Paige Harris If you’ve been on the internet recently, chances are you’ve gotten an ad for Noom, the newest diet trend. Although the website promises “life-changing results with Noom’s psychology-based approach,” and is supposedly “not a diet,” I’m here to tell you that it is, in fact, just another diet.
If you’ve never seen Noom before, here’s how it works. As a new user, you first go through some onboarding questions. These range from simple things like your height and weight, your age, and your gender, to more personal things such as whether or not you have an important event coming up, what kinds of foods you tend to eat for lunch, and what kind of environment you live in. They also ask for the ideal weight that you want to reach.
Then, you’re given an estimate of how long it will take for you to reach that goal while following their calorie recommendation.
Now that you know how it works, here’s why Noom is just another fad diet:
Diet Alert #1: If a trainer or an app is telling you that you can lose X amount of weight without understanding what it would mean for your health, it’s a fad diet. When I completed my questionnaire in April, they told me that I could lose 20 pounds by July, I just had to follow their 1200 calorie diet. Since Noom never asks about any history of eating disorders, this could be incredibly harmful for some people. And many people don’t realize that weighing less doesn’t always mean that you’re healthier. In fact, weighing too little can often be worse for your health, especially as a woman.
Diet Alert #2: Any app that tells you a specific amount of calories to eat without having you track what you’re already doing first is a bad plan. Especially when it’s way too low. Now keep in mind, I had to enter my height and weight. They know I’m not a small person, and yet they put me on 1200 calories. At my height and activity level, I need way more than that to just run my body’s organs, let alone exercise. In fact, the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans estimate that a woman of my age needs an average of 2400 calories per day. If you’re a man, that number jumps up to 3000. And yet Noom wants you to thrive on half of that, or less!
I’ve also reached out to many people who have filled out the questionnaire only to be met with the same 1200 calorie recommendation. They were all different shapes and sizes, and had even chosen “get fit for good” instead of “lose weight for good” as their main goal for the program. If you suddenly start eating almost no calories, you will lose weight, but you won’t be able to sustain it for long.
Diet Alert #3: Any app that has you weigh yourself daily or weekly is just another fad plan. According to users I’ve spoken with, the app recommends that you weigh yourself at least once a week, but weight isn’t necessarily a metric of health. Muscle weighs more than fat, and two people who look very different can weigh exactly the same. And with hormonal changes and your carbohydrate and water intake, weight can fluctuate a lot. I’ve been able to gain 10 pounds in a day and lose it again by morning. It’s not fat, it’s fluctuation.
Diet Alert #4: Noom makes you track every single bite of food you eat. It’s true that you should be mindful of what you’re eating. But tracking like this reduces food to numbers. It can also make you become obsessive about everything, like weighing your leaves of lettuce.
This tracking can also make users ignore their body’s true hunger cues. If you have 200 calories left for the day but you’re not hungry, you might force yourself to eat them anyway. Or if you’re out of calories but starving, you might feel like a bad person if you eat more food. Other users talk about how they chronically choose the lowest calorie option available to them, even if it’s not really what they want. And that isn’t how to become truly healthy.
Diet Alert #5: The Traffic Light System is BS. This is honestly the worst part of the entire Noom experience for me. Their Traffic Light system rates foods into three categories: green, yellow, and red.
Green foods include things like fat-free dairy, fruits, veggies, egg whites, fish, tofu, whole grains, brown rice, nut milks, and calorie-free condiments. Aka things that are extremely low calorie.
Yellow foods include lean meats, low-fat cheese, avocados, beans, steak, eggs, chicken breast, white rice, corn tortillas, and diet drinks. Aka things that are a bit more calorically dense.
Red foods: Butter, full-fat dairy products (like cheese, yogurt, and milk), nut butter, nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, tahini, maple syrup, and honey, aka the most calorically dense foods you can have.
The problem comes in when you realize that calorically dense foods also are some of the most nutrient dense foods. And our bodies need nutrients to perform optimally. These two categories — calorie-dense and nutrient-dense — are not mutually exclusive.
For example, whole Greek yogurt (red) has no added sugar, while non-fat flavored yogurt (green) has about 12 grams or 3 teaspoons. Whole Greek yogurt also has more protein, satiating fats, and is more satisfying overall.
Also, I find it positively wild that whole grains like whole grain bread are considered “green” while olive oil, possibly one of the healthiest foods on the planet, is considered “red.”
No matter what Noom may say, labelling things green, yellow, and red is going to make people link red foods to being bad or off-limits. Red literally means stop or bad in our society. So when someone sees a little exclamation mark next to their logged meal because they ate “too many red foods,” that can become problematic.
Diet Alert #6: Noom encourages you to“exercise off” your food and rewards you with more calories for the day. In their words, you get half the calories back from your workouts “to refuel your body after that great activity.” But that still is plain wrong. That’s not how your body works. You do not have to exercise in order to earn your food, ever. In fact, you need to eat enough to earn the right to exercise.
So if Noom does all of this, why is it so popular?
Noom uses excellent marketing strategies and references different studies that show the effectiveness of their app. But they often leave out the parts that make them look less than ideal. For example, this study linked on their homepage shows that a majority of Noom users lost a significant amount of weight, but fails to mention most of the weight lost was by male users, and that only 14% of the users were able to keep that weight off after a year.
And before you take to the comments to tell me just how much Noom has helped you, be sure to read this part:
If you’ve done Noom, or are doing Noom, and you’ve lost weight and feel good doing it, great! I’m not here to tell you that it doesn’t work. As I said above, eating super low calorie diets and obsessing over every bite of food that you put into your mouth does work, for a time.
I put out this podcast and this blog post for all of the people out there who have “been there, done that” with restrictive diets, calorie counting, weigh-ins, and red/green/yellow food lists, and have continued to go on and off the wagon with their health. Because even if you pair those things with “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” it’s still a diet.
If the behavior you’re replacing is to choose a lower calorie option all of the time, that’s not necessarily the healthiest thing for you. “Retraining” yourself to avoid nutritious, calorie-dense foods for a bunch of low-calorie nonsense can wreck your metabolism, mess with your gut, and make you afraid of food in the long run.
Do you really want to live on 1200 calories for the rest of your life?
Because I know I don’t.
