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STUFF THAT SUCKS

Why Noom, The Weight-Loss App, Is A Scam

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
Why Noom, The Weight-Loss App, Is A Scam
Diet app Noom is under fire for its weight loss strategies and dubious psychological bent. Here's what the program claims to do, why people are mad — and the four big reasons it just doesn't work.
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If you've been online lately — or watching TV, or scrolling through Instagram, or consuming pretty much any form of media — you may have either seen people talking about Noom or ads for Noom.

Noom is a weight loss program that claims to "build better habits." But many users, former users, people who have seen their marketing campaigns, people who have had experiences with other kinds of diets, and just people who have common sense are calling Noom out. Here's why.



Noom is careful to position itself as something other than a diet app. It claims to work on a psychological level: for instance, it aims to teach its users how to identify the reasons they have cravings and how to avoid them.

But the fact remains that everything about Noom is geared toward weight loss, from the app's function to its marketing.

This is the first thing to know about Noom, and something that every former user I spoke with — even those who more or less liked the app — told me right away: Noom is not a lifestyle change. It’s a dieter’s diet. “They put you on 1,200 calories a day and tell you to eat mostly vegetables,” Sarah MacDonald, a 31-year-old swimming coach in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, who began using Noom in 2014. “So, you’re basically shitting yourself constantly and you lose 5 pounds in the first two weeks.”

[Virginia Sole-Smith, Bustle]


So what if you do want to lose weight, and an app that helps you do that is exactly what you're looking for? Even if that's the case, Noom is still not the app for that. Here's why.



1. Noom's diet recommendations are restrictive and hierarchical in a way that promotes disordered eating.



When a user downloads Noom's app, it onboards them by asking them how much weight they want to lose and how fast they want to lose it.

When I download Noom to my own phone, I’m greeted by a sunshine icon and a question: “How much weight do you want to lose?” The app asks me to pick a “weight loss speed”: turtle, rabbit, or cheetah. Next, I fill in my gender, age, height, and starting weight, then answer a series of questions. Do I eat sandwiches or salads for lunch? How often do I eat per day? The app begins to calculate when I can expect to reach my “target weight,” and as I answer more questions, it lowers the date, putting my new body and life increasingly within reach.

[Virginia Sole-Smith, Bustle]


Once you're onboarded and Noom has delivered you a "personalized plan," you can explore its food philosophy and psychological rubric — and the app will reach out to you to keep it top of mind.

Like many other web-based diet programs or trackers, the Noom app requires you to input all your calories and movements. It categorizes your food: green (largely fresh fruit and vegetables), yellow (lean meats and dairy), and red (desserts, saturated fats). Your green allotment is limitless, while just a couple hundred calories of red is permitted a day. When you eat a green food, the app chirps back, “Great choice — Enjoy!” but red foods come with a warning: “Limit your portions.” (Calorie counts for each category are listed in small print.) You’re prompted to weigh yourself daily so the app can track your “progress.” If you forget to log into the app for more than a day or two, you’re sent a text to remind you to get back in there. The app assigns you daily tasks, like reading summaries of peer-reviewed studies about how to be more “mindful” when you’re stress-eating.

[Scaachi Koul, Buzzfeed News]


But Noom's food groups miss every important point about nutrition and fall back on old, debunked myths about food: protein = good, fat = bad; vegetables = good, dessert = bad. Calorie-dense foods are categorized as yellow or red, which means that nuts end up in the same category as cake.

Noom’s color-coding system isn’t their invention; it’s called the traffic light diet, and it was designed in the 1970s for children to use as doctors began worrying about rising childhood obesity. (It is still recommended by pediatricians, though studies on the efficacy of the system have been entirely inconclusive.) [...] Critics say that the traffic light diet isn’t an accurate depiction of balanced eating because many healthy foods, like avocados or nuts, are highly caloric and so relegated to the “red” (or “stop”) category.

[Taylor Majewski, Every]


Even more insidious, though, is what labeling and categorizing types of food does to your brain.

