"Danmarks egen rockdrottning is still going strong"

LaGaylia Frazier slog igenom i Sverige när hon turnerade med Robert Wells med Rhapsody in Rock i början av 00-talet. Amerikanskan blev souldrottning i hela Sverige och har sedan dess hunnit vara med i folkkära program som Melodifestivalen, Let’s Dance och Talang, och körat bakom Håkan Hellström. På onsdag äntrar hon scenen igen när hon drar i gång Tina Turner-hyllningen ”Tina – the show” på Rival i Stockholm. – Jag tror inte att det hade varit så hälsosamt om jag inte var nervös, men jag är nog mer peppad än nervös, säger LaGaylia Frazier i Efter fem. Åkte till Aruba Frazier växte upp i Miami och var duktig på piano i ung ålder. Hon säger att hon brukade sjunga för sig själv på sitt rum när hon var liten, men det första framträdandet gjorde hon först i gymnasieåldern. – När jag var 15 var det talangjakt i skolan och hela livet förändrades då, jag fick stående ovationer från hela gymnasieskolan, säger hon och fortsätter: – Då kände jag att jag måste träffa min pappa, som var sångare, jag åkte till Aruba och träffade honom. ”Efter ett tag kan man inte vara arg längre” Hon berättar att hennes pappa lämnade familjen när hon var väldigt liten, och beskriver deras första riktiga möte som livsförändrande: – Han var han så vacker – he put Lenny Kravitz to shame! – han hade så mycket karisma på scenen och jag identifierade mig själv i honom. Jag tänkte, jaha, jag kommer från honom! – Jag försökte förstå varför han lämnade, men hade han stannat hade han kanske inte varit lycklig och då hade situationen varit annorlunda. Jag tror på ödet, det kanske var menat att bli så. I dag har hon och hennes pappa en bra relation. – Jag var arg, men efter ett tag kan man inte vara arg längre. Vi har bra kontakt, vi ringer på Facetime varje vecka, och jag har skickat bilder från showen. Han är glad för mig, men jag vet inte om han förstår precis vad det är, han är 90 år nu. Biljetterna till premiären är utsålda. Showen går även upp i Jönköping, Göteborg, Vara och Uppsala under våren.

2023 blev året då Lasse Berghagen, Ingvar Hirdwall, Tina Turner och Sinéad O’Connor lämnade oss. SvD sammanfattar året med en genomgång av de allra största kulturpersonligheterna – såväl internationella som svenska – som gick bort i år.

Av tolv deltagare återstod två som under fredagskvällen gjorde upp om titeln årets Idolvinnare under en rafflande final i Avicii Arena. För finalisterna Saga Ludvigsson, 17, och Cimberly Wanyonyi, 18, var nerverna inför påtagliga – inte minst för Cimberly som senaste dagarna kämpat med röstproblem. Men efter talförbud repade sig till slut rösten, förklarade hon bara timmar innan i Efter fem. Juryns hyllningar under Idolfinalen Under kvällen hörde vi finalisterna sjunga tre gånger var. En låt de valt själva, en vi hört dem sjunga tidigare i Idol och vinnarlåten ”Won´t Be Sorry”. Utöver vinnarlåten hörde vi Saga sjunga ABBAs ”Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” och ”Jolene” av Dolly Parton. Och Cimberly sjöng ”River Deep Mountain High” av Ike & Tina Turner och Whitney Houstons ”Greatest Love of All”. Likt Idolsäsongens gång fortsatte juryns hyllningar till Saga under finalen, där de framför allt lyfte hennes smarta låtval och hur hon lyckas fånga publiken. – När du kommer in i ett rum är det bara dig man ser, du har IT-faktor, konstaterar Kishti Tomita. Och hyllningarna haglade även över Cimberly. – Klanderfri sång hela vägen och du är helt klanderfri som artist, vilken resa tjejen, säger Anders Bagge. Vinnaren av Idol 2023 Sedan fredagsfinalerna drog igång i början av oktober har Cimberly enligt oddsen varit tittarnas favorit. Men dagar innan finalen vände det – Saga tog sig förbi och låg som vinnartippad hos spelbolagen. Men nu står det klart vem som får kalla vinnarlåten sin egen och kan titulera sig som årets Idolvinnare – det är Cimberly Wanyonyi som vinner Idol 2023!

17-åriga Saga Ludvigsson från Örby och 18-åriga Cimberly Wanyonyi från Skellefteå gör under fredagskvällen upp om vem som blir årets Idolvinnare i Avicii Arena. Vi hör deltagarna sjunga tre låtar var, en som är ett eget val, en som vi hört dem sjunga tidigare i programmet och vinnarlåten – som tilldelas en av dem när vinnaren står klar. Och enligt de två finalisterna passar vinnarlåten ”Won´t Be Sorry” dem båda, trots att de är olika artistmässigt. – De har ju skrivit en låt utan att egentligen veta till vem de skulle skriva den till, att man ändå känner att den passar båda oss, konstaterade Cimberly när hon och Saga gästade morgonens Nyhetsmorgon. Utöver vinnarlåten, som vi för första gången kommer att få höra under kvällen, kommer vi att höra Saga sjunga ”Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” av ABBA och ”Jolene” av Dolly Parton. Cimberly sjunger ”River Deep Mountain High” av Ike & Tina Turner och ”Greatest Love of All” av Whitney Houston. Hon är favorittippad att vinna Idol 2023 – så ser oddsen ut Vem som kommer vinna hela kalaset får vi veta senare under kvällen, men redan nu är det en av dem som har oddsen på sin sida. Sedan den första fredagsfinalen gick av stapeln i början av oktober har Cimberly Wanyonyi varit favorittippad med bäst odds av årets deltagare. Men inför finalen går hon in med högre odds än Saga Ludvigsson. Enligt spelbolagen är det nu Saga som kommer att vinna Idol 2023. På Betsson ligger Sagas odds just nu på 1.70 och Cimberlys odds på 2.05, och det ser snarlikt ut hos andra spelbolag. Idolfinalen startar 20.00 och sänds på TV4 och TV4 Play.

Nästa år ger sig LaGaylia Frazier på turné med "Tina – the…

Nanne Grönvall beskriver själv i ett pressmeddelande hur hon alltid har varit inspirerad av världsartisten som avled i maj i år. "Hennes energi gick rätt igenom tv-rutan när jag såg henne som barn och likaså när jag såg henne live som vuxen", säger hon. Turnéplan: 26/1 Västerås, 27/1 Karlstad, 11/10 Stockholm, 12/10 Kalmar, 18/10 Motala, 19/10 Kungsbacka, 20/10 Vara, 25/10 Jönköping, 26/10 Norrköping, 27/10 Uppsala, 8/11 Ystad, 9/11 Värnamo, 10/11 Göteborg, 15/11 Örebro, 16/11 Växjö, 17/11 Linköping

”Ingen kommer levande härifrån”, sjöng Jim Morrisson innan han dog vid 27 års ålder. Och kanske är det just påminnelsen om det som får oss att sörja öppet när kändisar vi aldrig träffat dör, resonerar The Economist. Men det finns fler förklaringar till fenomenet. När uppskattade artister dör blir det också ett tillfälle and samlas runt minnena av deras verk tillsammans med andra beundrare. ”Artistens avskedsgåva blir att ge oss en sorgesam högtid, som ett avbrott i vardagens slit och släp.” What we talk about when we talk about dead artists By The Economist 3 September, 2023 After Alexander Pushkin was shot in a duel in 1837, crowds of mourners formed in St Petersburg. Russia’s nervy authorities moved his funeral service and mustered 60,000 troops. When the wagon bearing the poet’s body reached Pskov province, where he was to be interred, devotees tried to unharness the horses and pull it themselves. The death of Rudolph Valentino, a silent-movie idol, in 1926 set off similarly fervid lamentation. Mounted police restrained the fans who mobbed the funeral parlour in New York where he lay on view (several reportedly killed themselves). In 1975 some of the millions of Egyptians who paid their respects to Um Kalthoum, a megastar singer, took hold of her coffin and shouldered it for hours through the streets of Cairo. Today’s celebrity obsequies tend to be less fanatical, and largely digital rather than in-person. But they are passionate all the same. In the past few months, grief has coursed around the internet for Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, Tina Turner and, most recently, Jimmy Buffett. If you stop to think about it, many such outpourings for writers, actors and musicians are odd, even irrational. Unlike other kinds of grief, this one does not stem from personal intimacy. If you ever interacted with a cherished author, it was probably during a book tour when, caffeinated to the eyeballs, she signed your copy of her novel and misspelled your name. Maybe you delude yourself that you once locked eyes with a frontman hero during a gig and that he smiled only for you. But you didn’t really know them, and they certainly didn’t know you. Nor would you always have liked them if you had. Their books or songs may be touching and wise, but (in the parlance of criticism) it is a biographical fallacy to assume that the work reflects an artist’s life or beliefs. Your favourites may indeed have been lovely people; or perhaps, beneath their curated images, they were spiky money-grubbers, consumed by rivalry or solipsists who drove their families nuts. Rarely do you know for sure. Though the artists are gone, meanwhile, the art you prize is not. Death does not delete it—on the contrary, curiosity and nostalgia often drive up sales. (David Bowie’s only number-one album in America was “Blackstar”, released days before he died in 2016.) The dead, it is true, write no more books and record no songs. Philip Roth will never set a novel in the era of Donald Trump; you will never hear another operatic Meat Loaf ballad. The cold reality, however, is that many artists’ best work was done long before their demise. The sorrow makes more sense when a star dies young or violently. Had she not perished at 27, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who knows what music Amy Winehouse would have added to her small, exquisite oeuvre? Sinéad O’Connor, another casualty of 2023, lived a troubled life that ended too soon. Buddy Holly (killed in a plane crash), Amedeo Modigliani (dead of tubercular meningitis at 35), Wilfred Owen (slain in action a week before the armistice in 1918): such premature and cruel exits are tragic. Objectively, though, the death of a long-lived and fulfilled artist is far from the saddest item in an average day’s headlines. And whereas most mortals sink into oblivion, laureates live on in their output, which Horace, a Roman poet, called a “monument more lasting than bronze”. The standard reasons for mourning don’t apply. Why, then, are these losses felt so widely