Jean Nidetch, Founder of Weight Watchers, Dies at 91
Jean Nidetch, the 91-year-old co-founder of Weight Watchers died early Wednesday morning in her Fort Lauderdale, Florida home.
Born Jean Evelyn Slutsky in Brooklyn in 1923, Nidetch, was the daughter of a cabdriver and a manicurist. After she married, the unhappy and overweight Nidetch tried fad diet after fad diet to no avail, but when she ran into a neighbor in a supermarket that asked her when she was due that Nidetch tried something different. She started a support group with her friends that turned into weekly classes and later incorporated Weight Watchers in 1963 — it was a runaway success.
An astounding 16,000 Weight Watchers members attended the company’s star-studded 10th at Madison Square Garden in 1973.
After the company went public, it was sold to H.J. Heinz for $71.2 million. Nidetch stayed on as head of public relations until 1984.Just recently, Weight Watchers was ranked as the number one diet in the country with the best long-term weight loss rate for its users.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO