Weight Watchers

H.J. Heinz Co.'s Weight Watchers International Inc. settled long-standing federal deceptive advertising charges by agreeing to permanently trim the diet company's claims about the success of its programs. The settlement, which requires that certain disclosures accompany weight-loss claims, formalizes a policy that Weight Watchers says it has followed since shortly after the Federal Trade Commission filed suit in 1993. The settlement marks the culmination of an FTC crackdown on U.S.

Albert Lippert, 72, who helped develop Jean Nidetch's diet plan into Weight Watchers International. A Brooklyn-born Army veteran of World War II, Lippert earned a degree in business administration from City College of New York and did graduate work at Baruch College, then began a career in the garment district. Concerned about their expanding girth, he and his wife, Felice, heard about Nidetch and her offer to teach a diet program and invited her over.

Weight Watchers International said its quarterly profit dropped, and it blamed the popularity of low-carbohydrate diets in the United States for a lower full-year forecast. Net income fell to $36.8 million, or 34 cents a share, in the first quarter, which ended April 3, from $40.6 million, or 37 cents, a year earlier, a spokesman said. Revenue climbed 12% to $281.4 million. The company expects to earn $1.70 to $1.80 a share for the year, down 10% from an earlier forecast of $1.90 to $2.

Weight Watchers International has an unusual recipe for trimming down its potential Y2K problems: Get rid of its computers. The Woodbury, N.Y.-based weight control business on Monday will begin eliminating all electronic registers at its centers and revert back to a manual record-keeping system. Employees at hundreds of company centers will adhere to a strict regimen of pen and paper by Dec. 19.

Consumer Reports has released its latest diet plan ratings, and there's a new queen of the low-cal aisle: Jenny Craig. This came as a bit of a disappointment to me.  Hoping to lose about 10-15 pounds of weight I put on when pregnant with my now 2-year-old son, I recently started Weight Watchers -- which came in third in the rankings.  Weight Watchers got dinged for not providing proof of sufficient weight loss and for publishing a sample menu...

Felice Marks Lippert, 73, a co-founder of the Weight Watchers diet system, died Saturday in Manhasset, N.Y. The cause of death was lung cancer. Born in New York City, Lippert graduated from Hunter College and taught in New York public schools. She helped develop the company's programs and served as a director and vice president of Weight Watchers International until H.J. Heinz Co. bought the business in 1978. At the time of her death, Lippert was chairwoman of the Weight Watchers Foundation.

She arrived bearing the same message as ever: If you follow this program, you lose weight and you keep it off. The road to slimness is as simple as that, Jean Nidetch said repeatedly as she visited Los Angeles this week to promote the 25th anniversary of the Weight Watchers program she founded as a New York housewife in the early 1960s.

Fifty-six-year-old Lynn Kaufman of Los Angeles has maintained a healthful weight on Weight Watchers for 10 years. But she was snacking way too much on the wrong kind of stuff, she says ? like 100-calorie cookie packs and hot chocolate. Today she jokes that Weight Watchers must have been spying on her. "I think there was a video camera in my house and they said, 'We don't like the quality of the food you are eating.'" In November, Weight Watchers unveiled its new point system, PointsPlus, to its 1.3 million members worldwide.

UC Irvine's College of Medicine received a $50,000 grant from the Weight Watchers Foundation on Thursday to expand its medical education program in nutrition. The grant, one of only two given in this country by the nationally known organization, will be used to augment existing classes and create programs in clinical nutrition and obesity prevention. In accepting the money, school officials pointed out that about 55% of Americans are overweight and 30% are obese.

Here is what it's like to be Sarah, the Duchess of York, on your first official day as spokeswoman for Weight Watchers International. After a long flight from England, where it has just been announced that you finally paid off that $6.89-million overdraft, you are awakened at dawn and taken to a morning news show where, while getting made-up in a room full of chocolate doughnuts, someone asks when you'll be appearing on "Melrose Place." (Probably never, you say, because you have yet to be asked.