Weight Loss Doc reviews Noom

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Noom is a weight loss app that claims to approach weight loss from a different perspective. But how does it work? And should you give it a try?

I had some patients ask me about Noom, so I went and tried Noom out myself. After trying it for a while, I definitely have some good and bad things to say about it.

Let’s take a comprehensive look at Noom, so you can decide whether it’s worth your money.

What is Noom?

Noom is a weight loss app that tries to market itself as different from other ones by focusing on a cognitive and behavioral approach to weight loss, as well as addressing the psychology behind weight loss.

Now, this approach to weight loss is definitely not new or revolutionary, and this emphasis on moderation over restrictions, and having people build good weight loss habits rather than just follow rules, is frequently used by a lot of other clinicians like dietitians and doctors, myself included.

However, due to Noom’s popularity, it may have exposed more people to this approach to weight loss. Not a lot of people get to work one-on-one with a clinician for their weight loss and have these concepts explained to them.

How does it work?

Noom is an app that works like a basic tracker. Like any tracking app, it helps keep track of your food intake and exercise, but also has a way to track blood pressure and blood sugar levels if you want.

The app is free. Where the payment comes in is with a subscription to Noom.

Before you start your subscription, you’re given a lengthy questionnaire to suss out your dietary and lifestyle preferences and how you might like to approach your weight loss.

The Noom subscription costs up to $60 USD a month. But there’s a huge caveat to this, which could potentially save you quite a bit of money, or might have you paying more than you should if you’re not careful. I’ll go into more detail later when we talk about billing.

A paid subscription mainly gets you 3 additional things with the app:

You get lessons and articles
It connects you to a weight coach, which Noom calls a Goal Specialist
You’re eventually connected to a community group, all of which you’ll communicate with via text.

The lessons and articles are a daily task, or chore for some, and depending on the preferences you submitted in your intro questionnaire, you’ll be given some daily reading to do. You’ll also be given a little quiz at the end to make sure you were paying attention.

The Goal Specialist is supposed to check in with you a few times a week to keep you on track, and offer some basic guidance.

The community group chat is kind of like a small forum of other individuals with whom you can share and chat about related topics. A Noom group coach helps facilitate discussion and moderate the chat. You aren’t placed into a group chat right away, and it could take a week or so before that happens.

The Noom diet

Although Noom is focused on behavior modification, it still follows a basic dietary plan. Noom’s diet focuses on limiting calorie-dense and high calorie foods.

It follows a color-coded system for eating, with orange coloured, or what they used to call red coloured foods being the foods to limit, and green coloured foods being the best to have.

Orange foods tend to be the most calorie-dense foods, like steak, oils, and fats as well as snack and junk foods, and green foods tend to be the least calorie-dense foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Yellow foods kind of sit in between, and include things like chicken, milk, eggs, and lentils.

There are technically no hard restrictions to what you can eat, but the general diet restricts you to 30% green, 45% yellow, 25% orange foods.

As a result, Noom promotes a diet that tends to be lower in fats and oils of all kinds, and high in fiber.

Pros of Noom

Now let’s start with the 3 things I liked about Noom:

Diet is simple to follow

The color coded system avoids the need to meticulously count calories, and for some people, the broad categorization of foods into 3 basic colors helps them to quickly make dietary choices.

It’s not complicated, and has a low learning curve, meaning anyone can learn the system almost right away.

This simple dietary system can be beneficial for people who don’t want to go too much into learning about nutrition or have to worry about the physiology behind eating certain foods such as insulin levels or hormones.

All-in-one app

The app conveniently packages a number of different tools in one location. You have a little diet and exercise tracker, easy to read info on basic behavioral interventions for weight loss, a coach to guide you, and a small community to share info with.

The food tracker also contains pre-made recipes, which allow you to quickly add calories from different Noom recipes into your logger, and the exercise tracker has a built-in step counter which uses your phone to track your steps, in case you don’t have an external pedometer like a FitBit.

I found the app easy to use, clean, and modern looking, making it relatively easy to navigate and find the information you might be looking for.

Easy to understand

Noom’s claim to fame is their focus on the psychology behind eating and weight loss. There is indeed a lot of patient education around behavioral interventions for weight loss, like examining and changing thinking patterns around eating and food.

