Zooming in on the NOOM diet plan program

Well, we cer­tain­ly all know by now that fad diets don’t usu­al­ly work; in the end, they just tend to backfire. Most of us real­ize that when we estab­lish healthy eat­ing and lifestyle habits, that is what will tru­ly lead to well-being in our life and last­ing changes. That’s why it’s worth look­ing at the Noom diet. It’s actu­al­ly a weight-loss and a per­son­al­ized meal-plan­ning app with mil­lions of users – maybe you didn’t know it, but it was the most Googled diet for 2020. It’s def­i­nite­ly become a very trendy diet of late, and it’s because it tru­ly promis­es hope and health – after all, it’s about mak­ing long-term changes that will help you achieve your weight loss goals. OK, it’s not like 100% per­fect – which diet is? It also comes with its pros and cons. But before you down­load the app and get start­ed, let’s just check it out a bit more for you:

Some Things That Will Let you Know More about Noom

• It is tar­get­ed at mil­len­ni­als – after all, this group is the biggest glob­al gen­er­a­tion, and they are kind of treat­ed as spe­cial and impor­tant. The Noom app has been designed by nutri­tion­ists, behav­iour­al psy­chol­o­gists, and per­son­al train­ers to enable you to lose weight in the long run. It’s about mak­ing sus­tain­able lifestyle changes more than encour­ag­ing extreme changes in eat­ing, such as cut­ting out cer­tain nutri­ents or spe­cif­ic food groups.

• Ini­tial­ly, the Noom pro­gram is aimed at 16 weeks. In this time, you are taught what and how to eat and why you eat the things you do. Every morn­ing you will be pre­sent­ed with a screen for the action of the day.

-It costs a min­i­mum of around $50 per month, and allows you, the user, to:

• Gen­er­ate your per­son­al calo­rie break­down, which will be based on some lifestyle questions.

• Track your food intake, allow­ing you to search a data­base and scan barcodes.

• Log your weight, exer­cise, blood sug­ar, and blood pressure.

• Receive health coach­ing dur­ing busi­ness hours.

• Stay moti­vat­ed with inter­ac­tive quizzes and articles.

• The whole ide­ol­o­gy behind the con­tent and coach­ing is to kind of “ ‘trick’ your body into quick­ly cre­at­ing healthy habits. It is claimed that those who use the Noom app and adapt to a healthy lifestyle lose around 18 pounds in just 16 weeks.

• One dieti­cian from Texas, Angela Lemond, says Noom is sim­i­lar to Weight Watch­ers because of per­son­al coach­ing, which Noom does too, just vir­tu­al­ly. It might be why Noom claims itself to be the “Weight Watch­ers” lifestyle for the Millennials.

• The Noom Weight Loss Coach App has a few stan­dard fea­tures that you find in many free apps. Noom’s fea­tures include:
  • Food log­ging
  • Weight log­ging
  • Exer­cise logging
  • Expert coach check-ins for set goals
  • Group chat with a group coach moderator.
  • Ways to cat­e­go­rize food
  • Search­able recipes
  • A behav­iour change edu­ca­tion program
  • Saved arti­cles folder

• Each day you need to have foods from the dif­fer­ent colour groups: green, red, yellow.

• Some peo­ple enjoy Noom because they feel it’s a con­ve­nient, pri­vate way to work towards a healthy lifestyle and still get sup­port from a trained professional.

• Haha, but Noom doesn’t deliv­er any food to you! Nor will it tell you what to eat. But it helps you make bet­ter deci­sions wher­ev­er you find your­self buy­ing or eat­ing food, such as in the restau­rant, the gro­cery store, on hol­i­day, etc.

• Just for fun, lots of peo­ple ask about what Noom stands for – where did that name come from? It’s not an acronym for any­thing. The founder says that ‘Moon’ spelled back­ward because the moon is a qui­et guide for lost people.

The Pros of the Noom diet

It encour­ages the dieters to eat whole, real foods, more nutri­ent-dense meals, and snacks as often as possible. The user will take a quiz and answer ques­tions about how active they are, how much weight they want to lose if they do, and any oth­er med­ical con­di­tions, etc. An algo­rithm will then break down their per­son­al­ized ener­gy require­ments and how many calo­ries they need to eat from the three food groups, fats, carbs, and proteins.

What can I eat on the Noom diet?