and keenly? One interpretation is that the departed celebrities are merely the messengers. The real news is death itself, which comes for everyone, immortal or impervious as some may seem. If the reaper calls for Prince, with all his talent and verve, he will certainly knock for you. As Jim Morrison sang before he, too, died at 27: “No one here gets out alive.” Part of your past—the years in which the mute musician was the soundtrack, the silenced writer your ally—can seem to fade away with them. Just as plausibly, the grief can be seen as a transmuted form of gratitude for the solidarity and joy they supplied. On your behalf, they undertook to make sense of the world and distil beauty from the muck of life. Yet as much as anything else, the passing of an artist is an occasion for communion. In an atomised age, in which the default tone is abrasive, a beloved figure’s death is a chance to share benign feelings and memories with fellow admirers. Like water-cooler moments in a cemetery, these sombre holidays from spite and strife are the artists’ parting gifts. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

I helgen samlas G20-ländernas statschefer i Indiens huvudstad New Dehli. Men samtidigt som värdnationen strävar efter att ta en allt större roll på den internationella arenan brottas landet med stora inhemska splittringar, skriver The New York Times. I Mewat, inte långt ifrån den golfresort där toppmötet ska hållas, syns fortfarande spår från de dödliga religiösa sammandrabbningar som ägde rum för ett par veckor sedan. Det i form av sörjande familjer, sönderbrända bilar och husspillror. Frågan för Indiens premiärminister Narendra Modi, skriver The New York Times, är hur mycket instabiliteten som hans religiösa nationalism har orsakat kommer att sätta käppar i hjulet för hans ekonomiska ambitioner. India’s hosting of the G20 summit this weekend will put its growing power on display. But its leader’s divisive religious politics threatens its rise. By Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar September 7, 2023 NUH, India — Inside a sprawling golf resort south of New Delhi, diplomats were busy making final preparations for a fast-approaching global summit. The road outside was freshly smoothed and dotted with police officers. Posters emblazoned with the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi bore the slogan he had chosen for the occasion: One Earth, One Family, One Future. Not far away, however, were the remnants of bitter division: grieving families, charred vehicles and the rubble of bulldozed shops and homes. Weeks before, deadly religious violence had erupted in the Nuh district, the site of the resort. The internet was shut down, and thousands of troops were rushed in. Clashes quickly spread to the gates of Gurugram, a tech startup hub just outside New Delhi that India bills as a city of the future. These scenes sum up India’s contradictions as it basks in its moment this weekend as host of the Group of 20: Its momentum toward a bigger role in a chaotic world order is built on increasingly combustible and unequal ground at home. Modi, India’s most powerful leader in decades, is attempting nothing less than a legacy-defining transformation of this nation of 1.4 billion people. On the one hand, he is trying to turn India into a developed nation and a guiding light for the voiceless in a Western-dominated world. The country, now the world’s most populous, is the fastest-growing major economy, adept digitally and awash in eager young workers. It is also a rising diplomatic power that is seeking to capitalize on the frictions of the superpower competition between the United States and China. On the other hand, Modi is deepening fault lines in Indian society with an intensifying campaign to reshape a vastly diverse country, held together delicately by a secular constitution, into a Hindu state. His party’s efforts to rally and elevate Hindus — both a lifelong ideological project and a potent lure for votes — have marginalized hundreds of millions of Muslims and other minorities as second-class citizens. The question for India, as Modi seems poised to extend his decadelong rule in an election early next year, is how much the instability caused by his religious nationalism will hinder his economic ambitions. The sectarian clashes in Muslim-majority Nuh were sparked by a religious march held by a right-wing Hindu organization that falls under the same Hindu-nationalist umbrella as Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. They were only the latest flare-up in what has become a seemingly constant state of tensions. Emboldened right-wing vigilantes and the aggressively Hindu-first messaging of BJP politicians have left the country’s Muslims and Christians in a perpetual state of fear and alienation. The northeastern state of Manipur, where its top leader has employed the BJP’s majoritarian playbook, has been burning in ethnic conflict for months, with about 200 people killed and regions effectively partitioned along ethnic lines. In the restive Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, the government has suspended democracy for four years and is responding to any grievance with a tightening crackdown. Asked whether his government had discriminated against religious minorities, Modi said during a state visit to Washington in June that there was no discrimination in India under its democratic values. “We have always proved that democracy can deliver,” he said during a news conference with President Joe Biden. “And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.” Yet BJP politicians continue their divisive rhetoric even when Modi is on the global stage. In 2020, for example, as Modi and President Donald Trump were addressing a stadium in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat, large swaths of New Delhi were engulfed in deadly violence that had been incited in part by BJP leaders. Gurcharan Das, an intellectual who supported Modi during his first term for his promise to focus on development, said he had grown disenchanted as the damage of the ruling party’s Hindu nationalism overshadowed its economic progress. In a public lecture this week, he said that