Noom is consistently ranked as one of the best weight loss apps.
The Noom Diet plan promotes sustainable weight loss with an emphasis on lifestyle, dietary, and behavioral changes rather than short-term weight loss through restrictive dieting.
So, what is Noom, and is the Noom Diet good for weight loss, health, and wellness? Is this the healthiest choice to inspire lifestyle changes?
In this guide, we will discuss how the Noom weight loss program works, how to follow it based on your health goals, what you can eat, and the pros and cons of the the Noom Diet app for weight loss and health.
Lets jump in!
What Is the Noom Diet Plan?
The Noom Diet and Noom app creates a custom weight loss plan and calorie goals based on information such as your age, height, weight, activity level, and body composition goals.
Although most people follow the Noom Diet plan or use the Noom Diet app for weight loss, you can also set other nutrition, health, diet, or lifestyle habits with Noom, such as healthy weight management, building muscle, and increasing physical activity.
As such, unlike many weight loss diets, the Noom Diet isnt one uniform diet plan for weight loss or a singular meal plan that everyone will follow no matter what.
Instead, Noom is a custom nutrition, health, body composition, and weight loss app or program that can be customized to you and your goals.
The Noom app and Noom Diet website have tons of recipes, a meal planning feature, and a water tracker to help you more easily stay on track with your weight loss goals, physical activity goals, and other healthy habits that you are trying to build.
Ultimately, the distinguishing feature of the Noom app for weight loss is the psychological approach to losing weight and establishing healthier habits for diet, physical activity, sleep, etc.
How Does the Noom Diet Work?
Your Noom Diet plan will be customized based on a relatively thorough intake survey where you fill in information about your body size, eating habits, target weight, exercise habits, and barriers to losing weight or achieving the healthy habits you desire.
However, if you are following the Noom Diet plan for building muscle, gaining weight, or weight maintenance, your Noom Diet meal plan will provide a caloric surplus or caloric balance, and may have other critical components, such as resistance training workouts.
Like most other weight loss apps, Noom has you calorie counting as you log your daily calories consumed through foods and beverages and calories expended through exercise, daily physical activity, and basal metabolic rate.
However, more importantlyand certainly more uniquely distinct to Noom vs other weight loss diets and apps, the Noom Diet program teaches you about healthy habits.
The Noom psychological approach to weight loss includes over 1,000 interactive daily lessons on mindset and behavioral changes for sustained weight loss that can be listened to or read in as little as 2 minutes each day.
The Noom Diet plan provides a psychology-based weight loss course designed to educate users about the important foundations of diet, nutrition, and physical activity for achieving your ideal body weight and how your brain can impact your behaviors.
The Noom weight loss philosophy is that weight loss begins in the brain.
The Noom Diet app offers a weight loss course involving a series of 10 short lessons that you can complete at your own pace. Each lesson builds upon the previous one.
The Noom Diet lessons aim to provide you with the necessary knowledge, tools, and skills to implement lasting changes to your lifestyle for sustainable weight loss and improvements in health.
In addition to the ten mini-lesson introductory series, Noom offers over 1000 interactive lessons in the library to help you learn more about diet, weight loss, exercise, and behavior to help you develop not only the knowledge but also the skills to make lasting weight loss changes to support lifelong success.
Topics for Noom Diet lessons include the psychology of weight loss, mindful eating vs emotional eating, incorporating joyful movement into your day, the science of metabolism, how to regulate emotional health, how to set healthy habits that stick, the ten types of hunger, and the importance of self-care.
What Can You Eat On the Noom Diet?
The Noom Diet plan is not rigidly defined like some weight loss diets in that there are no specific rules about meal timing, a calorie budget, or a specific Noom Diet menu that has to be followed.
Instead, the Noom Diet plan provides key principles that help guide your healthy eating behaviors to promote weight loss or your weight goals and improve your overall health.
Food groups on the Noom Diet meal plan are assigned different colors based on their nutrition profile, and youre encouraged to eat more green foods rather than yellow or red foods like calorie-dense snack cakes and hot dogs.
The Noom Green Foods list includes nutrient-dense, natural, unprocessed, low-calorie foods, such as fruits, veggies, lean proteins like tofu and egg whites, and whole grains and lentils.
Noom Diet yellow foods, such as nuts, seeds, avocados, beans, poultry, and fish, are still healthy but more calorically dense.
Noom Diet red foods are processed foods that should be avoided as much as possible.2Certain Foods Linked to Long-Term Weight Gain. (2015, May 22). National Institutes of Health (NIH). https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/certain-foods-linked-long-term-weight-gain
While even the Noom red foods on the meal plans are not totally off-limits, having the color-coded Noom foods helps shape your food choices and portion sizes to build self-efficacy for reaching your ideal weight and improving health by teaching lifelong sound nutrition principles.
Is the Noom Diet Effective For Long-Term Weight Loss?
Noom reports that Noom users lose an average of 18 pounds in 16 weeks, and 86 percent of people maintain this loss one year later.
Here are some of the benefits of the Noom Diet approach:
- The Noom food database has about 3.7 million foods already preloaded with all the nutritional information. For food logging, you can also scan the barcodes of nearly 150,000 food products to automatically upload and log the food into your Noom Diet tracker.
- There are hundreds of healthy recipes that are simple to prepare and are created by nutritionists and registered dietitians.
- Certified personal trainers are involved in the Noom workout guides and recommendations, and doctors and psychologists help put together the app’s behavioral aspects and overall structure of the Noom weight loss program.
- The Noom lessons use scientifically proven approaches used in psychology, fitness, and health such as therapeutic approaches to behavioral change, the caloric density of food, and mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques.
- You can connect the Noom app to the Apple Health app to keep track of all of your activity and health data in one place, and you can share this information with your Noom coach.
- Noom Premium has individualized coaching that can help you with personalized goal setting.
- The Noom Diet program and Noom app offer 1:1 health coaching, group support, and robust goal-setting features.
What is the Downside of Noom?
The primary downside of the Noom Diet program or the Noom app for weight loss compared to some of the other popular weight loss apps is that the cost is much higher.
So, how much does Noom cost per month?
After a one-week free trial, Noom costs $59 per month or about $200 per year.
However, it is important to keep in mind that you are getting a customized diet plan and much more support and resources through the Noom program for weight loss than competitive weight loss apps.
Additionally, taking the Noom lessons and logging all of your food, water intake, and physical activity can be tedious and time-consuming.
If you have a history of an eating disorder, food tracking can trigger a recurrence.
Also, some of the language used on the Noom app and website can be sensitive for those with disordered eating, body dysmorphia, or who feel shame or guilt for poor eating habits and physical activity behaviors.
However, overall the Noom Diet is one of the best weight loss apps for sustainable changes and long-term weight loss.
