Jean Nidetch, who has died aged 91, was a New York housewife who turned her weight problem into a multimillion-dollar business as the founder of Weight Watchers. She described herself as an "FFH" - Formerly Fat Housewife - and had tried every fad diet there was. But whatever weight she lost she soon piled back on - with interest - after secretly gorging on the stash of chocolate marshmallow cookies she kept hidden in a laundry basket.In 1961, she was more than 95kg and with a 111cm waist when she ran into a neighbour who told her how marvellous she was looking. "I was feeling very good about the compliment," she recalled. "And then she said: 'When are you due?' I didn't know how to answer her because I wasn't pregnant." She had not realised how fat she looked, because she avoided full-length mirrors.Nidetch decided to join a diet programme run by the New York City Board of Health in Manhattan, where further humiliation awaited her: "There was the thin girl at the desk, and I asked where the group was. And she said: 'You want the obesity clinic.' I had never heard the word 'obese' before. It shocked me. I said: 'I guess I do.'"Sitting in the back row of the meeting room, Nidetch was prepared to be unimpressed by the pencil-thin nutritionist who took the stage, until the woman told her audience the photograph of the fat woman propped up next to her was of herself before she had lost weight.story_article_left1She gave the participants a diet that recommended, among other things, that they consume fish several times a week, as well as eat two slices of bread and drink two glasses of skimmed milk a day and only try to lose a pound or two a week."The more I listened to the speaker, the more I thought: 'This makes sense,'" Nidetch recalled.She followed the plan up to a point, but she could not stop herself having the occasional cookie binge and found that she was not losing weight as fast as she should. Feeling that it might help if she could share her struggles with others in the same predicament, she invited six "fat friends" to her apartment to talk.Within a few months, she had 40 people queueing up to join the group she called Jean's Fats' Club. They chipped in and bought a scale and, within a year, she had to move the weekly meetings from her flat to the basement of her apartment block.By October 1962, she had reached her goal of losing 33kg and, at 1.5m, weighed a trim 63.5kg. The following year, she teamed up with a businessman called Al Lippert, who had joined her group and had been impressed by her flair as a motivational speaker. He suggested they go into business together. They rented space above a New York cinema and transformed Jean's Fats' Club into Weight Watchers International.At her first meeting, she was mobbed by a huge crowd of people all wanting to pay their $3 entrance fee to hear her speak. To meet the demand, she addressed eight sessions in a row.story_article_right2Business boomed and within four years, Nidetch and Lippert had established more than 200 branches around the world, licensed to 100 franchisees who paid a modest fee for the right to represent Weight Watchers but remitted 10% of annual gross profits to the founders. They also sold a range of trademarked foods as well as dieting and exercise videos. By the time they sold the enterprise to the Heinz conglomerate for about $71-million in 1978, Weight Watchers had a global reach.Jean Evelyn Slutsky was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 12 1923, the daughter of a cab driver and a manicurist. Her compulsive eating habits were established early. "I don't really remember, but I'm positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat," she wrote in her memoir, The Story of Weight Watchers (2010, written with Joan Rattner Heilman).After leaving school, she worked for the US Internal Revenue Service before marrying Marty Nidetch, a bus driver, in 1947. Her husband could not cope with the elegant, platinum-blonde butterfly that emerged from the rotund chrysalis and they divorced in 1971.After selling Weight Watchers, Nidetch continued to work for the company as its public face and consultant. She moved to Las Vegas, where she played poker and supported philanthropic causes. When she retired in 1997, at the age of 74, she selected the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, to replace her as the company's official spokesperson in the US. Later she moved to Florida.In 1975, she married an Italian bass player whom she had met on a cruise liner, but the marriage lasted only a few months.Nidetch had three sons with her first husband. One of them survives her, one having died in infancy and another in 2006.1923-2015 - ©The Daily Telegraph, London..