although Modi’s government had failed to deliver the jobs he had promised, it had still taken up key reforms, from streamlining taxes to help unify the Indian market, to ushering in a digital revolution that has brought more people into the formal economy. But he said he saw danger as the BJP rejected pluralism as the appeasement of minorities. He repeated a warning that has become frequent: that India is on a path of religious fundamentalism similar to what has plunged neighboring Pakistan into catastrophe. “While dreaming of a grand civilizational state, Hindu nationalists are in fact trying to create a narrow-minded, identity-based, 19th century European nation-state — a sort of Hindu Pakistan,” he said. As India’s economic growth largely enriches those at the top, the masses are still waiting for their promised prosperity. While India is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, ahead of Britain and France, its average income — a key indicator of living standard — remains in the world’s bottom third, next to countries like Congo. Modi, in a recent interview with the Press Trust of India, said the country would be a developed nation when it marks 100 years of independence in 2047. But with that promise still far away, he has filled the gap with the politics of polarization. Ajai Sahni, the director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, said that what distinguished the recent violence in India from its long history of far bloodier sectarian clashes was the attitude of the government. “The state always notionally distanced itself from such violence. There was always a reaffirmation, at least verbally, of the constitutional order and the secular order,” Sahni said. Under Modi, “there is clear, shall we say, evidence of state support or endorsement for extremist positions.” “The violence is still episodic,” he added. “One killing here, two killings there, then a certain flare-up,” he said. “But the threat is sustained.” He attributed much of that to the “virality” around violence now — social media is “harnessed” to spread a local episode nationally, to chilling effect. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s state minister for electronics and technology, said the government was trying to tackle potential “misinformation and incitement” online as it intensifies its digital efforts. In the case of the Nuh violence, online threats and counter-threats in the days before the march made clear the possibility of an imminent spiral, which residents said the police ignored. The Muslim side was also armed and ready to clash when the Hindu marchers arrived. Five of the six people killed were Hindus, a mix of day laborers who appeared to be caught in the violence and members of the right-wing group. The minority Hindu residents are now vulnerable in a district where they said they had survived without trouble through even the worst phases of India’s earlier sectarian tensions. The government, after its initial lax response, responded to the clashes with full force, in what has become an extrajudicial pattern of punishment. Bulldozers were wheeled in to raze homes and shops — mostly those of Muslims — without due process and with the visuals transmitted across the country. The economic ramifications of the clashes were immediate, and palpable even a month later. As the violence spread to Gurugram, many offices quickly had employees work from home. Executives at companies in the city told of a fearfulness they had never experienced before. About 500 families, both Hindus and Muslims, had settled in the shadow of the Gurugram skyscrapers seeking a better life. Now, a majority of the Muslims have left. “It’s fear,” said Sourav Kumar, who works as a security guard. Other families had piled their belongings — a tied-up mattress, a couple of tin boxes, a single bed — outside as they contemplated their options. Just days before the diplomats arrived at the resort in Nuh for final G20 preparations, the Hindu outfit that had carried out the march in late July threatened to stage another one, even though the state’s BJP government had denied it permission. As the organization pressed on, the government came up with a characteristic compromise: It escorted the group’s leaders in vans so they could offer a prayer at a temple, avoiding another clash for now so the G20 parade could carry on. © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Viktväktarna har i 60 år fokuserat på beteendeförändring och stöd i viktminskning för sina medlemmar. Men nu står företaget vid ett vägskäl och satsar allt mer på läkemedel mot fetma. I mars förvärvade Viktväktarna startup-företaget Sequence som är specialiserade på läkemedel som Wegovy och Ozempic, som anses vara banbrytande inom viktminskning. Viktväktarnas Sima Sistani tog över vd-rollen förra året och tror att förändringen kan väcka liv i det slumrande företaget. Samtidigt har omställningen väckt motstånd bland lojala medlemmar, skriver Bloomberg. Ozempic and Wegovy might save the 60-year-old company—if they don’t kill it first. By Emma Court and Ellen Huet. With Kevin Simauchi and Anders Melin

Bloomberg, 19 July 2023 The ladies at the rogue WeightWatchers meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut, were livid. For years they’d faithfully gathered, like about a million other members, at WeightWatchers locations to conduct the weekly rites: step on the scale, share the latest wins and woes, and swap tips on how to hack points or resist that happy hour margarita. Some had been coming for 15 years; two had been on and off WeightWatchers since the 1970s. They’d lost 46, 55, 62, 79 pounds; they’d supported one another through retirements, children leaving for college and deaths in the family. Then this March, WW International Inc. shut down thousands of in-person locations, leaving the group to either make an hour-plus drive to a meeting across Long Island Sound or, worse, assemble online. So one evening in April, about a dozen of them gathered in a windowless room at a local ShopRite for their second self-organized meeting. As they munched on Slim & Trim brand popcorn (three WeightWatchers points per serving), they fumed about another fresh wound—one