If you tell someone you love Weight Watchers, they usually have one thing to say: “Oh, my mother did that.” 

And honestly? We love that.

But here’s what’s changed: everything else. 

How we understand weight, health, and what it means to live well has fundamentally transformed. The pressure to be thin at any cost? Not our thing anymore. What we're actually interested in is the totality of your life. Eating food you love. Moving through every life stage with strength. Finding support that works for you — whether that's a walking club, a WW Coach, or access to a GLP-1 if it's right for you. There is no one-size-fits-all, and there never should have been.

We are not your mother’s Weight Watchers. We are mother. 

To prove it, we called in five of the most fearless voices in wellness today — women who are living this conversation out loud, in public, and without apology. Cynthia Bailey. Whitney Leavitt. Raven Goodwin. Mama J Rae. Taylor Strecker. Five covers. Five stories. One very clear message about who we are and what we’re creating together. 

Welcome to the Mother Issue.

Whitney Leavitt is ecstatic. It’s not because she just wrapped a record-breaking run in Chicago on Broadway. Or her new role as chief creative and brand officer at NYC dirty soda chain Cool Sips. It’s also not her recent departure from Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. (Although all those things are, indeed, thrilling). “It’s been my goal for over a year to do an unassisted pull-up — and I did one, like three days ago, my husband Conor is my witness!” says the 33-year-old, who started lifting daily while training for Dancing with the Stars. All that hard work in the gym has paid off. The mother of three has built the physical strength that every mum has spiritually in spades. But those etched-in-stone arms aren’t what’s transformed the most. 

“If I’m not happy with something, I make a change.” 

“My brain lets me choose what I do and don’t do. Before, it was so easy for me to blame how I was feeling on other stuff. Now, If I’m not happy with something, I make a change.” That’s the mindset she adopted up from her Core+ membership, where she tracks both Points^® and macros to fuel her life on stage, on screen, and at home. But what really motivates her isn't in any programme book. “I love reading other mums’ tips, hacks, and stories [on Connect] about what makes life easier with kids. I am here for the community, and I love the camaraderie." Momtok could never. 

After having two kids in five years, both requiring emergency C-sections, and filming the Ryan Murphy FX show Grotesquerie just a few weeks postpartum, 33 year-old actress Raven Goodwin went into exhausted-mum survival mode: “You just want to eat something, and you just want to lay down. My Peloton was just sitting there.” Now that her youngest is 2, “I’m trying to navigate getting back in the groove,” she says. For Goodwin, that means whipping up healthier meals in the kitchen for her family (and her 857k followers), and being more physically active, a lifelong passion. “Even as a kid, everybody would underestimate me because I was plus size, so I always outperformed. I was gonna out-dance you. I was gonna outrun you. I was gonna out-box you. I was gonna be that girl in the gym.”

These days, her motivation for exercising has shifted. “The catalyst for me now is that I want to run with my kids, to be able to play with them and be that active mum,” she says. As she starts her Weight Watchers Core+ journey, her focus is on her health versus her size. “Bodies, especially in Hollywood, tend to only be celebrated if they look a certain way. But I want to help normalise that everybody comes in different shapes and sizes, and there’s beauty in all of them.”

For most of her life, Taylor Strecker’s brain wouldn’t shut up about food. “I’d wake up asking what’s for breakfast, what’s for lunch, what’s for dinner. I’d ask my roommates, my wife, my family. It was a full-time Job.” Still, the 43-year-old radio host and podcaster made it work by sticking to her Weight Watchers Points. By her late 20s, she had become a de facto Coach, guiding friends through the programme too. When she went through a divorce, a job loss, and coming out all at once, her old habits stopped holding and her weight crept up. Starting a weight loss medication helped her lose weight, but it also did something more surprising: “It kicked the food noise to the curb.”

Now, whatever part of her brain used to ruminate on food ruminates at something else — usually her three month-old daughter Beau.

“ I love the way the Points system has changed, because it really emphasises whole foods and high protein.”

“But at the same time, she and my wife are the greatest loves of my life, and I am so here for this parenting thing.” Sticking to the Weight Watchers foundations — which have changed since she was in her 20s — has helped her feeling balanced and energised, even when operating on newborn sleep. “I love the way the Points system has changed, because it really emphasises whole foods and high protein now. This is the healthiest I’ve ever been.”

You may not be familiar with the name Jesi Rae Aviles — but you may have seen one of the North Carolina mum’s viral cooking videos on TikTok under the handle Mama J. Rae, which regularly get 39 million likes. Her videos are more relatable than chef-y, showing unfiltered “middle-class mum life” of trying to pack lunches and get dinner on the table for her five kids. People are drawn to how real the 32 year-old is, and she hopes they draw inspiration from her authenticity in showing the sometimes-bumpy road to success. 

“I’m proof that anyone can do things they didn’t think they could,” she says. “I didn’t think when I dropped out of high school because I was pregnant that I would end up earning a successful living on social media, and I didn’t think when I joined Weight Watchers that I was going to be able to lose 70 pounds.” Now, each week she posts a Weight Watchers Wednesday recipe video not just for people on the programme, but for their whole families. “It helps me get out of a dinner rut of eating the same thing, and it also helps my kids try new foods. I grew up on soda and frozen pizza, and I want something different for them — a better relationship with food.” 

You’d think Cynthia Bailey, as a former model and a longtime star of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, would cherish the spotlight. “I’ve always been very confident,” says the 59 year-old. “It was only when my body started to change — through fibroids, menopause , and weight gain — that it started to affect my self-esteem. I didn’t want to do [red] carpets anymore.” She began working with Weight Watchers and lost 15 lbs.⌃ through changing her food choices; once she plateaued, she started a GLP-1 alongside the Weight Watchers Med+ programme in the US and lost 15 more.**

“I’m happy at my size, and I don’t want to lose any more,” she says; she plans to talk with her clinician about going down to a maintenance dosage. From weight loss to menopause to fibroids, Bailey hopes to be “a source of information and support” to women about their health, whether that’s her younger castmates or her 26-year-old daughter, Noelle. “Even though my mum went through fibroids and menopause, she didn’t have the knowledge to tell me and my sister about it. She was also from that generation of, You just suffer and don’t ask questions. I want to help Noelle and other women get answers, make their health a priority, and start a healthy lifestyle today.”

^{⌃At 6 months, participants in a clinical trial of the WW programme lost an average of 12 lbs (5.4% of body weight).}