Weight Watchers, one of the world’s largest diet companies, is struggling yet again as shares dwindle amid “competition” from ketogenic diets.
The financial reports came out after Weight Watchers announced it was getting a major investment from Oprah Winfrey.
But her investment may have been ill-timed. Caloric restriction diets such as Weight Watchers popularized by such shows as The Biggest Loser are being shown more and more to just not work for the long run. (Click here to see how ineffective the Biggest Loser diet was to contestants.)
In 2011, Weight Watchers “officially” gave up on calorie counting, admitting it was “unhelpful.”
Now, CNN Business reports people are increasingly turning away from carbs — and diets that promote them.
“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 … that keto is ‘becoming a cultural mean’ and she even called it a ‘keto surge.’”
As a result of rapidly shifting consumer behavior, Weight Watchers’ stock value has dropped by more than 80 percent since its high in July 2018. Weight Watchers won’t be changing its diet strategy though, Grossman says.
Weight Watchers Opposes Keto
While Weight Watchers appears to view the ketogenic diet as another fad destined to eventually fade, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest nutritional ketosis is a most natural way of eating for health and weight management.
The same clearly cannot be said for the Weight Watchers program.
Before the advent of agriculture and modern food production, most people did not eat many carbs.
Fruit and vegetables were only available for short periods of time during the year, yet somehow eating a fat/meat-based diet is considered “unnatural” by Weight Watchers.
By reducing carbohydrates and increasing fat intake, the body switches from running on glucose for energy and starts using ketones for energy.
Ketones mimic the life span extending properties of calorie restriction (fasting), which includes improved glucose metabolism, reduced inflammation, clearing out malfunctioning immune cells, and reduced IGF-1, which is one of the factors that regulate growth pathways and growth genes and is a major player in accelerated aging and cellular/intracellular regeneration and rejuvenation (autophagy and mitophagy in the mitochondria).
Historically, the generous amounts of food most of us eat simply were not accessible throughout the entire year, let alone 24/7, and evidence shows your body simply isn’t designed to run optimally when continuously fed.
Part of the problem is that when you eat throughout the day your body adapts to burning sugar as its primary fuel, which down-regulates enzymes that utilize and burn your stored fat.
If you struggle to lose weight, this may well be a significant part of the problem — your body has simply lost the metabolic ability to burn fat for fuel.
Moreover, research has confirmed that many biological repair and rejuvenation processes take place in the absence of food, and this is another reason why all-day grazing triggers biological dysfunction. In a nutshell, your body was designed to:
- Run on fat as its primary fuel, which you do on a ketogenic diet, and
- Cycle through periods of feast and famine, which you do when intermittently fasting.
Is a High-Fat Diet Bad for Your Heart?
While a ketogenic diet is high in dietary fats, it’s crucial to understand which fats are good for you and which are not.
Most Americans consume harmful fats like processed vegetable oils, which will invariably worsen your health.
So, when we’re talking about boosting consumption of dietary fats, we’re referring to natural, unprocessed fat, found in real foods such as seeds, nuts, butter, olives, avocado, and coconut oil.
Dietary fat serves two purposes. As explained by Jeff Volek, Ph.D., a registered dietitian and professor in the Human Science Department at Ohio State University who has done a lot of work in the field of high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets, dietary fat is a “cleaner” burning fuel than carbs, as it creates fewer free radicals and reactive oxygen species in the process.
Dietary fat is also a foundational structural component of your biology with one of its primary roles in building your cell membranes.
If you’re trying to lose weight, training your body to access your body fat is key, or else you cannot shed it.
Unfortunately, many have been brainwashed into thinking that all dietary fats are bad for your heart and cardiovascular system.
It is becoming apparent that more and more people are starting to realize that since Weight Watchers was founded in 1963, America has become more and more obese and the strategies they have been pushing just do not work.
