The good, the bad and the helpful humor of Noom
I walk around the house with a mini purse tethered to my body so my smartphone can record every step I take.
I wear my lightest PJs so the scale will read a fraction of a pound lower each morning.
I wonder if ending breakfast with a peach is good because it’s healthy, or bad since the fruit will add “yellow” points to the day’s food report.
With lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and herbs, you can eat well on Noom or any diet. I’m pretty sure this dish (which doesn’t have all those ingredients I just listed; I took pictures on the wrong day) is the one-pan chicken thighs with coconut creamed corn from cooking.nytimes.com. The coconut milk is kind of a Noom no-no, except you can have everything in moderation—so stop after one serving.
It seems I am a NOOM-com-poop.
My new adventure is called Noom, and I’m peeved. I tripped upon a free two-week trial for this weight-loss program I’d never heard of three days ago and I jumped right in. WTF else do I have to do imprisoned here in the house? Free. Trial. Less fat? Let’s get started. ALL IN.
Today is Day 3, and I am questioning whether to eat a juicy summer fruit. As I stomp around the kitchen to retrieve the fuzzy treat, I clutch my mobile phone. Over tea this morning, surfing through the Noom app, I realized Noom wants to count every step I take every day and plans to do that through the phone. I never got a Fitbit because I knew step-counting would drive me batty; I’m tense by default and choose not to add new concerns to my overactive brain. But apparently I need 2,600 of those foot-by-foot babies today. So far: 59. Geez.
I have never been on any diet plan, not even the smart ones like Weight Watchers. When I want to slim down, I eat less and exercise more. I’ve been stuck in an ever-gaining cycle lately though: age. I thought the pandemic would be a gift to my dress size.
I’ve been trapped in my home for three full months. I cook simple Mediterranean-style dinners instead of feasting on the multi-course, multi-beverage menu tastings that make my work such a treat. I bake multi-grain breads in the dusty machine I retrieved from a high shelf. I exercise more than ever. I even clean my own house, a fatiguing exercise I’d avoided for the 30 years I could welcome strangers with mops into my home.
Shrimp, fennel, more herbs … low-cal, healthful and sooo good. This is another cooking.nytimes.com recipe called spicy shrimp with blistered cucumbers, corn and tomato. Other than one teaspoon of brown sugar, it’s 100 percent excellent in terms of healthy ingredients. The flavor is fabulous.
Now I have to hold my iPhone every second that I’m upright, hence the ridiculous permanent purse. And to worry about stone fruit? Stupid.
I honestly thought sheltering in place would make my waistline smaller. I’d envisioned my love handles dissolving, the scale inching toward lower numbers by the week. Sure, I watch a bit more TV—hey, Jane the Virgin, which means more sitting still on the sofa. But other than that I thought I was on track to slim down a smidge.
Didn’t happen. Ounce by ounce, the scale showed more weight gradually until I’d added two permanent new pounds to the extra already bulging my belly. I have a small frame—so petite that I wear girls’ hats and eyeglasses. Two pounds shows.
So I signed up for Noom. It’s a mobile phone app that presents itself as cheerful and logical. “Stop dieting. Get life-long results,” it says.
I filled out a questionnaire on my Mac. It was practically fun.
For a meal on the go, these organic energy bars by Kate’s Real Food are a much better pick than supermarket granola bars.
… Fast forward from when I wrote what’s above. I am now in Month 5 of sheltering in place and on Day 71 of Noom. I am down 11 pounds. Five of my friends are Nooming too, so I have group insight into the pros and cons.
The bottom line is that I think Noom is a good program, and I recommend it. Still, it has flaws, of course. Here’s what I think.
What Noom Is Like
Noom is like a little teacher/brainwasher/coach/scolder that lives on your smartphone.
Every day, you fire up the app and do several tasks:
- Read your lessons. Noom is as much about psychology as it is about dieting. Each day, you read a few short lessons about the whys and hows of choosing foods, exercising, being mindful, taming the “elephant” that makes you tear through a bag of Doritos, and breathing methods to make you less tense so you’ll be less likely to overeat. These info bites are small, witty, cutesy and presented with inviting colorful graphics, yet they’re educational.
- Get coached. You’ll be assigned a coach who checks in once a week or so. Once you pay after the trial, you’ll also be put into a group with a different coach together with other new Noomers.
- Log your meals. Three meals a day and two snacks—Noom has a place to add in what you eat. Once you do, click “Analysis.” There, you’ll see not only how many calories you’ve consumed but which items fit into green, yellow and red categories. The goal is to eat loads of green-category foods, such as turkey breast, broccoli and Benefiber powder—they’re less dense apparently, and fewer of the others. Down in the red zone, you might have a healthy item like olive oil plus, say, a custard-filled donut. Your choice. Noom encourages you to eat however many meals works for your body, at whatever times you please.
- Add on exercise reports. Zoom automatically counts your steps. If you clean the house, or cycle around your subdivision, or do a Zumba class, add it on. For me, recording my bike rides and strength classes are like saying to the invisible Mean Girls watching (in my mind), “I’m doing this. Lots of this. Take that!”
- Record your weight. First thing every morning. Once you type it in, look at the chart to that shows your day-to-day progress.
