When WeightWatchers Ended In-Person Meetings, They Held Their Own

On a warm Saturday morning last September, 11 members of the Brooklyn Wellness Crew gathered at the Windsor Terrace Library for their regular meeting. There were two topics on the agenda: One, as always, was food. The other was even more fraught.

These women, all WeightWatchers devotees, were furious at the company, which had shut down its in-person meetings in Brooklyn in March 2023. One member said she felt like she’d been “fired from a job.”

“I felt deeply betrayed,” said Naomi Nemtzow, a 74-year-old artist who has been a WeightWatchers member off and on since the early 1990s. In 2015, she lost 55 pounds; she credited in-person meetings — workshops, in WeightWatchers parlance — with helping her stay on track.

So did Dianne Stillman, 76, who was feeling “a bit like a woman without a country.” In her ideal universe, she’d have been at her WeightWatchers workshop at the Fairfield Inn on Third Avenue, near Downtown Brooklyn.It was one of a handful of official workshops in the borough, where members stepped on a scale to weigh in and heard lectures from a trained facilitator.

But WW International, as the company is now known, had stopped holding that meeting, along with every other one in Brooklyn. In-person attendance had dropped significantly since the start of the pandemic, specifically among premium members, who were paying $44.95 a month for unlimited access to virtual meetings and other digital tools.

According to WW, before the pandemic there were 3,300 in-person workshops throughout the United States. That number had dwindled to 825 by March 2023. As of January 2024, WeightWatchers’ website lists 1,040 workshops nationwide, with at least 59 held online.