Noom: Toxic Diet Culture in Disguise
Chances are you’ve seen ads for the increasingly popular weight loss program offered via a company called Noom, the “non-diet” app. You’ve heard commercial actors say onscreen, “it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change.” Noom is unique to other traditional diets because it focuses on changing daily habits for the better and gives dieters motivation and support along their weight loss journey. The program is marketed as “self-care,” rather than dieting.
Well, I hate to break to you, but despite its reputation for being different from all the other weight loss programs, Noom is still just another diet app. The app claims to use “real psychology” and mindfulness techniques, yet it still requires users to track their calories consumed/burned and weigh themselves daily. With its tagline “Stop dieting. Get life-long results,” Noom leads consumers to believe that after failed attempts at yo-yo dieting via various fad diets and countless weight loss subscription programs, they are at last on track to a lifestyle change that will keep the weight off for good. Noom’s mission is “to help everyone lead healthier lives” — but if this is the case, then why do they stress “sticking to a plan”? If it is not a diet, then how do they guarantee that “Noom users will lose 1–2 pounds per week”? Though packaged in a modern, visually appealing mobile app, Noom sounds just like internalized diet culture to me, and here’s why…
How it works:
In order to do a thorough investigation, I logged onto Noom.com myself and created a fake account to see what all the hype was about. If you’re not familiar with how the app works, here is a description of the “Noom Weight” product and its defining features. Upon downloading the app and getting started, the consumer enters how much weight they want to lose (i.e., your goal weight) and by what date. Noom asks whether the individual has an important event coming up, such as a wedding, vacation, reunion, etc., and then provides a specified calorie allotment and program to follow to reach their goal weight by the date of that special occasion. Supposedly, the health “experts” on the other end create a personalized plan designed just for you to help you get to your goal weight by your special event.
In effort to come across as more attractive and less toxic than mainstream diet culture, Noom prides itself on not labeling foods “good” or “bad.” However, they do have a traffic light food system that labels foods as red or green (which is essentially the same thing). As you may guess, foods labeled “red,” a color associated with danger, caution, and “Stop!,” are those high in calories and fat, and are advised to be eaten sparingly. On the contrary, foods labeled “green,” a color that signifies “Go!,” are less calorie-dense and allowed to be eaten as much as one desires. There is also an assortment of “yellow” foods to be eaten in moderation. At the end of each week, the app tells you what percentage of “green” foods you ate, how many steps you took, and how many times you exercised.
Additionally, Noom users are paired with health coaches, emotional eating counselors, licensed psychologists, and support groups comprised of other online users. To emphasize learning over dieting, users are also given daily articles and lessons to read, including prompts for digital journal entries, for as little as 5–10 minutes a day.
Lastly, Noom offers a ‘weight loss guarantee,’ which entails that “If you go through your full program and don’t lose weight, we offer your money back, trial fees included, with no questions asked.”
Health behavior theories:
The main premise of the company is their focus on behavior change and mental health, utilizing “real psychology,” as their website claims. Noom’s curriculum was supposedly created by psychologists, doctors, researchers, and other experts in the field of health psychology and behavior change to get at the root cause of weight loss struggles. Noom’s tagline claim’s it is “not a diet,” and because of the psychology-based curriculum, it is believed that if individuals lose weight “the Noom way,” then it will lead to long-term results. I took a deeper look into the non-diet “way” of this app’s approach to weight loss to determine just what psychology and health behavior change theories build the foundation of this program and ensure its weight loss success stories.
Upon investigation, it appears that the health educators who created Noom used the Social Cognitive Theory to build this weight loss intervention. But what exactly is cognitive theory? History’s earliest cognitive theorists believed that reinforcements influence expectations of a behavior’s outcome. That is to say that behavior is not simply automatic, and it requires mental processes, such as thinking, reasoning, hypothesizing, or expecting — all major components of cognitive theories. In essence, behavior is guided by cognitive and affective factors, not just biological and external events. In the behavior change process, this is important to consider because it’s addressing more elements of losing weight and keeping it off outside of cutting calories and exercising. One main construct of psychologist Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, self-efficacy, is the major component of Noom. Noom attempts to build a person’s self-efficacy by increasing their confidence in their ability to eat healthy and exercise to reach their goal weight.
Furthermore, the makers of Noom boast that the program utilizes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to achieve sustained weight loss. CBT is a popular form of psychological treatment that addresses problems via a patient’s unhelpful ways of thinking, learned patterns of unhelpful behavior, and poor ways of coping. CBT attempts to change ones thinking patterns with strategies such as evaluating problems realistically, learning problem-solving skills to cope, and developing a greater sense of confidence in one’s own abilities. Understanding how one’s emotions change over time helps Noom ‘customize’ each individual’s weight loss program. It addresses many constructs of SCT by assessing how one’s motivation to lose weight has changed over time in the past in order to better understand their current state of mind.
