What is Noom and is it worth it?

• Your age
• Your height
• Your weight
• Your goal weight
• What you’re looking to lose weight for (an upcoming event or a health concern)
• Your current eating habits

All of those will be asked over the course of a 15-minute survey. Noom will assess your habits and behaviors, then predict a timeline in which they can help you achieve your goal. Noom’s timeline is meant for sustained success after you’ve lost the weight and to avoid bouncing back after.

Per its website, Noom uses behavioral therapy to help you achieve sustained weight loss. That sounded gimmicky to me, and normally would have turned me off until I actually started my program. I’m not going to be like the women in Noom commercials claiming to feel smarter after finishing Noom, but I understand what they mean now that I’ve tried it.

Essentially, you take mini-lessons every day and quizzes based on the lessons as you go. Noom teaches you to form healthy habits with what you eat, while trying to instill a healthier relationship with food by avoiding labels that could diverge you from your path.

Example: In Noom 201 lessons, you learn about why you shouldn’t label any foods as “bad,” because you’ll then feel bad if you eat them while you’re trying to diet.

I found that an effective tactic, as I don’t want to put negative labels on things I love and want to continue eating. Instead, Noom color codes food (more on that later) and offers ways to incorporate all food colors into your daily food consumption.

Outside of the lessons and quizzes, Noom also has a Goals Specialist that will message you daily when you first start. Your Specialist works with you to target your exact goals and help you work on areas that have been troublesome for you in the past.

How much does Noom cost?

You can test out Noom for only $0.50 for seven days. While they suggest using it for at least two weeks to really review the program, I think seven days is enough to tell if the program is right for you. After seven-day trial, your card will be charged the full monthly amount  of $59. Since Noom is meant to achieve a long-term goal and not a quick “fix,” I’d suggest opting for the annual plan, which is $199 (around $16/month), otherwise, $59 will add up quickly. There is also a 5-month plan for $149, which might fit some schedules better than an annual plan, though you can do the cost-benefit analysis there yourself.

Is Noom a diet? 

The answer is yes and no. Yes, you will need to diet on Noom, but Noom is not the diet.

To be clear, Noom does not tell you to diet. They do not tell you to never eat ice cream. They do not tell you to never eat cookies. In fact, as I said before, they tell you the opposite. If you label cookies as bad, you’re more likely to fall off the wagon and feel bad when you do eat cookies. Instead, Noom suggests eating foods that are “red,” like cookies, pizza, and French fries in moderation. Don’t eat them every day, but if you’re going to a friend’s birthday party, you can enjoy a small slice of cake. You don’t need to eat a carrot while everyone else is having cake.

While Noom isn’t a diet, it is a type of dieting. You won’t get a meal plan and a restrictive list of do’s and don’ts. Instead, Noom has you track your calorie intake. You’ll be budgeting calories for the day, which increases if you’re active.  Noom budgeted about 1,800 calories a day for me, as I was trying to slowly lose weight over a six-month period. However, on days I was very active, that budget adjusted to as high as 2,500 calories. It all varied on my daily activity levels.

Noom vs. Weight Watchers

The most obvious difference between Noom and WW (formerly Weight Watchers) is that one has you count calories, while the other has you count points. To lose weight, Noom has you in a calorie deficit, which means you’re eating fewer calories than you burn.

WW has more of a community feeling than Noom does as well, but not without trying. Noom is newer, so the Noom family is smaller than WW. Weight Watchers has been around for decades. WW also has a history of famous faces promoting the brand, whereas Noom uses real people in advertisements to talk about how it changed their thinking and thus changed their lives.

Coincidentally, my best friend joined WW while I was doing Noom, so we were able to compare the two quite a bit. When we both looked at our normal Dunkin’ orders on the Noom and WW apps, we were surprised to see the differences. She would have used half her points for the day, whereas I could fit in a coffee if I cut the added sugar in half, which I already did. Dunkin’ adds way too much sugar for me.

Noom Meal Plans

You can pay an additional cost for custom meal plans for Noom, though I did not. Instead, I took the lessons about food categories. When you’re logging foods and learning about them in Noom, they’ll fit into three categories: Red, yellow, and green.

• Green foods are the least calorie-dense, which is important terminology in Noom. They’re mostly fruits and vegetables
• Yellow foods are where you’ll find lean proteins, like salmon and ground turkey
• Red foods include most foods with added sugars

You can eat all three colors in a day, but the majority should be green foods, While you could eat 100g of grapes or a 100g of raisins, one will fill you up in fewer calories. That would be the grapes. Raisins are denser, with fewer nutrients and added sugars, so they won’t fill you up the same way.

Grapes are a green food, while the raisins are red food. You should go for the green food when you can.

Now, these color labels might seem drastic, given most of us associate red with no and green with go. That isn’t the case with Noom. You can eat all the green foods you want, but you can still eat some red foods every day. Ideally, green will constitute the biggest portion of your food intake, followed by yellow, then red. If you want a piece of cake but see it is a red food, you can still have a piece of cake. You’ll just need to eat one normal slice, and not a huge chunk.

Is Noom worth it?

My full review of Noom is too long to fit after all of this information, so I’m separating that into its own article. To be succinct: For me, Noom is worth it. I lost 13 pounds in the first month. Having a real person, and not a bot, check on me daily was motivating. I also had some health concerns in February that made taking better care of myself a top priority.

Noom is a dedicated process. You need to weigh in every day, you need to log all of your meals and snacks, you need to log your water intake, and you need to track your daily activity. Writing all of that down sounds like a lot of work. And, yes, it is. Losing weight isn’t easy. If it were, there would not be such an intense stigma around diet culture, and there wouldn’t be so many companies profiting off of trying to “help” people lose weight.

But with Noom, I didn’t feel like I was working hard with nothing to show for it. Even before I lost weight, I felt better about what I was putting in my body and I didn’t feel discouraged from indulging when I did.

Tracking food can be triggering for some people, and I wholeheartedly understand. It was something I needed to do, as I was abusing serving sizes. My regular bowl of cereal was three times what you’re meant to eat. Don’t even get me started on how much ice cream and French fries I was consuming in one sitting. I needed that accountability for myself. I could eat two days worth of calories in ice cream if you let me, but it never filled me up, so I had to eat other foods to fuel my body. Noom helped me understand the best foods to fuel myself, what foods I could indulge in, and when I should indulge.

How to cancel Noom

Some weight loss programs make it miserable to quit. If Noom isn’t for you, or you complete your program sooner than anticipated, canceling your membership is simple.

You can cancel two ways:

1. Go into Settings > Manage My Subscription > Choose the option to Cancel your plan.
2. Open the messages with your Goal Specialist and tell them you’ve completed your program and wish to cancel your membership.