There’s a meme of sorts about how people from all cultural backgrounds claim that what makes their own unique is its love of food. As versus which other culture, is the retort. Every culture (fine, apart from WASP culture) is the one with the food.
So too, perhaps, with dieting. To me, dieting feels like a deeply Jewish pursuit, like something inherent to mid-century-to-Y2K North American Jewish culture. But also, I happen to be a woman born in the 1980s, to a mostly-American, partly-Canadian Jewish family.
I get that, as a demographic matter, the however many gazillion dollar diet industry cannot only have Jewish adherents. I have lived in the world long enough to have, would you believe it, met gentiles on diets. But also, diet culture is something I associate with the self-deprecation of Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Dorothy or Sophia on The Golden Girls, or Natalie on The Facts of Life, and with specific classmates of mine whose mothers served them SlimFast in early 1990s Manhattan, really just a whole Jewish subculture of venerating thinness, all the while (mistakenly, I suspect) believing it to be somehow harder for us to attain than for our non-Jewish white-lady equivalents. Zaftig was our assumed communal set point.
Marisa Meltzer is a lifestyle-journalism A-lister, a byline familiar to readers of The New York Times, Vogue, and the like. One of the names, alongside Hadley Freeman and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, where I see the byline and hop to it. She first came on my radar in 2013, in a piece for Elle.com, a part of which is about how dieting had gone out of style, replaced by the euphemism of wellness: “Losing weight for your wedding day? Okay, you get a free pass on that one. But the daily slog of dieting—all that calorie counting and dessert skipping and cardio bingeing? That’s not at all chic.”
That essay marked, to me, the end of diet culture as it had once existed. Meltzer did not personally end it, but rather was picking up on a shift that had occurred. The long 2010s were not a time when dieting itself ceased to take place, but rather when the way women—or, women of a certain class—discussed it changed dramatically. It was no less important to be thin, but fat-shaming was out, as was overt diet-talk. Gone were the days of, just a small piece of cake for me, I’ll only be a little bit bad. It was understood that to speak of how fat you thought you were was a microaggression to any fatter-still woman who might be within earshot. That dieting and calling it “dieting” was a bit low-class, but also that it was classist to phrase it in such terms.
Then the vibe shifted and skinny came back. Whichever woke-capitalist impulse led brands to sell their wares to skinny socialites using heavy-set models stopped being the thing, and now the models are once again emaciated. It’s all enough to make a person nostalgic for the yes slightly hypocritical 2010s.
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Meltzer’s 2020 book, This is Big: How the founder of Weight Watchers changed the world (and me), is in a sense an extension of the 2013 essay, but so much, well, bigger. It is a biography of Jean Nidetch and a dieting memoir, told in alternating chapters. Meltzer writes of her own sense of identification with Nidetch: “Jean and I were both five foot seven, Jewish, blond (hers by bottle, mine by birth), and residents of Brooklyn (hers by birth, mine by adoption). When I look at old photos of her before she lost the weight, the physical resemblance between us is so strong, she could easily be my aunt or cousin; she could almost be me somehow transported back in time to New York City in 1961.”
The Nidetch chapters offer a deeply reported, entertainingly told American Jewish history, not all weight-related. Did you know that Weight Watchers had a magazine, and that in the 1960s, “A fashion story with the young stars playing Tevye’s daughters from the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof featured a very young Bette Midler modeling mod outfits of the era: an apple-green shirtdress, red patent-leather shoes, and knee socks”? I for one am glad to now know this. And Jewish women figure prominently among the anti-dieting activists as well: Susie Orbach, Roberta Weintraub, and others.
But they’re mostly the story of one working-class Jewish woman reinventing herself, rising above her humble origins, and then landing (due to sexism, a lack of business acumen, or an addictive personality shifting from eating to gambling) not far off from where she started.
The autobiographical chapters present a woman for whom dieting is cringe, but who nevertheless goes on Weight Watchers for a year, as one does for a book project, but also because she earnestly wants to lose weight: “I admit I had long dismissed Weight Watchers as the most retro, basic, lowest-common-denominator, least chic diet company in the world.” She goes on a Weight Watchers cruise, even, doing the full intrepid journalistic dive into a scene that both is and is not beneath her.
