THE CHANGING SHAPE OF SLIMMING
On 16 September 1967, a local paper in Surrey ran a weight-loss story about a woman named Stephanie Vaughan. Having struggled with her body weight as a child and adolescent, Stephanie had grown “fatter and more hopeless about her weight problem until, at 21, she reached 14½ stone”. She had tried everything in her willpower to diet. She had even taken a course of slimming pills, which left her feeling “terrible”. But recently, reported the newspaper, something dramatic had happened. Stephanie had discovered a new slimming method called Weight Watchers: “an organisation, recently introduced to this country from America, which helps fatties through group therapy – a kind of ‘eaters anonymous’.”
The article in the went on to record Stephanie’s remarkable success with Weight Watchers. She had started going once a week to a meeting in a small village hall in Datchet, where a new branch of the company had just been formed. Although she had already slimmed down to 13 stone, she hoped to stay for five further months to lose more weight. The journalist concluded that Stephanie felt better in herself and found it easier to resist sweet temptations. Where once she had been a “fat girl”, “too big to go out and buy pretty, off-the-peg clothing”, she had started “taking an interest in fashions, now there is a chance of finding something to fit”.
