Perpetual waiting: Analyzing dieters’ time in WW’s Instagram posts

Abstract

ABSTRACT WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) is one of the biggest and most successful diet companies in the world, and its social media presence, showcasing the company’s mostly female clientele, is saturated with messages regarding time and temporality. Unlike many descriptions of dieters’ experiences from their own points of view, this article examines WW’s corporate perception of dieters’ time as evidenced in its Instagram publications. We argue that WW presents to its online audience a dual conception of dieters’ time, in which the present is both missing and at the same time present in hyperfocus. It is missing in that the fat body is seen as an obstruction to a life of fulfillment and happiness, as merely a step on the way to unlocking one’s true potential via thinness; it is present in hyperfocus in that the monitoring and disciplining of the body through the program’s point system requires constant vigilance and preoccupation with food and eating. Since, as the research indicates, the promise that dieting will result in a thin body is rarely realized, dieters are thus left in a cycle of dissatisfaction, an existence taken over by calculations, and a perpetual state of expectation and waiting.