Some leaders say that the $18 base rate for running meetings has not increased in more than a decade, and many complain that they receive no mileage reimbursement for the first 40 miles driven each day. Some also assert that a major reason Weight Watchers keeps its pay so paltry is that the overwhelming majority of its employees are women.

“We are not working for a charity or a nonprofit corp,” one Weight Watchers leader posted on the Web site. “This is a multimillion-dollar company with enough cash to advertise relentlessly on TV, and pay celebrities tons of money to lose weight.”

The restlessness over low pay extends across the weight-loss industry to Weight Watchers’ rivals, including Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem. A pending lawsuit asserts that Jenny Craig’s employees in New York State typically work through their lunch hour, but are not paid for that time — a claim the company denies. That comes after Weight Watchers reached a $6.2 million settlement two years ago to end a class-action lawsuit in California in which employees complained about minimum wage violations, off-the-clock work and receiving paychecks that did not explain how wages were calculated.

”People feel they did everything right. They’re working hard, they have higher levels of education than ever before, and they find the job market is offering them a wage that they can’t live on,” said Janice R. Fine, a professor of employment relations at Rutgers University.

For Weight Watchers, one of the world’s oldest and largest dieting companies, keeping its leaders happy is crucial to the company’s future, because it relies on them to recruit and retain members through the nearly 50,000 face-to-face meetings the company runs each week worldwide.

The leaders, often highly educated professionals who were hired after losing dozens of pounds in the program, sometimes sound like religious disciples, so eager are they to help others lose weight.

But their disillusionment over compensation is not unique to their industry. Sharon H. Mastracci, an expert on women’s employment at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of “Breaking Out of the Pink-Collar Ghetto,” said these complaints parallel those in other fields with mostly female workers, like child care and social work.