that seemed like an even bigger betrayal. The company was getting in on the hottest new thing in weight loss: obesity medications. In March, the same month WeightWatchers clamped down on its rent costs, it agreed to pay $132 million to acquire Sequence, a two-year-old telemedicine startup that prescribes a new, much-hyped set of medications called GLP-1s that can basically melt the pounds away. The drugs, which go by Wegovy, Ozempic and other brand names, have come to be regarded in the past year as a magic weight-loss solution. Shrinking celebs like Elon Musk and Chelsea Handler were injecting themselves with the stuff; some doctors and scientists were predicting the drugs could upend America’s obesity crisis; and now WeightWatchers—the arbiter of self-restraint—was diving in, too. “They’re not practicing what they preached … and now all of a sudden there’s a drug involved,” Christine Sisterhenm, who’s been on the program for four years, said at the April meeting. “WeightWatchers has kicked us to the curb,” said Bob Kline, the lone male member of the group that day, who joined WeightWatchers about 15 years ago. For decades, WeightWatchers taught dieters there was only one way to shed the pounds: hard-won behavioral change. It was a long game, one fought with preportioned baby carrots and an accountant’s worth of spreadsheets for meal-logging. But battling food for your whole life is exhausting, and the weight almost always creeps back up for most dieters. Now, after 60 years, the company was reversing course, proclaiming that jabbing a drug into your thigh once a week could do the trick. GLP-1s, which mimic a naturally occurring appetite suppressant, activate pathways in the brain that make you want to put down the fork even if there’s still food on your plate. The cravings just disappear, along with the pounds. WeightWatchers’ sharp turn to pharmaceuticals is the work of its new chief executive officer, Sima Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran who took the top job last year. The company has been fighting for relevance for about a decade, mostly by going all-in on wellness trends rather than by transforming itself for the digital age. That allowed upstarts such as Noom Inc. to siphon off customers, leaving WeightWatchers flat-footed when the coronavirus pandemic shoved everything online. Late last year, nine months after Sistani became CEO, WeightWatchers’ stock price dipped to $3.38 a share, its lowest level in about 20 years. Sistani had recently made a name for herself after selling the video-chat app Houseparty, which she co-founded, to a major gaming company for an undisclosed sum. WeightWatchers’ board hired her to save the company, and within weeks of taking the job in March 2022, she started looking at GLP-1s, which were just going mainstream. Sistani says that when she heard these drugs could eradicate obesity in her lifetime, “I was just like, ‘Wow, that is a big statement. … We need to catalyze this.’ ” The strategy seems as audacious as it does desperate, but WeightWatchers has little to lose. The company long succeeded by surfing each wave of diet culture, from low-carb to fat-free. Now it has about $1.5 billion in debt, more than 10 times its expected 2023 earnings. Its bonds are trading at distressed levels, which suggests investors think that the company may have trouble paying back its creditors. (WeightWatchers said earlier this year that it has more than sufficient liquidity.) Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs have been rushing to embrace GLP-1s since 2021, when Wegovy became the first highly effective obesity medication to win US Food and Drug Administration approval. Dozens of slickly branded telemedicine startups such as Sequence have surfaced, acting as digital matchmakers between patients eager to take weight-loss meds and clinicians who can prescribe them. The startups are trying to capitalize on a drug category that analysts at Jefferies Financial Group Inc. predict will be worth more than $100 billion by 2032. Since the WeightWatchers-Sequence announcement, the traditional weight-loss category has only continued to free-fall: Longtime competitor Jenny Craig Inc., also saddled with debt, filed for bankruptcy, and WeightWatchers’ biggest shareholder, Artal Group SA, sold its remaining stake, ending a relationship that began in 1999. “Obviously it’s not a vote of confidence,” says Mike Holland, a senior credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. All of this raises the question: What even is WeightWatchers if it becomes just another hawker of diet drugs? It may not matter. Sistani says: “It’s not like Blockbuster didn’t see Netflix coming.” Before WeightWatchers-branded postal scales and recipe cards became staples of the American kitchen, a housewife in Queens, New York, was mistaken for being pregnant. The woman, Jean Nidetch, joined a local weight-loss program and began meeting with her mahjong crew of fellow dieters, eventually losing more than 70 pounds and turning the weekly support group into a format that could be replicated. Businessman Al Lippert and his wife, Felice, became fans and helped Nidetch and her husband, Marty, found WeightWatchers in 1963. It soon expanded internationally, and in less than a decade, it went public. The original WeightWatchers plan was strict, banning many processed carbs and emphasizing protein and fruit. Dieters measured out their food and were required to eat liver—the closest thing to a superfood at the time—at least once a week. By the ’70s, as convenience foods were starting to boom, WeightWatchers began to loosen up, licensing its name for use on frozen meals and other products. Ketchup maker H.J. Heinz Co. was in the process of acquiring a line of WeightWatchers-branded packaged foods in 1978 when it decided to buy the company, too, for about $71 million. Under its new owner, WeightWatchers dove deeper into selling in supermarkets—where it faced off against rivals such as Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine and Jenny Craig—and became Heinz’s fastest-growing line by 1989. Then, in the ’90s, researchers discovered a drug combination that could help people lose weight. Millions of people flocked to clinics and doctors willing to churn out prescriptions of fen-phen, an amphetaminelike combination that worked to suppress appetite. Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem Inc. soon joined the frenzy, getting into the prescription business by enlisting doctors to prescribe fen-phen to their customers. WeightWatchers stayed away, though, causing its membership and sales numbers to drop. But taking a hard line paid off when fen-phen was later linked to heart damage, a discovery that led to recalls and lawsuits. “We’re not a medical organization, and we never pretended to be,” a WeightWatchers spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “Medical decisions about prescription drugs should be left to people and their personal physicians.” WeightWatchers’ offerings fluctuated over the years, from weight-loss camps to working-woman-friendly recipes, even as the weekly in‑person meetings remained constant. In the late ’90s the company introduced the points system, which gave foods different numeric values based on calories, fiber and fat, that could serve as a simple shorthand for tracking what people put in their bodies. Dieters got a budget of points, allowing for some indulgences—just not too many. (In 2017, WeightWatchers even created a menu with more than 200 zero-points foods—including eggs, fish and beans—with the implication that one could, but probably wouldn’t, gorge on them endlessly.) The company itself shape-shifted, too: Heinz sold it to the investment firm Artal Group in 1999, and Artal took the company public again in 2001. By 2015, WeightWatchers was in trouble. Loaded with debt, largely from purchasing its own stock over the prior decade, and struggling to compete with free online weight-loss and fitness tools, the company needed to get people excited about joining again. And nobody, WeightWatchers concluded, was better at getting people excited than Oprah Winfrey. The influential talk-show host had long struggled very publicly with her weight, trying just about every diet out there. After WeightWatchers approached her, Winfrey bought a 10% stake—which would’ve been worth about $43 million before she joined the company—and became a board member. In commercials she flaunted the 40 pounds she’d lost on the program and praised its flexibility. “I have bread every day,” she declared. Her endorsement provided a much needed face-lift to an aging brand, but the core, slightly boring tenets of pursuing a healthy lifestyle remained. “I truly wish there was a magic pill,” former CEO David Kirchhoff told analysts a few years earlier. “But there isn’t.” How people were approaching weight loss, meanwhile, was changing. The body positivity movement was shifting emphasis from the scale to overall health, which might now mean eating like a caveman, meditating, sporting a Fitbit, swapping alcohol for green juice or turning to Goop for your medical ailments. Wellness culture ran on good vibes, and dieting had bad vibes, as Deb Benovitz, who heads WeightWatchers’ insights and innovation, learned when she surveyed consumers. People no longer wanted to talk just about “diet”—which inevitably implied failure—and instead said things like, “I want you to look at the whole me.” In 2017, Mindy Grossman, the retail executive who’d reinvented television shopping at HSN, took the helm and continued the wellness makeover. (She also marked the third CEO in 10 years.) WeightWatchers scrubbed the “d”-word from its materials, replacing it with “healthy eating”; got rid of artificial sweeteners, colors and preservatives in its products; and, for the first time, let people join without specifying a goal weight. Members could also attend special wellness workshops and vacation on a WeightWatchers cruise. In 2018 the company even temporarily scrapped the WeightWatchers name, truncating it to WW with a new slogan: “Wellness that works.” WeightWatchers had an app, which it updated with Headspace meditations and new online groups where members with similar interests could connect, but those changes went largely unnoticed. Ultimately, says Benovitz, wellness “didn’t translate into sales.” (Grossman didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Noom, meanwhile, using psychology to help dieters develop and keep healthy habits, was suddenly becoming cool. Then, during the pandemic, people were packing on pounds snacking anxiously at home, while hundreds of leased WeightWatchers locations across the US sat empty. By the time Grossman stepped down in early 2022, the company’s membership was declining, and even Winfrey, still a board member, had offloaded most of her stock. Early in the pandemic, Sistani was taking a walk around her neighborhood in Menlo Park, California, to mark another day of working from home. After a meandering career with stops at Creative Artists Agency and Tumblr, she’d recently achieved a milestone many in Silicon Valley dream of: selling a company. In this case it was Houseparty, a group video-chat app popular with gamers and college students, which Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, had purchased. As she walked, Sistani listened to an episode of the Oprah’s Super Soul podcast and heard comedian Tina Fey confess her affection for WeightWatchers. Fey told Winfrey that her favorite low-points treat was a banana and strawberries with Cool Whip and chocolate drizzle on top. She said she’d posted about it under a pseudonym on the WeightWatchers app, where she also cheered on other members. It dawned on Sistani, who’d used WeightWatchers after giving birth, that the company was more than a fading brand for middle-aged dieters—it was a social network. “I hadn’t really connected those dots,” she recalls thinking. “And I got really excited about that.” She reached out to WeightWatchers’ board, hoping she might persuade them to bring her on. That didn’t happen, but two years later, when the company was in desperate need of a reinvention, the board invited her to interview for the CEO role. Sistani’s pitch: Not only did she understand digital communities, but she could also turn WeightWatchers into a tech company. Its customers were already getting used to doing things