Patient education is dispensed in the form of daily reading articles and lessons, and is written in a simplistic and understandable way.

They seem to have written the articles in a way to actively avoid sounding boring and academic. It comes off to me as trying to be hip or cutesy, with some people describing it as cringey.

So while the articles may be easy to understand, it might be difficult for you to read through if you don’t like their style of writing.

Cons of Noom

Now let’s go over 5 things I didn’t like as much:

Diet is oversimplified

Noom gives great background information on behavioral interventions for weight loss, but lacks good background information about the other most basic aspect of weight loss, diet.

The simplified dietary system potentially restricts healthy food options and fails to take into account the possible benefits of some foods, particularly the ability of fats and oils to help strongly suppress appetite, and reduce the glycemic index of various meals throughout the day.

A lower glycemic index can help control insulin levels in diabetics, and reduce fat storage in those trying to lose weight.

Not for eating disorders

Although Noom is a psychology-based weight loss app, it lacks the proper support for those with eating disorders, particularly if you focus on intuitive eating and want to avoid the diet culture or restricting foods.

Noom does follow a diet that has the overall goal of restricting certain foods. It also recommends you weigh yourself daily as part of their weight accountability process.

If accepting some of these things are going to cause problems, Noom isn’t for you.

At the end of the day, it’s a weight loss app. Its main goal is to help you to lose weight, not manage eating disorders.

Although there are tidbits about healthy eating and learning to listen to your body, those won’t be its primary focus.

Billing issues

They appear to bill a little like a phone plan. They have leeway to charge more if you don’t complain, and charge less to keep you subscribed.

There are stories of people calling to cancel their subscription, just to be offered a lower monthly rate. So you might be able to negotiate a lower monthly cost by just threatening to cancel your subscription.

Billing is also automatic until you actively cancel your subscription, which is honestly not unlike many gym memberships.

Just know that deleting the app won’t cancel your subscription. You’ll need to either contact them, or cancel it from your phone settings.

Depending on where you sign up, a Noom “free” trial is not always free. If you sign up for a free trial from your web browser, it’ll cost you at least $1, and this requires you to have a payment method on file.

Go even a minute past your free day trial and you’ll be quickly charged the full subscription amount. Reportedly, refunds are not easy to get.

However if you sign up for a free trial from the Noom app, like Apple’s App Store or Google play, the free trial is actually free, however you only get 7 days of free trial, versus 14 days with the web browser version.

The Noom subscription costs depend on how many months you get from them upfront. It can range from $60 USD for a month-to-month subscription, to around $17 a month if you buy a full year.

Typically, they’ll charge you for a few months upfront. The default appears to be two to three months at a time. For example they charged me $125 CAD for two months.

Weak food tracker

Noom’s calorie tracking app is not very comprehensive, and foods frequently have inaccurate calorie counts or are simply missing.

Their database of foods is much smaller compared to MyFitnessPal or FitBit which are free. So if you find calorie or macronutrient tracking very useful, I wouldn’t go with Noom’s food tracker.

Also, the tracker lacks personalization and tends to generalize your daily recommended calorie intake, so if you’re expecting Noom to give you an accurate and detailed breakdown of your Total Daily Energy Expenditure based on your exercise and body fat percentage, you’re probably not going to get that.

Weight coaching issues

Weight coaches and group chats have varying, sometimes limited use. The quality of the coaching received from Noom’s weight coaches seems to be somewhat dependent on the coach you end up with.

While Noom makes an effort to train its coaches to some degree, the level of engagement and effort is sometimes inconsistent.

I found my coach to be almost overly optimistic and enthusiastic, but found their actual advice to be too general and less helpful than the articles.

Your experience will likely vary. Some people love chatting with their coaches, and find them to be helpful.

However, other people find that their coaches might seem disinterested, provide canned, almost robotic responses, and in some cases ignore them outright.

The issue stems from a difference between Noom’s marketing promises which create high expectations, and what they can actually deliver.

You see, Noom markets itself as a psychology-focused app. So naturally, people will expect to be able to talk to their weight coaches about the psychological issues they face while trying to lose weight.

Unfortunately, these weight coaches are not psychologists, and cannot properly manage and support people with serious psychological problems.