They also explain that you're not supposed to think of red foods as "bad," but as a "red flag" because they contain more calories without making you feel full. This is interesting, but in all of my dating experience, red flags actually are "bad." Nutritionists like Caitlin Kiarie, RD, founder of Mom-N-Tot Nutrition, have a few bones to pick with this system. "Any time we start to put food in a category, we’re eluding that there’s a good category and a bad one,” she says. “When our brain thinks something is bad, we see it as more desirable.

[Molly Longman, Refinery29]



The very fact of meticulously tracking food in an app is also psychologically damaging:

Noom tells users to log everything they eat in the app so it can categorize each food and keep tabs on your overall caloric intake. This, too, is a classic dieting strategy that can trigger obsessive thinking. Molly Robson, a nutritionist in Boston, has worked with several clients trying to wean themselves off Noom after recognizing its role in their disordered eating behavior. “They find that logging food forces them to be thinking about food a ton when they didn’t really want to be. It’s also really difficult to eat in community because they worry about not being able to make ‘safe’ choices when they go out to lunch with friends or co-workers,” she says.

[Virginia Sole-Smith, Bustle]



2. Noom's caloric recommendations are restrictive in a way that ignores biology and individual bodies' differences and is almost guaranteed to backfire.


Many Noom users have said that the app has recommended they eat 1,200 calories per day in the interest of losing weight. If the number seems reasonable, that's probably because it has a history that's led to it being normalized as a reasonable amount of calories for a woman to consume in a day. But 1,200 calories isn't enough to function in a healthy and sustainable way.

Losing weight, if that’s the goal, though it doesn’t have to be, does require a calorie deficit, but the food intake doesn’t have to be so tiny. “When you’re in such a huge calorie deficit, you’re going to be hungry, and your body is going to tell you that by making you crave certain things or think obsessively about food all day long,” Nadeau said. “You stick to it for a few days but then you give yourself a cheat day and that could be a 3,000-calorie binge day. Women especially need more than 1,200 calories just to breathe and exist, let alone exercise and function throughout the day like a normal human being.”

[Scaachi Koul, Buzzfeed News]


@thebalancednutritionist Is 1200 calories the magic number? #greenscreen #weightlosstip #diettips #nutritiontips ♬ Blue Blood - Heinz Kiessling & Various Artists

You may lose weight initially on a low-calorie diet, but here's what will happen in the long run:

Most of us get our needs met over time, we don’t have to eat a perfect diet every day because much of what sustains us is held in reserve. But the stores can run dry in just a few days. This will make the cave-brain kick into action to save us. The cave-brain response differs from one person to another. But the common ways that the brain tries to conserve energy and vital nutrients will cause very predictable physical sensations such as chilliness, restlessness, cold hands and feet, poor skin, slowed digestion and digestive pains, slowed heart rate, reduction in essential hormones and poor metabolism. This has a big effect on our emotional well-being, how we feel and how we think.

[National Centre For Eating Disorders]



Ultimately, losing weight via an ultra-restrictive diet is only effective as a short-term plan: the physical and psychological effects of restriction almost inevitably catch up to you. Research from 2020 shows that 80% of people who drop a somewhat significant amount of weight quickly won't be able to maintain the weight loss for even a year; within two years, dieters typically regain more than half the weight they lost. Noom doesn't address this fact when it recommends a user eat a 1,200-calorie diet.

According to a 2013 review of common commercial weight loss protocols, people lose around 5-10% of their body weight in the first year of any diet, but over the next two to five years, they gain back all but an average of 2.1 pounds. Noom’s own published research can’t claim any better: 64% of people who stuck with the program lost an average of 7% of their body weight after five months on the plan, according to the 2016 analysis the company includes in its press kit. But there is no data offered on whether these users maintained the weight loss over the subsequent two to five years, when most dieters regain. And Noom’s study followed 43 people — only 36 of whom completed the program. That “64%” is just 23 people.

