The company, founded by Jenny and Sidney Craig in 1983, went into voluntary administration earlier this week. While administrators say they will try to keep the company open, its collapse here, in Australia and the United States is a positive sign that diet culture has shifted, Barnett told Kathryn Ryan on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme today.
“I'm very sorry for the staff that are losing their jobs, but in terms of all the people that have been campaigning and raising their fists against diet culture for a long time, it is really a win. There’s so much evidence that shows that 95 percent of diets don't work.
“I'm hoping that it's really a sign that we can start to talk more about weight discrimination as well, and fatphobia.”
Barnett said that diet regimes offered by previously multi-billion-dollar companies like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, which rebranded itself as WW in 2018, were most efficient at slimming the wallets of their users. The fact that Jenny Craig offered a ‘Platinum’ life membership that offered unlimited weight loss and follow-up maintenance was a clue as to diets’ inherent flaws, Barnett said.
“In what other industry would you continue to pay for the rest of your life to do something that you're constantly failing at?
“I always look to the work of Professor Cynthia Bulik ... she's done a lot of work into diet culture. She’s said, look, if you took 100 11-year-olds and put them on a diet, one will get anorexia, three to four will develop a binge-eating disorder. Five will lose weight with no psychological effect and up to 90 can potentially go into a lifetime of dieting and yo-yo dieting.
"So, there’s so much evidence that the actual process of dieting can create more weight gain. It becomes this ongoing struggle.”
While there was increasing awareness across the media about embracing different body sizes, there remained a lot of pressure on young people from social media and influencers, Barnett said. She was hopeful that the filter-less sharing of images on Snapchat (“my 14-year-old daughter explained to me that it would be really uncool to put a filter on Snapchat photos”) was a step in the right direction.
Barnett said her own mother was a Jenny Craig dieter and she was “miserable, very miserable”.
“It may have worked for a little while and then it didn’t work. Bless my mum, after years of dieting, she got to the point where she realised that she needed to throw away all the diets.”
Research now showed that people could be fit and healthy without being a certain size, Barnett said. She would like the emphasis to shift to eating well for the sake of how people feel, rather than how they look.
“This idea that we're all meant to be a particular size is what gets us all into trouble. There’s so much more research out that it's far better to talk about intuitive eating and to embrace HAES - Health at Every Size."
