On Monday, Oprah Winfrey, Queen of America, bought a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers. Her purchase sent the stock price soaring, gaining 105 percent in the first day.
With that $43.2 million purchase of 6.4 million shares, Winfrey joins the company’s board — increasing its ranks from nine to ten members — and, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Weight Watchers International Inc., grants the diet and wellness organization permission to use her “name, image, likeness and endorsement for the company, its programs, products and services, subject to her approval.” Her face already graces the landing page for the Weight Watchers website, along with the text, “I’m ready. Are you? Come join me!”
Winfrey’s considerable media portfolio currently includes OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, which she… owns (sorry, there’s no way around that) and O: The Oprah Magazine, a Hearst publication Winfrey publishes that features Winfrey on every single cover. The eponymous talk show that made Winfrey famous went off the air in 2011 after airing for 25 seasons.
In a prepared statement, Winfrey said, “Weight Watchers has given me the tools to begin to make the lasting shift that I and so many of us who are struggling with weight have longed for.”
It’s not unprecedented for Winfrey to let the public in on her diet decisions; she documented her ups and downs through her show. One of her her highest-rated episodes came in 1988, when she toasted her 67-pound weight loss by wheeling a wagon full of fat onto her stage. Her willingness to invite viewers into that part of her life was, in hindsight, an extraordinarily prescient move, foreshadowing a generation of reality television stars and YouTube celebrities who build and maintain devoted followings by exposing the intimate details of their lives.
And it is part of why Winfrey and Weight Watchers make sense together: Winfrey doesn’t scan like an actress shilling for a shampoo you know she never uses.
Weight Watchers is a perfect fit for the Oprah brand, and vice versa. Both are stalwarts in landscapes where competitors pop up only to get quickly knocked down again, Whac-a-mole-style. They stand for simplicity and quality. Winfrey is, of course, more glamourous — an occupational hazard of having a pool of money so deep Scrooge could scuba dive in it — but her gift from the get-go has been to never let her one-percent status keep her at too far a distance from the everywomen to whom she preaches.
For every fad diet — from Atkins to South Beach, from Paleo to Zone, from gluten-free to low-carb to non-fat to juicing to cleansing to that awful thing Kelly Kapoor did on The Office — that has captivated the public, Weight Watchers has remained, since the early 1960s, a steady drumbeat of boring yet practical advice: Everything in moderation. The Weight Watchers empire is built on advocating for the obvious, the day-in-day-out of making healthier, less indulgent choices. It is simple, unimpeachable, and not intended to be disposed. Weight Watchers isn’t a diet you get into or out of so much as a lifestyle you maintain indefinitely. That this is as savvy for their business as it is good for one’s health is the icing on the (small slice of) cake.
Winfrey, too, has amassed her massive following by proselytizing what is practical. Be kind. Read more. Give back. Work hard. Have faith. And while there are plenty of television personalities who have succeeded in earning decent ratings and sticking around our screens for years, including those, like Doctors Phil and Oz, who were tapped for glory by Winfrey herself, there is no one quite like Oprah. Oprah is sui generis, the one-name-suffices star who shines so bright it is possibly more prudent to watch her indirectly, through a hole in a paper plate, as one might safely observe an eclipse.
In the announcement, Weight Watchers president and CEO Jim Chambers said Winfrey’s inclusion in the company is part of a broader effort: “We are expanding our purpose from focusing on weight loss alone to more broadly helping people lead a healthier, happier life.” How very Oprah of them.