[Virginia Sole-Smith, Bustle]



Noom is also not designed to take into account individuals' particular needs and life circumstances.



So: will you lose weight on a 1,200-calorie diet? Yeah, probably — but you're unlikely to keep it off, since eating that few calories a day will slow down your metabolism, making it harder to keep losing weight and, accordingly, easier to gain weight on fewer calories than before.




3. Noom manipulates the language of psychology in a way that's divorced from actual science.



In addition to modeling its weight loss program on diet strategies that are both physically dangerous and known to fail in the long run, it wields psychology as a tool in its arsenal, promising to help you modify your "negative or intrusive thought patterns." It claims to use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help you get your hunger and cravings under control:

The lesson [called “Tame your inner elephant"] explains that we all have an inner elephant, otherwise known as our “impulsive, irrational emotional side,” that persuades us to skip the gym or have chips for dinner. But we also have an inner rider or voice of reason. “The rider knows what’s right,” the lesson says, before going on to offer strategies like keeping “a stash of healthy nuts, seeds, fruits, and veggies” on hand to prevent our elephant from stampeding to the office vending machine.

[Virginia Sole-Smith, Bustle]


Not only is it risky to frame natural hunger as an impulsive or intrusive thought, it's dubious that this is even a particularly accurate implementation of CBT.

Its approach suggests that losing weight is simply a psychological game, but that’s not necessarily true. Psychology is just one influence, because biochemistry, genetics, and environment play a role too. The way Noom sees it, cravings and caloric needs beyond its guidelines are compulsions that your mind can crush. But do understanding and modifying your thoughts really help if you live in a food desert? Can you mind over matter yourself out of starvation mode while eating far less than what your body actually requires to function optimally?

[Scaachi Koul, Buzzfeed News]


Most of the psychological elements of Noom come in this format:

You also get a series of motivational sticky notes that say things like, “Stop saying I wish. Start saying I will,” and “Great things never come from comfort zones.” Another day, it’ll present you with a PowerPoint-like presentation featuring the definition for metacognition, “a fancy psych term that describes an awareness and understanding of one’s thoughts and thought processes.” You are told to “embrace” the “journey.”

[Scaachi Koul, Buzzfeed News]


At the end of the day, it's unclear that these "psychological" tools even work on a physical level:

How are all these people losing weight so fast? (1,534,384.) Because Noom is going to create my “personalized plan,” which is not a restrictive diet, the app emphasizes repeatedly. On a screen titled “why restrictive diets fail,” I learn that 73% of dieters experience at least one weight-cycling episode, according to a 2019 study of nearly 500 women, and that these “yo-yo” cycles increase diabetes risk and “amounts of belly fat,” according to the Mayo Clinic. So how does Noom achieve weight loss without these risks? “Simply believe!” the app tells me.

[Virginia Sole-Smith, Bustle]


@thekicksshrink #fyp #doctorsoftiktok #tiktokdoc #noom #learnontiktok #weight #weightloss #diet #dietculture #psychology ♬ Commercial - TimTaj


4. Noom reinforces the idea that weight loss and thinness are key to mental health and wellness.




One of the least unique things about Noom is the culture that it both comes from and that it reinforces: one that emphasizes that both physical and mental wellness are only possible when you're thin. Not only is this not true — studies have consistently shown that there are health risks associated with both extreme thinness and what is termed "obesity" — it's bad for people of all sizes: it publicly shames fat bodies and encourages people to adopt whatever eating habits they think will help them lose weight in order to avoid living in a fat body and incurring that shame.

And beyond the social aspects of shame, there's a real psychic toll associated with anti-fat bias:

Programs like these lay out the playbook for disordered eating—the spectrum of behavior that sits between normal eating and eating disorders—and throw gasoline on the fire of our collective cultural tolerance of anti-fat bias. As Christy Harrison, a registered dietitian and author of “Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating,” wrote in her New York Times piece on the subject, anti-fat bias (also known as weight stigma or fatphobia) among children and adults actually poses a “greater overall health risk than what people eat, and about an equal risk as physical inactivity.” This claim isn’t mere conjecture—it’s based on a study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, and reflects the consensus of dozens of scientists from top hospitals and universities worldwide that anti-fat bias has real and measurable negative health impacts.

