I just saw that WW’s stock is crashing due to very poor results and earnings outlook. I wonder if Keto is cutting into their sales. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/weight-watchers-international-q4-earnings-2018.html
Weight Watchers stock hit hard by falling earnings
anon2571578
#3
Millennials be killing the Diet Industry because 1) We’re moving away from counting calories; and 2) who’s got Weight Watchers’ money lol?
JEY100
(Janet)
#6
Weight Watchers is getting crushed by keto
[https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/27/inve...keto/index.html]
(CNN) — Oprah Winfrey famously proclaimed “I love bread!” in a Weight Watchers commercial three years ago. But carbs aren’t cutting it for the company anymore.
Shares of WW — Weight Watchers’ new name — fell more than 33% on Wednesday after the company shocked Wall Street with poor earnings and sales.
CEO Mindy Grossman attributed the problem to the keto diet, a popular eating regimen that makes bread and other carbs taboo. She said during a call with analysts Tuesday that keto is “becoming a cultural mean (sic 
),” and she even called it a “keto surge.”
Wall Street is clearly nervous, too.
JPMorgan analyst Christina Brathwaite downgraded the stock to “underperform” last week and slashed her price target. One of the reasons? She was worried about competition from rival weight-loss service Diet Doctor, which is a proponent of keto.
The stock slide is also hurting Winfrey, the second-largest shareholder in the company. She bought 6.4 million shares of WW in October 2015 — a stake that at the time was valued at $43 million. At the peak of the stock’s value last July, her investment would have been worth about half a billion dollars, an amount that accounts for a sale she made of some stock last March.
Since that July high, WW stock has lost more than 80% of its value.
Grossman stressed that WW is not going to change its strategy just because there is a new diet plan that’s popular.
“Everybody on the diet side looks for the quick fix. We’ve been through this before and we know that we are the program that works,” Grossman said.
The-CNN-Wire
JEY100
(Janet)
#8
The CEO has one serious case of Denial. DietDoctor is not a “weight-loss service”, they don’t sell keto donuts, they are leveraging social media for all those page views. WW’s 57 year old model of sitting on metal folding chairs in the church basement doesn’t cut it anymore.
Aqua_chonk
(Stickin' with mammoth)
#10
Sit back, relax, and watch the shit show.
That’s the lovely thing about keto, it requires so little effort to win. You don’t have to prove your dedication to the cause through physical pain and discomfort like the starvation, restriction, and denial of pleasure pretty much all other health religions demand.
And I’m not just talking about your wallet.
Everybody knows obesity carries a hefty multilayered social fine without a Get Out of Jail Free Card. It’s not one of the sins you can hide, it’s right there on your pants label, and calories in, calories out, dude, so we all know who’s to blame. There’s a reason The Biggest Loser zoomed cameras in on the blood, sweat, and tears between diet shake commercials. People used to gather and cheer for the burnings during the Spanish Inquisition, too. Sinners must pay.
And here we ketoers are, calmly eating bacon and winning–outrageous!
Now, let’s drill down: There’s actually five levels of pissed happening here. There’s the bloated tick of a stock market hemorrhaging money because it attached itself to the wrong dog, there’s the diet industry wringing it’s hands because it can’t corner something it can’t patent, there’s the health care juggernaut watching its worshipers turn apostate as growing throngs ignore their doctors and cure themselves on their own, there’s the USDA losing power and control because they can’t legislate a behavior no matter how many lobbyists they throw at it, and there’s the general public getting madder and madder and sicker and sicker while us heretics eat everything on the Naughty List and thrive.
That’s a whole lot of Hell, No.
(sits back, relaxes, and watches the shit show)
Freefall_Doug
(DougH)
#11
Good Morning America had some stupid fluff piece this morning about keto being a fad, and they continued to tout how Weight Watchers was ranked number 1 in some survey of “nutritionists”.
If it was so great they wouldn’t exist. Weight Watchers is a business that relies on people losing weight in the short term, and staying fat in the long term. They love repeat business.
Rclause
(Scott)
#12
Does that mean my keto stock will go up?
This is the funny part about keto WOE. No one will pay for studies, no one can charge for it or package it. Its all free and works. That said there are a few keto snake oil salesman out there but we don’t need their wares.
atomicspacebunny
(Bunny)
#14
Weight Watchers is keto believe it or not, problem is the carbs and type used are still too high to reach maximum potential!
You can bridge on ketosis without actually being in high ketosis (what you can see revealed on a device for measuring such substances) and burn body fat, everybodies need for level of ketosis is different on an individual basis (G. Taubs et al.) even in the absence of a high protein and fat (LCHF) diet etc…
Little known fact: you do go into a mild ketosis when you sleep at night or whatever your circadian rhythm may be; high or low carb!
JEY100
(Janet)
#15
Weight Watchers has a list of 200 “Free Foods”…can eat as much of them as you want and not even use one of your allowed points for the day. That list includes Bananas and all manner of Beans and Peas, including canned fat-free refried beans (1 can=62 carbs). Eat vegetarian chili, beans and bananas all day…that is not “keto”.
Ruina
(Hyperbole- best thing in the universe!)
#16
I had success with WW. I lost at the same rate as I did with keto, and I kept it off for over two years. I liked the meetings and they worked for me. I’m not generally a joiner, and the leaders were often a bit too cheerleader-y for my taste, but it worked and kept me on track.
I much prefer keto. I am successful at keto without tracking and without meetings. The forums do serve a lot of the same function as the meetings did, but I was doing well long before I came to the forum. I also feel healthier, physically and mentally, with keto.
But I would have nothing against WW if they accepted the science and at least made keto an option instead of trying to compete. Putting competition over people’s health is unforgivable in any context.
DawnOM
(Dawn O Miller)
#17
I agree. Many people have been successful with WW in losing weight, but because that’s the only outcome they are concerned with they miss out on what keto brings to the table, which is to help people correct their overall metabolic health. Most smart businesses would take full advantage of that and incorporate it into their model, but for Mindy Grossman to causally dismiss it I think is a reflection of of why the company is not performing well.
Ruina
(Hyperbole- best thing in the universe!)
#18
True. I didn’t have T2D to reverse, but WW couldn’t have helped if I did.
Janie
(Jane)
#19
No it is not.
The original plan with exchanges was close because it limited your bread servings to 2 80-cal servings per day the first week and 3 per day after that. I made it to goal and a lifetime member in 1990 or thereabouts.
When I stallled, the advice was to go back to week 1 and cut out one bread exchange.
They wound never tell you that today.
Once they went to the point system you could eat as much bread as you wanted as long as you stayed under your points. I was starving all the time.
No reason you couldn’t eat keto on their point system but the high fats would use up your point too fast, you would be hungry, and why pay WW when you can do keto for free?
Janie
(Jane)
#20
I looked up the carbs for their original program with 2 bread and 2 fruit exchanges for week 1. It runs about 50 g carbs per day so maybe not keto but by definition low carb.
They added a bread and fruit exchange in later weeks.
I forgot about the milk exchanges. So would need to add a few more carbs for them also.