She never ate dessert in public. But at night, by the dim light of the refrigerator, she gorged on goodies. Then one day in 1961, Jean Nidetch, a 214-pound Queens housewife with a 44-inch waist and an addiction to cookies by the box, ran into a neighbor at the supermarket.

“Oh, Jean, you look so good!” the neighbor said. “When are you due?”

That was it. Mrs. Nidetch, who had tried many times to subdue her compulsive eating — dieting, losing weight, then gaining it all back again — had to do something.

She shed 72 pounds and helped found Weight Watchers, the organization that turned the drab, frustrating diet into a quasi-religious quest, with membership commitments, eating systems, inspirational meetings and cookbooks, food products and motivational success stories to reinforce the frail will.

Mrs. Nidetch, the organization’s public face for decades, proclaiming its manifesto that managing weight is a lifelong task, died on Wednesday at her home in Parkland, Fla., according to a Weight Watchers spokeswoman. She was 91. A visitor in 2011 found that she weighed 142 pounds, the same as she did after her dramatic weight loss in the early 1960s.

With her overweight husband and two overweight friends, Mrs. Nidetch (pronounced NIE-ditch) incorporated Weight Watchers in 1963. It spawned thousands of franchises and enrolled millions around the world. It came to encompass weight-control classes that resembled group therapy sessions, summer camps for overweight children, a daily syndicated television program, magazines in America and Britain and many other enterprises.

Source: Jean Nidetch, a Founder of Weight Watchers, Dies at 91 – The New York Times