What is Noom? (An Honest Review)
Noom is a subscription based platform for tracking your food and exercise habits. A key element of their program is a focus on a psychological approach to weight loss.
What if you could stop your forever diet and weight loss programs for one “simple” program that can change the way you eat, sleep, and believe in yourself. One that isn’t a diet at all but a psychology- based platform?
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That is what the Noom program is all about. Noom is primarily known for their different approach to weight loss. The emphasis on behavior change and mental wellness.
On there website they claim that the program is “based on the latest proven behavioral science to empower people to take control of their health for good.” I love this! It’s focus is teaching life long skills that can help you with maintaining a healthy lifestyle and weight.
After reading that I knew I needed to dive a bit deeper into it.
Interesting to note: The Program has a weight loss guarantee, which you can see below. Emphasizing that they have helped 3,627,436 people lose weight.
Getting Started with Noom:
1) Fill out the Questionnaire:
The very first thing you do when getting onto the Noom website here is fill out a questionnaire when prompted. It asks the basic questions like height, weight, exercise activity etc. Then the questionnaire dives deeper into questions like:
- Why do you want to lose weight?
- When did you notice weight gain?
2) Download Noom and Pay:
After you answer the questionnaire, it encourages you to download the app and pay a fee (Yes there is even a fee for a trial). Because Noom is a subscription based plan, you aren’t able to access anything with out it.
What Noom Costs
For a monthly subscription for Noom, it costs $59 (as of 2022).
The cheapest plan for a 12 month period at $17.79 or a total of $213.43. The baseline subscription includes a health coach, and the ability to input all your recipes, meal plans and exercise.
You can add on different subscriptions by bundling them, $49 for both a meal and exercise plan or $29 for a custom workout plan and $49 for a custom meal plan.
Overall, it’s kind of pricey compared to other plans out there. If you are looking for a one stop shop and like a health coach that is working with you as often as you need, this might be a program that you look into.
3) Using Noom:
After everything is paid for, the next step is to to set up your account and profile. You get introduced to the program. The very first thing you will see starts off by a motivational quote. Which says:
Noom asks everyone to give the program a fair trial. For best results they recommend using Noom for at least 5 minutes a day and up to about 12 minutes for modules. They encourage you to complete different tasks daily, log your water and meals, weigh in and talk with your (free) coach as needed.
The best part being they walk you step by step through the whole process!
Each day you are assigned tasks to complete on top of everything else. Some of the tasks include taking quizzes, writing goals and mentally encouraging yourself.
Overall, it is pretty simple once getting started with the program. I think this aspect of the program is very beneficial because it not only encourages you, but teaches you how to live a better lifestyle. The biggest downfall being, it does take time.
Noom’s Food Categories and Logging Food
When someone thinks of weight loss programs, food elimination comes to mind almost immediately. However, Noom is a little bit different than most, if you’re familiar with Weight Watchers it is similar to this program.
No foods are off limits. They encourage you to eat a certain types of food more often than others, which is understandable and do this by categorizing food into colors.
The database for logging food is not very big. Inputting specific brands generally cannot be found in the database even if they are common. You can enter them manually with all the different macro’s and nutrients, however, it is very tedious and takes time. (The database doesn’t have nearly as many options as something like myFitness Pal)
In the end, the biggest turn off to me is how they categorize food. As mentioned previously they separate foods into colors.
- The first is green,
- second red and
- third yellow.
You would assume green is good, yellow is okay and red is bad. However, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
They break the colors down into proportions of what one should eat. Green: 30%, Yellow: 45% and Red: 25%. “Red” foods simply raise a red flag for food that contain a lot of calories without necessarily feeling you up. This I don’t believe to be necessarily true and I believe that eating all of the foods in moderation is the key.
The foods that are placed in the “green” category are foods that are full of water like whole fruits, vegetables and whole grains. “Red” foods are anything like your cooking oils, nuts, seeds, and cheeses.
In the end, I think Noom really does have some great solutions for people, especially those who thrive with a one on one support group. It is a bit more expensive due to this aspect of the program. They have a selection of great recipes on the program that you can use and as long as your put time into it, it can be worth the price.
If you don’t have at least 10 minutes a day to listen to the program and then additional time to log all your activities, food, water, weight and meet with others or give the program 100% an effort, maybe something else will better fit your needs.
If you choose to sign up for Noom, I’d love for you to use my affiliate link, where I get a small commission if you sign up. (affiliate link here)