Jean Nidetch obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/01/jean-nidetch

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Jean Nidetch had the timing and gravel voice of a standup comic, plus the psychological perception and charisma of a great preacher. She put those gifts to good use in 1961, as a housewife in her 30s weighing 97kg (15st 4lb), after a neighbour asked, genuinely, how soon the baby was due. Nidetch faced the mirror, and the shock released her other self, Jean the Lean, who set up Weight Watchers, the founding church of slimming. Nidetch, who has died aged 91, lost the weight, and never again exceeded 64kg.

She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her father, David Slutsky, was a cab driver. Her mother, Mae, a manicurist, compensated for all Jean’s woes in her childhood with a mouthful of sweetness. Jean met her future husband, Marty Nidetch, in a luncheonette, and they courted in diners, knowing every local restaurant that didn’t charge extra for dessert; in 1947, she was his size 18 bride, with the sides of her dress let out.

She tried fad diets, prescription amphetamines, even hypnosis, but none dented her flesh. She would deny herself, then slip into the bathroom and down a box of Mallomars chocolate cookies hidden in the laundry hamper. But after her neighbour’s innocent blunder, Nidetch went to the New York City department of health’s obesity clinic. She had never even heard the word obesity before.

The diet suggested by the clinic was simple (low fat, no sugar, watch the carbs) and its principles sound (weigh everything, don’t go hungry): “Drop the damn fork” was how Nidetch always summarised it. What made the class work, worth the weekly two buses and a subway schlep over to Manhattan from the family apartment in Little Neck, Queens, was “the companionship, the camaraderie”.

Nidetch knew her neighbourhood well (she supplemented her earnings as a tax clerk by selling eggs door to door) and shared her new diet knowledge, and the secrets of her sinful cookie lapses, with six overweight friends who met in her apartment the day after each clinic visit. They brought chairs, then friends and relatives, packing her living room so tight that “Jean’s Fats Club” moved to the block’s basement. The women – they were nearly all women – no longer had to face their deprivation or despair alone: all her life, Nidetch remained surprised that total strangers would encourage and listen to each other.

She gave up her job to run more meetings – scheduled after mealtimes, because, Nidetch said, you should never preach abstinence to the hungry, never shame or bully – in other venues, including a loft above a cinema in Little Neck where, she made a $2 admission charge. Even then, Nidetch didn’t feel it was the beginning of a big business, just a chance to support women changing their own lives mouthful by mouthful. But one dieter, Felice Lippert, brought her husband, Al, a businessman, to a meeting in Long Island, and he and Nidetch worked out a profitable way to spread the word: they would license franchisees to start their own branches, and run their own meetings. Each franchisee had to talk openly about their own weight loss. “I’m an FFH,” Nidetch said boldly. “A Formerly Fat Housewife.”

For almost two decades, Weight Watchers International – the name was Nidetch’s idea – was the unchallenged manager of voluntary weight loss and made the idea of calorie-counting part of daily life. Lippert took the company towards brand-name processed foods, with a photo of Nidetch, platinum blonde in a tight gown, on the boxes of Weight Watchers tins of fish. Nidetch wrote cookbooks and did the publicity, happy to launch each franchise personally: “I am a lady who got thin and now I have to tell the world about it.”

The Nidetchs made enough money to acquire their entire apartment block, and Jean bought Marty the bus company he drove for. But he hated the change (“When is this going to be over?” he asked. “I liked you better when you sold eggs”) and in 1971 they divorced; this slender woman flying first-class around the world had become so much bigger than the woman he had married. She remarried, to Frank Schifano, a bass player on a cruise ship, after a week’s courtship in 1975, but the relationship foundered immediately.

In old age she told the journalist Louise France, in a candid interview, that her zenith was the company’s 10th birthday party in 1973, in Madison Square Garden, New York, hosted and entertained by show-business celebrities, where thousands came to say thank you, and she was hailed as Jean the Queen, a multimillionaire. Then Nidetch stood down as president – “too many airports” – and in 1978 she and Lippert sold the company to Heinz (it has been sold on twice since). She continued as its public face into the 1990s.

Nidetch moved to Los Angeles, then Las Vegas, then to Florida to be near her son David. She allowed herself an occasional spoonful of ice-cream, or a nip of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and played a mean hand of poker.

Two sons predeceased her. She is survived by David and three granddaughters.

• Jean Evelyn Nidetch, businesswoman, born 12 October 1923; died 29 April 2015