The day after what I thought was a promising first date with a man I had met online, I received a long text message explaining why exactly he was left with a negative impression of me. The reason was that my online photos were too flattering and didn’t fairly show off what my body looked like in person. He used the word “deceit.” I was, in short, too fat for a second date.

“Will this be my Jean Nidetch moment?” I wondered as I sat on the couch, blocking his number from my phone.

Mrs. Nidetch, a married mother of two who once worked for the Internal Revenue Service, was a founder and the public face of Weight Watchers. In fall 1961, after being mistaken for pregnant when she ran into an acquaintance at a Queens supermarket, she went on a diet overseen by the New York City Board of Health Obesity Clinic. It was strict and included liver. But it worked. Within a year, she reached her 142-pound goal weight and never gained more than eight pounds in the ensuing decades before she died in 2015.

My fantasy was that I, too, would one day be so humiliated that I would recognize I had hit rock bottom and had no alternative but to lose weight. Being mistaken for pregnant (at least half a dozen times) didn’t do it. And after that text rejection, I took a bath, cried and ordered Indian food.