online: Once more evenly split between in-person and not, members had shifted dramatically during the pandemic, such that more than 80% of subscribers opted to pay only for digital access. But often, customers weren’t connecting with one another on WeightWatchers’ app, instead using places like Facebook and Reddit. To start, she told the board, the app would have to improve. “You can’t even DM people,” she says. It was a diagnosis more commonly heard in 2010 than in 2022, but it got her the job. By the time Sistani joined, Ozempic and Wegovy were becoming household names, and hashtags such as #ozempicjourney were being circulated on TikTok by users who shared miracle stories of losing weight. Sistani hatched an internal incubator at WeightWatchers to explore whether the company should offer GLP-1s. Benovitz, the head of customer insight, was interviewing GLP-1 patients, who were calling the drugs “magic.” Hearing their stories of losing weight after many futile years of trying was so moving that she cried. “It felt like, I’m living through an inflection point where we may be able to cure a problem in this world that has been getting worse and worse,” says Benovitz, who’s been with WeightWatchers for almost a decade. It wasn’t just GLP-1 patients. Despite all the talk about body positivity, people seemed to have moved on, and they wanted to slim down again. They felt like they finally had permission to speak about it more bluntly. The company quietly began calling itself WeightWatchers again; suddenly wellness was out and science was in, especially science that explained the biological factors of obesity. In October, Sistani met with WeightWatchers’ scientific advisory board, which is made up of outside academics and physicians. (Some of them have taken tens of thousands of dollars from either Novo Nordisk A/S or Eli Lilly & Co., both makers of GLP-1s. WeightWatchers says it looks for the best scientific experts and hires them based on their expertise, regardless of affiliations.) Sistani came away determined to move swiftly, but the company’s board was tentative, mindful of the fen-phen fiasco WeightWatchers had dodged decades earlier. Sistani convinced some longer-tenured members that GLP-1s were different. And Gary Foster, the company’s chief scientific officer, was reassured that GLP-1s’ primary side effects—nausea, diarrhea and vomiting—were generally mild and that the drugs had been used for almost two decades by people with diabetes without any safety scandals. “Other medications had things that were more nervous-system-related, or agitation or increased heart rate,” he says. With GLP-1s “you’re not seeing any of that.” Of course, it remains to be seen what happens long term when GLP-1s are used by many more patients, including already-thin people wanting to lose weight, a cohort on whom these drugs have yet to be tested. (This month, a European regulator began investigating some GLP-1s after the drugs were linked to a small number of reports of suicidal thoughts.) The fastest way to move into GLP-1s was an acquisition, and by that time, Sistani had plenty of options. Telemedicine had boomed during Covid; to spin up a digital prescription provider, all you needed was a sleek website, some science-y language branding, contract clinicians and a marketing budget. After considering more than 30 different GLP-1 startups, Sistani was sold on Sequence, which she thought had the best approach to automating insurance appeals, arguably the most labor-intensive part of the process. “They had a team of engineers who’d come from working on AI-driven cars and have figured out a complete automation platform,” she says. Sistani decided to buy the company, she says, because of its “tech stack” and a feeling of kinship with its co-founders, two ex-Google software engineers who’d come along with the deal. “I truly believe that 5 to 10 years from now, we’ll look back on weight management in a very different way than we did, say, a few years ago,” says Remi Cossart, the CEO and co-founder of Sequence’s parent company, Weekend Health Inc. Wall Street cheered the deal, but for many WeightWatchers lifers the news stung. The acquisition “is an antithesis to what I thought they believed in,” says Nadine Lee, who’s been a member for the past 13 years. “Switching to medications feels like a quick-fix shift in their philosophy.” With the program, every food—from an ice cream sundae to a piece of broccoli—had a points value. In this new WeightWatchers era, how many points was a shot of Ozempic? With the deal moving so quickly to purchase Sequence, it remains uncertain just how WeightWatchers will handle the integration. Sistani says her experience at acquired companies—not just at Houseparty, but also at Tumblr after Yahoo! Inc. bought it in 2013—will help smooth the transition. “Two-thirds of acquisitions don’t go well,” she says. “I’m really lucky to have been part of one that did and one that didn’t.” (Tumblr was acquired for $1 billion in 2013 and sold for $3 million in 2019; Epic shut down Houseparty in 2021.) Since the purchase announcement in March, WeightWatchers hasn’t communicated much about its move into pharmaceuticals. Sistani, who posts videos on TikTok sharing her go-to two-point smoothie recipe and sporting a sweatshirt that reads “saving my points for wine,” says she’s been surprised by the backlash among WeightWatchers loyalists. But some die-hards who reach and maintain their goal weight don’t pay the company a dime, and even if they did, she’s fine rubbing them the wrong way to win over a whole new crowd. “Some of the pushback we heard, our members for instance, was like, ‘I did it the hard way.’ And that’s not a reason to not help people,” Sistani says, comparing their complaints to people griping about student loan forgiveness. Based on conversations with Sistani and her team, it’s likely the new WeightWatchers will look like some version of this: A traditional membership now costs about $25 to $50 per month; for access to the GLP-1s, you upgrade to a Sequence membership, bringing your monthly fee to $99. (Existing Sequence members, already paying this amount, automatically become WeightWatchers members.) A Sequence membership comes with medical consults and help from a dietitian but doesn’t actually include GLP-1s. To be eligible for a GLP-1 prescription through the company, you need to have a body mass index of 30 or higher (or 27 or so with a weight-related condition). Once on the drugs, Sequence members have access to WeightWatchers’ new lifestyle services to help with things such as managing side effects and rebuilding strength as weight drops (along with fat, muscle inevitably disappears, too). The company envisions also marketing these behavioral services to GLP-1 patients who’ve gotten the drugs elsewhere. “There are plenty of people who are getting these medications from their doctors and not having the right support,” Sistani says. Members who aren’t on GLP-1s will continue using its traditional program—the points system and virtual or in-person meetings. WeightWatchers had about 3.5 million online and in-person members last year, more than half of whom would qualify for a GLP-1 prescription based on their BMI. That group, along with a segment of the company’s 20 million or so lapsed customers, could be interested in upgrading to a Sequence membership. But that doesn’t guarantee insurance will cover the GLP-1s, which can add $900 to $1,400 in out-of-pocket costs a month, an unrealistic expense for most. (WeightWatchers says in cases where people can’t get coverage, Sequence can provide access to less expensive medications typically covered by insurance.) Sistani also concedes that while WeightWatchers has dramatically cut its real estate expenses—reducing from about 3,000 locations before the pandemic to around 800—the new business’s margins are similar, with costs like employing clinicians, as well as staff to fight insurance companies that deny coverage to members. But a bigger threat to WeightWatchers is how rapidly the drugs are being commoditized. Noom recently launched a $120 monthly subscription for GLP-1 users, while the telemedicine startup Ro—better known for selling erectile dysfunction medications—plastered New York City subway stations with ads featuring weight-loss drug injections. Med spas and plastic surgery clinics are pitching Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro alongside facials, tummy tucks and nose jobs and blanketing Instagram and Facebook with ads. (One nail salon in New Orleans advertises nurse-administered injections for “Semaglutide Saturdays,” a reference to the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy.) The drugs seem to be following the Botox trajectory, leaping from medical intervention to cosmetic elective, with Ozempic injection parties not far behind. Drug companies can barely keep up with demand as they deal with product shortages and knockoffs put out by so-called compounding pharmacies, which sell cheaper and questionable versions. (Novo Nordisk recently sued several providers and pharmacies over trademark infringement and other complaints.) Soon enough there should also be GLP-1 pills for obesity and likely next-generation versions that help people lose even more weight. Middlemen such as WeightWatchers could find themselves in a race to the bottom, competing on price, access and marketing. “The uniqueness of this WeightWatchers offer is still a question from my end,” says Brian Nagel, a managing director and senior analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. In the best-case scenario, WeightWatchers members who try Ozempic will encourage friends to sign up for the new program, where they can get drugs and support and discover the wonders of points. Those who are—and aren’t—on GLP-1s thrive together without resentment. In the worst-case scenario, longtime members, whose only elixir all these years has been willpower, quit en masse. But it doesn’t end there: The new people who swarm to the brand for access to the drugs can’t get their insurer to cover them, then abandon it just as quickly. Eventually, some members fear, leaders at weekly meetings sling GLP-1 pens as newly skinny Ozempic users complain about losing too much weight too quickly. Everyone else grinds bitterly through another daily points log on their phone, including onetime Ozempic takers whose pounds have piled back on. What’s left is the illusion of a venerable brand that’s turned into a prescription factory with perks. Already, versions of the latter scenario are playing out. Cindy Borges, a 54-year-old in Visalia, California, joined Sequence after she heard it had been acquired by WeightWatchers. Sequence couldn’t help her secure insurance coverage, though, and she quit soon after. She says she told two co-workers who were interested in her experience that it was a scam. “At the end of the day, until the insurances will start paying for it, what’s the point?” she asks. Even if WeightWatchers can satisfy Sequence customers, it could still fade into irrelevance. Kelly Steffee, a 46-year-old mom who lives in an Orlando suburb, was a WeightWatchers member on and off for years before she joined Sequence last fall. A clinician there prescribed Mounjaro, and she lost more than 50 pounds in six months. But the most dramatic results were the ones she felt inside. “That food noise, the lady in your head telling you to eat all the time—‘Get a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, it’s really, really good’—she’s not there anymore,” Steffee says. Although Sequence helped WeightWatchers recapture her as a customer, it wasn’t a stable situation. For one, Steffee’s insurance wasn’t covering Mounjaro, and a coupon she’d been using, issued by the drug company, expired in June. She also wanted to keep losing weight, but her Sequence-appointed doctor didn’t want her to drop any more. So she quit and found another telemedicine provider that prescribed her Ozempic, at a dose she wanted. This time, her insurance covered it. As for WeightWatchers, Steffee isn’t interested in going back to paying for the warm and fuzzy sense of community it monetized for so long. She already gets that on TikTok, where she’s constantly swapping tips and life updates with fellow weight-loss-drug takers. “That,” she says, “is my WeightWatchers meeting.” For more articles like this please visit us at bloomberg.com