To do so, the app prompts users to answer questions about how motivated they are to reach their target weight at a given moment. For example, as mentioned, upon downloading the app and creating an account, one of the first things Noom asks is if you have an important event coming up, because having something to look forward to can be a big motivator to stick to a weight loss plan. In essence, Noom revolves around the idea that setting small goals allows for more frequent wins (reinforcers), and that reaching these goals keeps you motivated and empowered. Feeling empowered is a key component to sustained behavior change and weight loss because staying motivated further helps you crush even more goals.
The cognitive aspect of Noom is evident in its attempt to help users “master their thoughts.” The premise behind this is that once an individual determines the things they’re ready to work on, their mindset will help them form new neural connections over time to change their habits. Basic neuroscience explains how powerful and engrained the connections for “bad” habits are in our brains, and consequently why changing our habits can sometimes be so difficult. With repetitive practice, over time Noom helps retrain a person’s brain for healthy habits, so they are more likely to follow and stick to their weight loss plan.
Not only does Noom tap into the cognitive processes behind emotions and thoughts associated with eating and exercise habits, but it also utilizes social support to aid in weight loss success. As stated on their website, “People who successfully refer friends and family can lose weight 32% faster during their Noom program.” This level of support and individual programming is important to users’ weight loss success. Health coaching is a fairly new field, but research shows that when an individual coaching approach is combined with group support, education, and frequent interactions, a participant is much more likely to see success in changing their health.
The app also sends you daily articles that “focus on learning, not dieting.” According to Noom experts, just 10 minutes a day can change your relationship with food. This educational aspect of Noom helps one learn about social eating, cognition and food, stress management, managing emotions in relation to food, how exercise affects you, why we eat and act the way we do as humans, and more. The psychology-based curriculum, which increases one’s knowledge and self-efficacy, gets at the reasons behind your habits to grow self-awareness so that you can better know how to make changes and lose weight.
Traditional restrictive diets can help you lose weight in short bursts (aka the “yo-yo” effect), but ultimately don’t help you keep the weight off. Noom attempts to help you create long-term results through habit and behavior change, not restrictive dieting. Everyone is different and needs different things in their journey to a healthy weight. Noom uses science and personalization to help you lose weight and “keep it off for good.” With daily questions and journal prompts, Noom helps you better understand your relationship with food, how to be more mindful of your habits, and give you the knowledge and support you need for long-lasting change. Though marketed as a new and innovative approach, Noom’s combination of self-awareness and empowerment via goal setting, psychoeducation, and social support is grounded on the premises of the historically well-evidenced Social Cognitive Theory.
Weaknesses:
There’s no question that Noom is successful as a weight loss program. According to Scientific Reports, 78% of participants using Noom lost weight over a 6-month study — but at what expense?
The problems surrounding this new “anti-diet” diet begin with the fact that Noom makes sure that you own a scale. When you start your Noom journey by creating a profile, you are prompted to answer the following question: is your goal to lose weight or get fit? They assume a person’s desire to eat healthy and improve their relationship with food is purely aesthetic based. The focus is on pounds lost. There is no focus on reducing risk for disease, getting better sleep, improving mental clarity, or how food makes a person feel (i.e., some people feel happier and more energetic when they change their habits to include more nutrient-dense foods and regular exercise!). After signing up and answering the prompts, you receive an email from Noom that includes a graph showing how much you’ll lose by the date of your upcoming “special event” and information on how they can help you reach your goal weight. For the record, promising a certain number of pounds lost by a certain date is not a mindfulness-based lifestyle change, it’s purely a crash diet perpetuated by society’s thin-ideal.
The reason why diets don’t work is because being fat doesn’t equal unhealthy, and being skinny doesn’t equal healthy. Everyone’s body is different, and there is not one ideal weight/BMI that applies to every adult male or female. A person’s natural setpoint weight is based on their genetic/ethnic/biological history. Therefore, any amount of calorie restriction or over-exercising that leads to achieving a goal weight below one’s biological setpoint is not sustainable, because the body will naturally bounce back after time to achieve homeostasis.