Similarly, these weight coaches are not acting as registered dietitians, and cannot create a comprehensive dietary plan specifically for you.

The weight coaches are there primarily to keep you on track by following up with you and trying to keep you motivated. They likely use scripted responses at times for efficiency, like most software companies do.

They might give you some basic tips and tricks, but if presented with a complex issue, they’ll probably ask you to think about how to solve the problem yourself, since they don’t have a solution readily available.

Dr. Brian’s analysis

Does Noom actually work?

I think it could help certain people. Noom’s weight loss approach attempts to answer the question of why we should do certain things, rather than just what we should do for weight loss. This creates a behavior-based approach to weight loss.

So if you’ve never learned how to address your eating habits or implement any behavioral interventions for weight loss, this information might be eye opening to you.

However, if you’ve already taken a behavior-based approach before, this info might just be common sense to you.

Their simplified dietary approach tries to act as a general guideline, rather than following the rules. Instead of being a laser pointer direction, it’s kind of like a flashlight.

The result is that you’ll have to be doing a lot more meal planning, decision making, and problem solving on your own, and weight loss will typically be slower and more gradual.

So if you’re looking for a simple diet that has more flexibility and moderation, you might like their traffic light colored system.

But if you’re looking for specific guidelines, want a clear direction, and want to lose weight quickly, Noom’s diet is not for you.

Also, because the diet follows a somewhat low-fat, high-fiber style, if you’re a big meat-eater, are not used to eating many fruits and veggies, or are used to following a keto-style diet in the past, you might find Noom’s diet quite a shock.

Is Noom worth it?

If I were to break down the different parts of what Noom offers, I believe its greatest strengths lie in the information you can learn about behavioral interventions for weight loss, from the articles and courses they present to you, assuming the info is new to you.

So if you already use many behavioural interventions, Noom might not be very useful for you at all.

Also, Noom is pretty expensive, and for people paying for a full subscription, it may not be worth the cost, especially given that the info they provide is readily available for free all over the internet.

You might need to wade around a bit and spend some time looking for it, but it is there. So if you’re willing to spend a little time yourself reading forums and articles online, you’ll often be able to find all the information you need and more.

I don’t think Noom’s diet is terrible or anything, and it’s pretty simple to understand. It’s a good diet to start with if you have no idea where to start.

But the concept is really quite basic and can be summarized in one sentence: Eat whole foods with lots of water and fiber in it. That’s it.

I don’t think you need a paid app to teach you how to eat like this. It’s also overly simplified in my opinion and lacks information about how certain foods interact with your body.

Their food and lifestyle tracking app is also easy to use, but again, is overly simplified and doesn’t offer much more than other free apps.

For example you can find great recipe ideas with calorie tracking for free from online meal planners like EatThisMuch.com.

Finally, there isn’t too much more information that the Goal Specialists and community groups can provide you beyond the articles and set diet.

They’re not there to create a customized diet for you, help you through psychological issues, or tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. You’ll still need to figure out most of those things yourself.

The Goal Specialists and community groups seem to be mostly there just to keep you on track, rather than give you an abundance of advice.

Even then, their ability to keep you on track depends on your Goal Specialist and the community group they put you in. If you have a disinterested weight coach and a quiet community, you might get no support at all.

Also, many online weight loss forums like Reddit offer a free and much larger weight loss community that you can interact with and get support from.

Overall, you can replicate everything that Noom provides you with free resources you can find online.

Noom just kind of puts these resources together for you, and makes it easier to digest by cutting out some of the information. So if you are willing to do some research yourself, you likely won’t need to use Noom.

How to use Noom

Now I have some final thoughts about using Noom. I’ve noticed that while you might learn a lot at the beginning, the courses near the end seem to take forever to finish, and useful information quickly becomes repetitive.

It almost seems like the courses are designed to not end, and keep the user subscribed. In my opinion, once you’ve read and grasped the basic behavioral concepts, Noom stops being that useful, since the other tools are not great.

If I were to use it for weight loss, I would use it just long enough to learn what I could from the articles, then cancel the subscription and continue myself, and use a far better food tracker like MyFitnessPal, and dietary planner like EatThisMuch.com, and try to get a friend or family member to help keep me accountable.

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