[Taylor Majewski, Every]


Aubrey Gordon — @yrfatfriend on Twitter and author of "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat" — has written extensively on the subject of anti-fat bias, and the fact that we don't have to live in a world where fatness is vilified and thinness is prized at all costs. In an interview with Teen Vogue, she says, “At its core, if you feel bad about being fat or getting fat, that’s kind of the only option that’s offered to us right now. We can actually absolutely build another world and offer more options to people than just ‘feel terrible about your body all the time,’ we just haven’t done that yet.”




TL;DR



Comments

  1. Patty 8 months ago

    I've been using Noom for several weeks now, and I think I understand why people have trouble with it. I don't pay attention to counting calories, because the app does it for me. I watch the color categories and don't eat more than fits inside them. I eat mostly green because there are SCADS of foods, not just fruit and vegetables, that fall in that category. I eat many yellow foods as well - and avocado is yellow as well as 1 glass of white wine and 1 beer, believe it or not. The red foods, I'm told, aren't "bad" - though I have to agree if they're not "bad" they should be a different color in the system, since red in our culture certainly means "bad", and if we're simply to use caution with them they should be yellow. I've lost 10 lbs in the program so far, not trying to eat the categories full - there are strips of each color that show segments for each food you eat which are a little like an upside-down thermometer to show fund raising progress - and I have lost weight. The past two days, when I tried to eat the categories full, even though I walked my goal number of steps and even 10,000 yesterday, I have gained weight. So Noom should not add back the calories you're hopefully losing by exercising into the color system strips, because of course people like me are going to think, "hey, I can HAVE that Hershey chocolate bar!" and then gain two pounds overnight. But since I KNOW that, I can choose not to eat those extra calories, and let the color strips remain partially full. And I can certainly say that when I followed the system I have NEVER been hungry while losing weight on this program. Yes, it is a diet, no mater what they call it. But so are all the other systems, so big deal. Only this one actually makes you THINK about why you are eating something and that is HUGE. And I have found I can walk through a grocery aisle chock full of cookies and candy and not even feel a whiff of desire to eat one little piece of it now, because I choose when and what I am going to eat, using this program.

    This is a very good system for people like me who don't count calories because our brains don't go there for long, but would rather focus on music and art and dancing (a great way of moving!). And if you're not determined you are not going to lose weight no matter what system you use. Blaming it on the diet app is just silly. Take control of your life and use whatever works for you, and good luck! :)

  2. Doug Dalager 1 year ago

    Bad mouth Noom to your heart's content. For me however, it worked! In the middle of Covid as people were putting on weight due to inactivity, I went from 215 to 185 over the course of four months. By then, Noom had taught me how to consciously manage what I ate, while tracking my physical activity. I also enjoyed the "psych" coaching aspect of Noom, although once i understood how to better balance my diet, I no longer needed that.

    I discontinued Noom once I'd taught myself how and what to eat (and when). Two years later I'm at 188 and holding steady. Not bad for a 6'0" tall, 66 year old male with an appetite for beer and wings. I credit Noom for my success!

    After teaching myself to eat better with Noom, I switched to Lose It!, which also focuses on counting calories at a lower price. I don't use it all the time, but if I see the scale go up a few pounds I get serious about watching what I eat. Apps like Noom and Lose It! work if you use them and take ownership of your diet.

    Staying healthy is challenging under the best of circumstances, and apps like these are helpful. At the end of the day, weight-loss is and should be a personal priority.

    1. Patty 8 months ago

      Thanks for the tip about Lose It! I don't want to pay so much more again in future for Noom, though it's really helping right now. Good luck to you!

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