Save Hundreds Of Dollars By Learning About Weight Loss For Free

Stop going on Noom. Start learning about effective weight loss.

The health industry has no short supply of fad diets, but this one is one of the few to change into something else. It’s called the Noom diet. A diet that is simple to follow: download an app called Noom and follow the recommendations it proposes.

This diet has captured the attention of so many people with a Noom representative claiming they have over 50 million users worldwide. As a result, the app has been able to generate $400 million in revenue and plans to be valued at $10 billion once it launches an IPO this year or early 2023.

It’s gotten a tremendous amount of positive reviews with people saying they have a better relationship with food and there’s even a study that found 77% of users reported losing weight in two years.

All in all, it seems promising on the surface, until you look at it more carefully and realize the $60 per month (or $200 per year) price tag isn’t really worth it.

It’s Still A Dietary Program

My own personal experience with Noom is limited. Several years ago, I too downloaded the app to try out their free trial. Since then, that brief experience was my only exposure to the app.

The reason I left was simple: I wasn’t about to pay $60 every month to use an app where the only tangible benefit I had from it was calorie counting. I was also living at my parent’s house at the time and didn’t have as much control over my own nutrition compared to now.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Noom at its core is still a dietary program at heart — something that Noom has gone out of its way to differentiate itself from. It does so through marketing and the app itself providing you with little tidbits of information or studies.

It creates a feeling that what Noom is telling you is well researched, and effective. But for anyone who is familiar or has done programs like Whole30 or WeightWatchers, you’ll start to see echoes of those programs in Noom too.

The only reason Noom is so effective is that the diet industry has changed drastically in the last few years. No longer is it about weight loss but rather “wellness”.

A shift that has appealed to male users who are a fan of the psychological aspects and are unaware of the various tropes and tactics.

A Non-Effective Dietary Program At That

The biggest trope of them all is that Noom encourages a simple message: Noom is here to help you eat less, so you can weigh less.

And it is a trope because diets consistently show that they don’t work, and this has been proven multiple times.

Worse, this messaging suggests a diet called the deprivation diet. A diet that has been reportedly used in The Biggest Loser show to the extreme and has predictable results for contestants after the show.

The deprivation diet is an antiquated idea where it was suggested for women to have a daily caloric intake of 1,200 to 1,500 per day. That’s appropriate for a particularly large dog. Not a fully grown human being.

For men, you still see that Noom undercuts caloric intake. For a 5 foot, 10-inch tall man, Noom suggests 1,900 calories. My calorie counter I use — and I’m 5 foot, 9 inches — is 2,100. And even then, my calorie counter might be undercutting that since dietary guidelines for Americans suggests a range of 2,400 to 3,000 calories per day depending on physical activity.

Based on my own personal experiences and the fact that 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 cases of eating disorders stem from men, what Noom is suggesting is dangerous. Especially since men typically don’t seek treatment or try to be eating more.

After all, Noom is at its core psychologically geared and for men. Noom is their first exposure to diet fads that have been aggressively targeting women for years. Men find it appealing because, for the first time, an app allows us to focus on the emotional aspect. Something that society has pummelled into us not to have.

Failure Happens Two-Fold

The issue with Noom is that while psychology is an important aspect, it’s creating two-fold failures for its users. At the end of the day, Noom is a weight loss program and it’s also teaching you how to “deal with your inner elephant”

So in the event that you ever cheat on your diet, not only are you failing from a health standpoint, but you’re also failing to tame that “inner elephant”.

On top of this, the app psychologically conditions you to be thinking about your food in a certain way. It uses a traffic light system to denote the categories of food.

• Green is for your fresh fruits and veggies.
• Yellow is for lean meats and dairy.
• Red is desserts and saturated fats.

The app will give you a nice dopamine boost when you select green foods while red will issue warnings.

The app will also demand daily weigh-ins which is another trope that can be demoralizing for people. It also places more emphasis on weight which I can say with confidence at this point isn’t as significant as it's made out to be.

Yes, it’s key for someone who is definitely overweight, but what truly matters is how the person feels about their weight. The average weight of an NHL player is 201 pounds and an NBA player is 222 pounds. By BMI standards, the average professional athlete is dealing with obesity and would be an excellent candidate for a Noom diet.

But don’t worry though. If you do ever fail, Noom has some words of wisdom to get you back in there. Positive psychology like…

• “Failure is part of the process”
• “Great things never come from comfort zones.”
• “Stop saying I wish. Start saying I will.”

And while those sorts of things are encouraging and true, it’s undercut by the fact that Noom is just another deprivation diet program that works hard at conditioning unsuspecting individuals. It’s the sort of positive psychological nonsense that The Secret pulls by telling people they’ll attract whatever they desire if they think positive enough.

It’s effective but so deceptive.

And what’s worse, is people are paying a monthly subscription for this.

There Is A Much Better Way Than This

Even though Noom is able to get people to lose weight and provides psychological tools, it doesn’t mean that the tools and resources it provides are promoting healthy habits.

In cases like myself and others — where I am overweight — counting calories can be pretty helpful. But I don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars for an app to tell me that. I’m using the free version of Lose It!. And there are several other alternatives, most notable is MyFitnessPal. That too is free.

And unless you’re planning on becoming some kind of athlete, tracking your exercising or personal bests aren’t that necessary either. Even so, you don’t need an app to track that. Pull out a notes app.

The constant tracking that these apps demand does nothing but create more strain on people and places emphasis on those numbers. It creates an obsession over those results which isn’t always healthy. I know from experience how those numbers can be so demoralizing and in some cases encourage taking diets to more extremes.

While I am no dietician, I’ve spent years understanding my body in a much healthier way than what Noom presents in their daily health tidbit of information. So here are my suggestions for those looking to lose weight:

• Download a free calorie counter (Lose It! or MyFitnessPal) and begin tracking.
• Keep tracking until you get a good understanding of how many calories you’re taking in every day. The goal is to eat enough so that you’re as close or slightly above the limit the app tells you.
• Do avoid highly processed foods as much as possible and get plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, protein, carbs, and nuts. If you do feel the urge to get fast food, limit it to one meal per week if you can.
• Monitor your fitness level in a broad sense. Get into the habit of doing routine stretches on a regular basis. Even better, go for an hour-long walk or hit the gym/use a fitness machine at home. You can even look for HIIT programs on Youtube.
• Do a weekly weigh-in — or if you’re eager one weigh-in every three days — and note the number. Start looking at trends after you’ve weighed yourself routinely for over a month.
• If you weigh more than before, do some research into why that is. Talk to a registered dietician in your area or a member at the gym you go to.
• If you’re weighing less, then you know your strategy is working and keep going.

The cost of doing all of these things can be kept to a minimum. In fact, if you don’t care about getting a gym membership and are happy working out at home, you can do all of this stuff for free.

Yes, it’s a lot of work and will demand research and time from you. However, the program Noom presents will send you down a path where deprivation diets will destroy your metabolism and make it hard for you to lose any weight.

Once you leave the program, you’ll find that weight coming back and bringing more, forcing you to pay $200 a year for an app for the rest of your life and hoping that it can re-condition you again to take up a weight loss trope that is clearly not effective and has long-term health ramifications.