Despite this science-backed Health At Every Size® concept, Noom still encourages calorie counting in the name of calorie restriction. Though Noom preaches ‘mindful eating,’ it is not to stay present in the moment and increase self-awareness, but rather to “eat fewer calories.” As mentioned, based on what date you need to lose the weight by, Noom will send you a personalized plan of how many calories to eat and/or burn in a day in order to reach that goal. Reports have noted Noom’s calorie budgets to go as low as 1,200 calories per day, an allotment too low for even a sedentary female, let alone a physically active male. Noom doesn’t take your lifestyle into account when calculating calories either, nor do they let you adjust your daily caloric intake goal manually. For example, a woman who is breastfeeding, or a person who works out often (heavy weightlifting 4x a week and intense cardio 2–3x a week) and only joins Noom for help with their diet, cannot be sustained on a daily caloric goal of 1,200! Noom’s philosophy of calorie counting and filling up on high-volume, low-calorie dense foods in order to eat less calories is one that I do not agree with, and one that fuels every other weight loss diets on the market just the same.
To make matters worse, your calorie budget goes up in the app when you burn calories through exercise. While perhaps somewhat scientifically accurate in terms of your natural biological system, it teaches one the toxic mindset that they must “earn” their food. The “calories in vs. calories out” model is as old as diets get, but recent research has debunked this myth. Weight loss isn’t as simple as counting calories. Evidence reveals that the nutritional density of a food matters more than its calorie content, i.e., 100 calories of spinach is not processed in the body the same as 100 calories of ice cream. Another finding is that low-impact, low-calorie burning exercise, such as weightlifting or Pilates, compared to high-intensity exercise, such as running, is more effective at burning fat and boosting the metabolism. Because muscle weighs more than fat and burns more calories when at rest, 100 calories burned jogging does not have the same effect on the body as 100 calories burned deadlifting a heavy barbell, for example.
Let’s say you logged 30 minutes of running at a 6mph pace into the Noom app and you burned around 365 calories, you therefore would be granted that much more you’re allowed to eat. However, if you logged weightlifting for the same amount of time, you’d only burn around 130–220 calories, and not be allowed to eat as much. The program’s heavy emphasis on tracking calorie intake makes it just as toxic as other diet-app competitors, such as MyFitnessPal or Lifesum, that have been cited to cause the development of eating disorders in their users. Noom’s goal is to help users “continue developing healthy habits to keep the weight off after reaching your goal,” but I’m not so sure these habits being promoted are healthy long-term. Eating nutritious foods and exercising isn’t healthy if the primary reason that you’re doing so is because you’re terrified of weight gain.
Furthermore, applying the color red to a food, a color instinctively associated with danger or caution, sends a harmful message. Food has no innate moral value! Teaching individuals this dichotomous view of foods, in addition to promoting the restriction of calories, breeds disordered eating (that is the real danger here, not a bit of saturated fat from all-natural coconut oil!). Essentially, every food that a typical personal trainer or nutritionist would suggest for an active person trying to build muscle and eat healthy balanced meals, such as whole grains or high-quality protein, seems to be considered a “red” food by Noom’s traffic light color system. Full fat products are considered “red” foods as well, further perpetuating our country’s decades-long irrational war against fat. (Contrary to Noom’s belief, bacon and 2% milk are not to be feared!)
On the other hand, many of the approved of “green” foods have tons of natural sugars, e.g., pineapple, which when eaten in excess can still cause weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, tooth decay, and more. Since green foods are allowed, it implies one can eat as much as they possibly want. However, while eating limitless watery foods like fruits and veggies fills you up, it doesn’t always give you all the nutrients you need to survive. Similar to the daily calorie allotment, the food color system is not at all adjusted for specific lifestyles or circumstances, such as people who are doing intense aerobics or lifting heavy weights often. These individuals need more protein, such as meat, carbs, and plant-based fats, than the Noom color system allows. For example, protein supplements are considered “red” foods. Just one post-workout protein shake can put someone over their “red” allotment for the whole day! You know there is something wrong with the Noom color system when Fiber One Honey Nut Clusters, Lean Cuisine pizza, and Chef Boyardee raviolis are “green,” but hummus, dehydrated broccoli, and protein powder are “red.”
Even so, Noom raves that there are “no good or bad foods” and “you can still eat foods you enjoy.” Not only contradictory, this also implies that healthy foods are not enjoyable, and you have to “splurge” or “cheat” on your calorie plan in order to enjoy the ‘unhealthy’ foods you actually love. They reassure you “if you mess up, that’s ok — everyone falls off the wagon sometimes, we’ll help you get back on track.” When users have “fallen off the wagon” they can access various courses in the app for an extra price. Unfortunately, these courses are often just repeats of content they’ve already been sent. In fact, a lot of “refresher” courses pop up throughout one’s Noom subscription, but these are also just prior lessons repeated word for word, which is not exactly helpful. After some time, the content starts to get stale, and therefore ineffective.
