With their bulging workloads, there is no question of Melanie Stubbing and Clare Pullen, her PA, not pulling their weight. Melanie is head of the UK’s largest slimming organisation and openly admits that she could not do her job without Clare’s support. “She is often the last to leave the office,” Melanie says.
Melanie heads Weight Watchers, which employs 250 staff plus 1,700 self-employed leaders, who hold 6,000 meetings a week, attended by more than a million dieters a year — including Melanie, who has been attending them on and off for 27 years and is also a trained leader.
She says: “I joined as an 18-year-old student, eating all the wrong foods, and I got down to my goal weight in my second year. After my children were born, I resumed going to the meetings and lost two stone (13kg).”
She believes that she has a natural predisposition to put on weight. “But our members can empathise with that,” she says. “I’m only 5ft 1in (1.55m) and my goal is to reach 9lb 6oz by October.”
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Clare also joined when she wanted to lose a dress size. “The weight had just crept up,” she says. “I enjoyed the meetings — and it worked.”
Weight Watchers started in America in the 1960s when a group of women gathered around a kitchen table to talk about following a diet together. Four years later the first meeting in the UK was held in Berkshire. Today, with its headquarters in Maidenhead, 30 million members and a philosophy of group encouragement and healthy eating, the organisation is active in 40 countries.
Melanie says: “Weight Watchers is a fantastic business. It is about information, inspiration and ethics. We help our members to achieve their goals, and it can be life-changing.”
Ninety-two per cent of its members are women, but Melanie particularly recalls a 20-year-old man called Trevor, who weighed in at 37 stone but slimmed to 16, and is now training to lead classes. “He was a wonderful success story,” she says.
Melanie worked in the toy industry before joining Weight Watchers in 2000 to run its online arm. She took on her present role in December 2003.
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Much of her time is spent on the road, meeting leaders and members and attending meetings. The business also has products. “We’re the 17th- biggest grocery brand in the UK,” she says.
Melanie is reliant on her PA to mastermind her diary and to keep things going in her absence. Clare, who was brought up in Reading, learnt her secretarial skills at college two days a week while working for a firm of shopfitters. She then worked for Yellow Pages before moving to London.
She started at Weight Watchers as a temp. “It was the ideal introduction,” she says, “because I got to know the organisation and it got to know me.”
Her job is hectic. “I’ll start the day with a plan but things happen, so I am constantly prioritising. I have full access to Mel’s e-mails, and when she is away, make decisions about what I can deal with and what I need to tell her.”
Melanie says of Clare: “She is unflappable, with a great capacity to juggle — and always with good humour.”
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Weight Watchers UK won’t accept anyone with less than 5lb (2.3kg) to lose or aged under 16. But buoyed by the results of independent trials that showed that the organisation offers the most effective means of weight control, it plans a new programme, Family First, aimed at child obesity.
Melanie explains: “The focus is to work with the parents and the whole family, not just the overweight child, and to raise issues later in life. We shall be talking about the diet the whole family eats.”
Another weighty challenge for a nimble organisation.