What Noom Does Well
Tone. Personality matters, and Noom is a spunky little thing. Each little lesson is written clearly, in a vivacious voice complemented by colorful drawings. It’s full of puns, and clever hashtags, and self-effacing comments meant to make the information seem less intimidating. It works.
Change how you think. Noom’s goal is to get you to change your habits. It wants you to eat nutritious foods, in moderate amounts, and to exercise in a way that works for you. Splurge foods like cake and chips? Enjoy them, just not every day. Noom teaches you what foods to choose, how to recognize if you’re eating for hunger or for another reason, how to control portion sizes and that it’s OK to eat a Carvel cone now and then. As a friend told a friend, “It gets into your head.” After a couple of months, you may think, “Oh, I’m not hungry; I’m feeling anxious. I can do a breathing exercise for that” instead of downing the bag of Wise salt-and-vinegar flavor. You may urge yourself, “I’ll grab a handful of cherries with breakfast” because you know you’ll feel better all day if you toss fresh fruit into your first meal of the day.
Instill logic. Noom is smart. It’s grounded in science and psychology. It lets users eat what they want, when they want. It has no fad diet element, no all-or-nothing food requirements, no starvation requirement.
Base ideas on solid research. Whether it’s talking about psychology, physiology, how to know when to trust a research study, the pros and cons of fad diets … Noom uses reputable sources. It then boils down the findings into bite-size chunks of useful info. I trust what it tells me, and I am a well-read know-it-all about all things weight-watching.
Encourage exercise. Noom counts your steps every day, as mentioned above, and it encourages more exercise—in a respectful way that inspires you to push your own boundaries a bit.
What Noom Could Do Better
Sync with other devices. You can sign up for Noom on your desktop or laptop. After that, it’s all app, all the time, except for correspondence with your coach. I hate that. I have to crouch my head over a tiny phone to type in recipes, log meals, mark my day’s weight, read the day’s lessons, add in my extra exercise and see if I’ve met my step goal yet. That’s bad for my eyes and my posture. If I could only take the same actions seated at my desk, on my ergonomic chair, with my ergonomic keyboard and big monitor, I’d have a much better experience. I’d also get more out of the lessons. Hunching over a 5.7” x 2.79” device to read, type and sift through lists to find my morning’s cold brew brand (Chameleon: highly recommend) does not appeal. So I was little duped there. Even my iPad doesn’t sync with the iPhone app.
Improve the coaching system. I was delighted to have a coach. Quickly, I shared my issue: I’m doing everything right yet keep getting fatter. The coach was no help. I envision teams of 20-somethings flying from customer to customer five days a week, none educated enough to know how to handle questions from a cocky baby boomer. Not to mention my dairy questions: I need lots of calcium, and the coach just didn’t grasp the depth of my concern. Another time, I told her I felt like all the smoothies and salads had me feeling like I wasn’t eating enough solid food. Her response involved finding vegetarian breakfast items. Huh? Not only do I do well with animal proteins, but just a few days later my Noom lesson focused on the benefits of animal proteins (for those who eat them) as a way to feel satisfied without overeating. I now start most days with smoked salmon on artisan multigrain toast followed by some sort of fruit. Useless. I stopped writing to the coach.
Match up support groups better. The first few people in my support group were like me: in shape, healthy but over their ideal weights. Then the group got bigger, and the new posters talked about sitting on the sofa all evening eating junk food and drinking six-packs of beer. I’m not judging; those folks are just in a different place. I had to surf through so many feeds to find helpful info that I stopped visiting the support group at all.
Improve the food logging app. I’m told the Noom food logger is better than most, and it’s clear that the creators tried to make it easy to use. Still, I hit snags. I type in foods and hope to find a match, scan the bar code to get an exact match, or type in a recipe and then choose the number of servings I ate. Every day, I have to re-scale the quantity of the same exact food. My biggest beef is in the “Create a new dish” area: I can’t scan ingredients in that section. That function is absent, and I’d really rather scan in my soy sauce than have to search for the brand.
Make the food categories more sensible. Since I trust Noom now, I feel bad questioning its choices. But why is lower-fat Swiss cheese rated red, creamy pimiento cheese yellow? Sweetened Iberia coconut water green, fennel seeds red (1 calorie for a bunch. 1! And 100 percent natural). A chicken liver is green (don’t judge; I broil and devour whatever comes with a raw chicken and feel iron-ready for life for weeks), mango kefir red. Sign. I just go with it.
Over here in Day 71, after 2½ months whining that I want more food, more wine, more sugar and oh-lord-please a plate of crispy golden french fries, I’m liking this Noom thing. I no longer feel dissatisfied. I miss snacking on foods that don’t come from farm stands, but I don’t think about them much anymore. I’m trim. I’m energetic. I’m eating more fruits and vegetables. And better yet, the Noom psycho-stuff is working: I can see sticking with this way of thinking and eating once I log off for good.
The marketing says, “Stop dieting. Get life-long results.” Maybe the lessons will stick.
(P.S. If you know someone who is currently on Noom [I stopped when my three months were up], ask that person for a referral. Then you’ll get a discount and the referrer will receive a $20 amazon gift card.)