• The app will ask you to log what you eat. You will search the data­base and find more than 150,000 foods. You can also scan the bar­code on pack­aged items when you are out shop­ping – this will give you feed­back on that food and keep you on track. The app will reward you for eat­ing nutri­ent-dense, whole­some foods – work­ing with its colour-cod­ed sys­tem. Research from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, and pub­lished in the jour­nal JMIR Mhealth and Uhealth in 2019, sug­gests that peo­ple who reg­u­lar­ly input what they eat into track­ing apps could lose more weight than peo­ple who sim­ply tried to watch their diet. More than 77% of those who used the Noom app report­ed los­ing weight after using the app for nine months. Accord­ing to sci­en­tif­ic reports in a 2016 study, data from more than 35,000 people.

• You will also be able to man­u­al­ly load your blood sug­ar and blood pres­sure by sync­ing app-friend­ly devices – this is vital in track­ing your progress or shar­ing data with a physi­cian or others.

• Noom encour­ages com­mu­ni­ty spir­it. Groups of goal-set­ters can offer chat and sup­port, which is a great way to help oth­ers with their cama­raderie and communication.

• If you did man­age to lose weight on anoth­er diet pro­gram, only to gain it all back after you stopped, then ask your­self whether you man­aged to cre­ate life­long healthy habits on that diet plan. Or did you just fol­low a few guide­lines for a time and then went back to your old habits? If your answer is the lat­ter, you aren’t alone. That’s a com­mon prob­lem many dieters expe­ri­ences and why so many peo­ple are flock­ing to Noom. While Noom does have food lists, the focus is on break­ing your bad habits and devel­op­ing new ones so that there are no “old ways” to go back to.

• Peo­ple love Noom because they choose the foods they like to eat each day. Guid­ance is giv­en to help them make bet­ter choices.

There are Cons

• A top com­plaint that some peo­ple ask is whether the Noom app is all “worth it.” For exam­ple, you do get oth­er health apps, such as MyFit­ness­Pal, which also pro­vides sim­i­lar type track­ing capa­bil­i­ties as Noom does. After all, Duke Uni­ver­si­ty researched these types of free apps for peo­ple to track their progress. They showed that there might not be a dif­fer­ence in results whether you pay for the ser­vice or not.

• Anoth­er thing that is frus­trat­ing for Noom users is that the app is only avail­able on your smart­phone – this makes it frus­trat­ing if you want to check it all out on your tablet or com­put­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly when you think of the mon­ey you are paying.

• Anoth­er down­side is the hours of oper­a­tion. Often when you’re din­ing out or trav­el­ling, a few nutri­tion prob­lems or ques­tions arise. But unfor­tu­nate­ly, if you want after-hours sup­port, you can reach a goal spe­cial­ist, but at addi­tion­al charges – the cost, though, might make you lim­it this.

• Lots of peo­ple don’t like the lan­guage used on Noom, a kind of con­de­scend­ing lan­guage, almost as if you are doing some­thing wrong or abnormal.

Any­way, back to the diet, so after going through the series of ques­tions you get asked when you down­load the app, you will receive a 16-week nutri­tion plan plus a cer­ti­fied health coach to help you reach your per­son­al goals. Over these 16 weeks, you will be asked to note your fit­ness activ­i­ties and what you eat. Noom will encour­age you to read nutri­tion and health arti­cles to pro­mote lifestyle changes daily. It will also help you to dis­tin­guish healthy foods from not-so-healthy foods – they do this by colour-cod­ing your food entries. For instance, bad foods might be labelled as red, and good foods are labelled as green. Noom con­nects with all its 47 mil­lion app users, so you get plen­ty of sup­port. In fact, all the social sup­port received by the Noom users through the group net­works was one huge moti­va­tor in food log­ging and encour­ag­ing them in their weight loss.

Last but not least

The take­away here regard­ing the Noom diet is that it doesn’t appear to work for you if you are not motivated. Noom is all about mak­ing lifestyle changes. You need to put in dai­ly work and con­tin­ue the changes dur­ing and after the 16 weeks. Over­all, Noom’s per­son­al­ized and com­mu­ni­ty-based app scores many points for bring­ing in such edu­ca­tion­al val­ue. Even for those who are not well, like those who have dia­betes, there is a dia­betes-friend­ly diet. If you want to learn about health and how to achieve weight loss through inspir­ing arti­cles and nutri­tion­al advice, then Noom might just be the per­fect app that you’ve been wait­ing for to help you to achieve just that!