735m. By then, the outfit had become an international powerhouse. "In Israel, the Jews and Arabs sit together at our classes," Nidetch said in 1993, "and, you know, they don't hate each other at all. They're just interested in what they ate for breakfast."

EMILY LANGER

Jean Evelyn Slutsky, businesswoman: born New York 12 October 1923; married 1947 Mortimer Nidetch (divorced 1971; three children), secondly Frank Schifano (marriage dissolved); died Parkland, Florida 29 April 2015.

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