Noom including an educational aspect in their program is actually part of their attempt to set itself apart from the rest. The educational courses, while seemingly well-intentioned, are still toxic diet culture in a pretty package. For example, the first “lesson” Noom walked me through directed me to choose grapes over dried raisins as the healthier snack option. Their reason why? Because grapes are 81% water and will therefore make you feel full faster. As mentioned, this type of mindset rooted in choosing the least calorie-dense option for weight loss is what fuels the development of disordered eating. Another psycho-education example is when Noom sends push notifications such as, “Did you know? Losing just 5% of your body weight can reduce your risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.” This fact fails to recognize the most recent science that concludes weight loss itself isn’t the direct contributing variable to these conditions, but rather the lifestyle changes associated with it, including more doing more physical activity and eating nutritious foods.
Also unique to Noom’s program are its health coaches, which could stand to be more human. It seems as if the coaches just copy and paste info, and do not answer any user generated questions. It appears that all of the initial goal setting answers users give at the beginning of the program are never actually read by anyone. It doesn’t seem like the “personal coach” even has access to them. In all, the personal coaches just don’t seem into it. They check in after a whole week of exercising and eating with a virtual “high five” and zero input or advice. Losing weight and making real life changes to stick for good is hard and requires real coaching — the type of coaching Noom users are tricked into believing they’re paying for.
Pulling on constructs of the Social Cognitive Theory, Noom also attempts to utilize social support to increase motivation in its users. It puts individuals together into virtual groups based on start date, and this randomized organization is total chaos. In these groups, people post whatever they want, including random comments like “I just ran for 20 minutes!” and “I answered today’s lesson question.” In order for the group idea to be impactful, I would suggest at least organizing them by age or goals. A 30-year-old, stay-at-home mom trying to get in shape doesn’t have much in common with a diabetic 60-year-old with mobility issues. It would be more effective if users could chat with other people who maybe exercise the same amount as they do but just struggle with the nutrition aspect, for example.
Another major component of Noom is the psychology-backed, mindfulness, habit-change focus based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It attempts to build self-efficacy and create new thought patterns by prompting users to enter answers to daily questions regarding their eating and exercise habits. However, there is no way for users to see what they’ve entered! Every day, users are typing away into the app and everything just disappears. They cannot read their entries at a later date or refer to them in order to learn from their patterns, grow skills, assess their progress, etc. What is the point of setting weekly and long-term goals if there isn’t even anywhere to track these!? After the first two or three weeks on the program, the app asks you to go back and think about your big picture, but it is easy to forget your goals if you enter them once on the first day and then never see them again.
Lastly, when all is said and done, in keeping with the educational aspect and the popular “it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle” motto, I feel like Noom could benefit from a course on maintaining weight. It’s great that people have found success in losing weight initially with the app, but how can users maintain that weight loss or prevent yo-yoing the rest of their lives? If one quits the paid program, all of the lessons disappear. This is disappointing because there may be certain lessons that someone would have loved to periodically refer back to, even after they have completed the program. Noom doesn’t offer any short, inexpensive booster courses that people can do periodically without having to pay for a full 6-month subscription. Noom doesn’t help those struggling to maintain long-term weight loss and keep up with the long-term healthier habits it claims to instill in its users. It’s evident that any company that makes a profit off of people wanting to lose weight isn’t going to invest in making sure they keep it off for good (the diet industry is a multi-billion-dollar trap!).
The “non-diet” diet app:
Don’t let its marketing fool you — Noom didn’t reinvent the diet wheel. In the end, it’s just another diet app. Noom’s promise to “help you increase your self-worth” implies that your body weight determines your worth as a person and that you’re only as good as the number on the scale. With subscriptions to Noom costing a minimum of $59 per month, it is capitalizing off people’s poor body image — just like all the other fad diets on the market that make more money the less successful you are at them. It’s no different than any other weight loss programs that benefit from the vulnerability of its users. We’ve seen calorie restriction, exercise tracking, daily weigh ins, and weight-based goals that glorify weight loss as “success” many times before (e.g., Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers/WW, Jenny Craig, etc.).
Unlike these older weight loss programs, however, the Noom app is popular because it caters to this generation of social media-raised, tech-savvy dieters. It works for millennials who don’t mind logging everything they eat and do into their smartphone each day. But it is still rooted in society’s misconception that being fat is bad. It still perpetuates the shaming of fat people and the praising of thinness that dominates our culture.
The only thing that’s different about Noom is the optimistic hope it instills in its users that they are making a permanent “lifestyle change.” It removes the mental fear of yet another unsustainable, unsuccessful fad diet. By calling it a lifestyle change rather than a diet, it gives the illusion of being free from toxic diet culture, all while pursuing and monetizing off the thin ideal that stems from exactly just that.
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