This is Big is brilliant; my only regret is not finding it and reviewing it closer to when it was new, but in the end, there is a reason why it is maybe more pertinent now. I’m getting to what that is.
This tension between doing the thing and commenting on it as a detached observer drives the book. Meltzer is not (by her own admission) someone who would read as remarkably fat in all settings, but she happens to be a New York City journalist who, among other things, reports on movie stars and models and the like. She’s of a socioeconomic class where thinness is expected (she writes about her awareness of the class privilege that ought to make her able to be thin, but has not), but it’s more than that. Her scene is one where people are top 0.0001% conventionally gorgeous. Weight Watchers is not aesthetic, it reeks of horrible mid-late-century recipes, it is not Instagrammable, but she goes on it for a year and, yup, loses weight.
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“Is Weight Watchers feminist?” Meltzer answers this with ambivalence. The collective-endeavour bit, yes, the official purpose, maybe not so much.
This is Big was, recall, published in 2020. I read it in 2025, with, in the back of my mind, a recent Free Press essay by Suzy Weiss, about GLP-1s, the new, mega-effective weight loss (among other purposes) medications, which just so happen to be a Canadian-Jewish innovation. Weight Watchers did not survive Ozempic. Instead, it went bankrupt. All of this is foreshadowed in the part of the book where Meltzer discusses the impact 1990s weight-loss drugs had on Weight Watchers, and then how the company rebounded when those drugs went off the market. The new batch seems to have more staying power.
I read This is Big, that is, with the knowledge that it would be a preserved-in-amber relic of the pre-semaglutides era. A last glimpse at a lost world, one for which the novelist Jennifer Weiner—one of ours—expresses nostalgia, for those same group-therapeutic reasons. If the dieting is going to be happening, better, at least, to talk about it.
In another interpretation, dietland is a world whose loss we should celebrate. Writes Weiss, “How many millions of Weight Watchers points have been counted over my lifetime?” While her own weight-related struggles are not those of Meltzer (who is herself careful to state that she is aware others are fatter than she is), she found that taking Wegovy, an Ozempic-like drug, allows her to be thin, but more importantly, to stop thinking about diet all the time:
“Now there’s another option. If you take it, the mental real estate previously dedicated to the minutiae of your diet can be leased to more important matters: your family, your job, your passions, or your faith. ‘Food noise,’ the constant consideration about what you might eat next, what you’re craving, what you might order at a restaurant later, whether you’ve ‘earned’ dessert, gets a lot quieter, because food just doesn’t have the power it used to.”
What Meltzer describes struggling with isn’t just food or weight or what have you, but the way these things take up one’s mind. “Loving my body still keeps the focus on my body. What I would prefer to have is the freedom not to think about my body at all.” Meltzer writes of how dieting gives her life “organization” in the absence of anything else serving that purpose: “For someone raised without religion, dieting has been a source of faith.” Lest this seem like a call to spirituality, note that Meltzer also meets Orthodox Jewish women at Weight Watchers meetings, including a woman named Sadie ever-ready with a quip about the dietetic value of babka, challah, or bagels. Dieting can be all-encompassing even for those who would seem to have transcended such worldly concerns.
Beyond the diet-related stress is the added layer of fearing being a bad feminist or a conventional bore (aka basic) for dieting. “For my whole life,” writes Meltzer, “ I have felt like I have been forced—or have forced myself—to choose between two opposing ideologies: to diet or to embrace not dieting.”
It occurred to me that all the angst within the pages of This is Big could now be eliminated, much as it has been said, of Seinfeld, that the plots would not make sense in a world with cellphones. No, not everyone who has struggled with their weight is now on Ozempic. The cultural trappings of the old order—the bonding among women over fat avoidance or acceptance—inherently cannot be what they once were, if some percentage of women (and of people generally!) are on medications that make slimness and food indifference just happen.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. Subscribe to The Jewish Angle wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll have more updates on Substack and The CJN’s own daily newsletter.
