Weight Watchers Shares Plan To Rebrand — Angelica LaVito

Weight Watchers will offer teens aged 13 to 17 free memberships this summer as part of its plan to help ten million people adopt healthy habits and grow its revenue to more than two billion by 2020. The company said it is rebranding to focus itself on the purpose of inspiring healthy habits for life. Encouraging teens to count calories and diet is dangerous, said Tomi Akanbi, MS, RD, clinical nutrition coordinator at the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center. She sees patients who adopt their parents’ weight-loss plans, not realizing that teens need to eat certain foods to help them grow. When teens focus on calories, she said, they tend to skip meals and eat too little or replace them with empty calories from sugary sources like soda. Instead, she encourages teens to create a diet that's heavy in fruits, vegetables, protein and grains and void of refined starches and sugars, mixed with at least an hour of daily exercise. "Weight Watchers really is dieting and focusing on just weight, and research has shown when the focus is on weight and dieting in teens, that is not an effective way to promote and sustain weight loss," Dr. Akanbi added. "It's not even helpful to promote overall wellness because we're also talking about body image and how these kids are experiencing themselves and food and their bodies, and dieting does not help with that."

• Tomi Akanbi, MS, RD, Clinical Nutrition Coordinator, Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center
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