Weight Watchers for Teens: Helpful or Harmful?

Before age 12, Becca was a normal, happy Midwestern kid. She loved dancing and swimming, did well in school and giggled with friends over Starbucks Frappuccinos. After age 12, Becca was different. She only danced and swam to burn calories, had trouble focusing in school and retreated from friends who socialized over food.

The turning point, says Becca, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy, was joining Weight Watchers. She signed up for the program a few years after her doctor had told her she needed to lose weight, since she exceeded what was considered a healthy range for her age group. Never mind that she was off the charts in height, too.

"It was instilled in me that something was wrong with me and that I was wrong because of the way I looked, and so I tried to change the way I looked," says Becca, a 26-year-old social media manager in Illinois. Cue more than 10 years of yo-yo dieting, social isolation and total preoccupation with food and weight. She lost her period and energy, her hair thinned and eventually, she learned she had an eating disorder. "It's taken me a lot of years of therapy to not see food in points, and see it as food," Becca says.

[See: The Eating Disorder Spectrum -- From Pregorexia to Drunkorexia.]

Becca is one of the outraged voices taking to social media in response to Weight Watchers' announcement that it's opening up its program to teens for free, beginning this summer. The initiative is one of several born from the company's new vision to "inspire healthy habits for life" by making its programs more accessible to people across ages, genders, geographic locations, income and more. Critics, who've used the hashtag #WakeUpWeightWatchers, say putting kids on diets sends the message that their worth is weight-based, and sets them up for a lifelong unhealthy relationship with food, if it doesn't set the stage for a full-blown eating disorder. Many have stories like Becca's.

"Generally speaking, the initial concern comes from our knowledge in the eating disorder field that dieting is a very established risk factor for disordered eating and eating disorders," says Claire Mysko, the CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association. She and others point to research like a 2016 clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics concluding that focusing on a healthy lifestyle, not weight, can help prevent both obesity and eating disorders in teens. Dieting has also been shown to affect metabolism in a way that makes long-term weight gain likely, so Weight Watchers' efforts will only backfire -- or, from a business standpoint, succeed, some say.

"We have no long-term data that shows that trying to suppress kids' weight is successful at long-term weight suppression and improves their well-being," says Rebecca Scritchfield, a registered dietitian nutritionist in the District of Columbia and author of "Body Kindness: Transform your health from the inside out -- and never say diet again."

What is related to kids' well-being, she says, is growing up in a household without "fat talk" -- aka comments about weight, either directed toward someone or about someone. Kids whose families eat meals together regularly, too, tend to eat more fruits and vegetables, but aren't necessarily thinner. "Some kids are just born fat and are going to stay fat and it's called genetics," Scritchfield says. The important thing, she adds, is instilling in kids the type of self-worth and self-compassion that inspires self-care, whether or not that affects their weight. "This argument is not about keeping kids from improving their lives," Scritchfield says.

On many accounts, Weight Watchers and other health professionals agree. After all, today's Weight Watchers is "very, very different" from the program of 10 or even three years ago, says Stacie Sherer, the company's senior vice president of corporate communications.

For example, instead of drilling down mostly on food and nutrition, 50 percent of the program's topics now focus on mindset. Instead of a points system based mostly on eating fewer calories, it's now organized more to promote healthy choices like fruits, vegetables and lean proteins. Instead of telling members what their goal weight should be based on their BMIs, Weight Watchers asks members to identify their own goals, including non-weight-based motivations like alleviating knee pain or being able to play with their grandkids longer before tiring.

"We know that the consumer mindset around health and wellness and weight has changed," says Sherer, who admits that the name "Weight Watchers" is unfortunate since watching weight no longer best represents what the brand is about.

What's more, almost of all the details of how the teen program will run are forthcoming, and so can't be effectively evaluated. The program will, however, likely involve a way for teens to connect with each other digitally, and materials and guidance will be tailored to what's known about adolescent health, Sherer says. "Our chief scientific officer is deep in conversation with experts in childhood obesity and eating disorders and really looking at, from a scientific, research-based approach, how can we make sure this is a healthy and safe program and approach for teens?" Sherer says.

Worries that such a program will set kids up for a lifetime of weight loss and gain aren't well-founded, she adds, since there's also research finding weight cycling doesn't have an effect on metabolism. Even if people do lose and regain weight, rejoining a program to help lose it again shouldn't be seen as a failure, but rather as a positive step toward better health just like rejoining a gym after getting out of shape, Sherer says. "Overweight and obesity are chronic conditions -- it's not something you just fix" and never think about again, she says. "It's something that requires ongoing management."

[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids' Health.]

Dr. Christopher Bolling, a pediatrician in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Section on Obesity, agrees. He was pleased to hear about Weight Watchers' intentions since he finds there aren't nearly enough resources for teens -- especially in small, rural towns -- to learn how to eat healthfully. "We have a severe obesity epidemic in this country -- this is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed," he says. "We need all hands on deck."

The concern about triggering eating disorders, while valid, should not prevent companies like Weight Watchers from developing programs that help appropriately-screened teens make healthier decisions without shaming them, agrees Penny Kris-Etherton, a distinguished professor of nutrition at Penn State who serves as an expert for the U.S. News Best Diets rankings, which ranks Weight Watchers highly in several domains, including first in weight loss. She points to a 2005 study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders concluding that "professionally administered weight loss poses minimal risks of precipitating eating disorders in overweight children and adolescents." In fact, the authors wrote, weight loss sometimes leads to improved psychological health.

"As a health professional, I really think that the studies show that overweight and obesity is not healthy and it can lead to long-term health problems, and I think it's good for people -- even teens -- to try to lose the weight if they can," Kris-Etherton says. "Maybe what they need is a very sensible weight-loss approach."

Whether Weight Watchers can provide that approach to teens remains to be seen. Most experts agree that to do more good than harm, the program would need to screen for eating disorders and eating disorder risk, and be overseen by highly-trained health professionals, not simply longtime Weight Watchers members. The enrolled teens would need to be self-motivated to participate in the program, and their physicians and families would need to support their involvement. And, the focus would need to be clearly on health, not weight.

[See: How to Make Healthful Dietary Changes Last a Lifetime.]

In other words, Weight Watchers would have to be so meticulous about how the program is implemented and perceived that they might be better off leaving the task to someone else, says Meredith Dillon, a registered dietitian at Children's National Health System in the District of Columbia who specializes in diabetes prevention and management, and is also an expert panelist for the U.S. News Best Diets rankings. "The way Weight Watchers is set up now," she says, "they can't be careful enough."