The Noom paradox

Unravel the enigma of the Noom paradox. A phenomenon that intertwines the realms of health, technology, and psychology. A journey that questions conventional wisdom, challenges norms, and redefines the path to sustainable weight loss and wellness.

Noom is a scam

A lot of people go through Noom without either curing their chronic illness or getting a diagnosis of disordered eating

• Instead, many people have the same experience almost everyone has on a diet: They lose some weight, stop the diet, and then gain it back
• Yves Grant is a 50-year-old technical writer who joined Noom in 2019
• He liked that Noom advertised itself as offering community support, and that it told him it wouldn’t be a diet but a lifestyle change
• In practice, Grant says, Noom didn’t quite live up to his expectations
• While the daily psychological tips were useful, they rapidly got overwhelming

In one corner is the traditional diet culture most American women grew up in, which holds that weight is a crucial indicator of health

Under this system, it’s an article of faith that if you simply exercise a little willpower and expend more calories than you take in, you will lose weight.

• In the other corner are the rising anti-diet and Health at Every Size movements, which hold that the correlations between weight and health are not nearly as straightforward as diet culture would have you think
• Most diets do not result in long-term weight loss and can even damage your metabolism in the long run.

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Food tracking and calorie restriction were useful

Between May and August 2019, Grant lost 30 pounds, and he says he grew to enjoy the feeling of hunger

• After that initial drop, Grant’s weight loss plateaued and he lost interest in Noom and stopped logging in
• Now, he has gained back half the weight he lost, in part because he found the diet unsustainable
• Grant doesn’t blame Noom for his regained weight, he blames his own bad habits

Noom was chronically understaffed

The goal was to have each coach working with 300 users a week, but at peak season, Amy says she found herself handling 800 active users per week.

• Noom does not break out the ratio of coaches to users, but says caseloads are closely monitored to ensure that all users are receiving the support they need to reach their goals.

Noom is a buzzy weight loss app targeted to young people

Its messaging insists that it teaches users healthy, sustainable habits that leave them feeling happy and satisfied

• Critics say it is just another diet app at best and a deceptive gateway to disordered eating at worst
• The fight between Noom and its critics is part of a larger cultural war that has begun to play out over the past 10 years over how we should think about food, weight, bodies, and health

If you or someone you know is struggling with disordered eating, there are people who want to help

All of these resources are free

• In the US: National Eating Disorders Association helpline 1-800-931-2237, or use the online help chat
• Crisis Text Line: Text NEDA to 741741 for 24-hour, confidential eating disorder crisis counseling

After a few months, Davis decided to cancel her Noom membership before the free trial was over.

She found, though, that Noom had gotten into her head: She kept counting calories and she kept trying to restrict them as much as possible. – “I was doing things that are considered normal by some – by Noom, by the general culture. But they’re actually not. They’re disordered behaviors.”

Amy tried to work closely with the cases she was assigned to

She would tell them that the calorie budget they had been assigned was a minimum, not a maximum, to try to keep people from starving themselves.

• Still, she found herself fighting against the design of the app, which flared bright red warning signs whenever users went over their calorie budgets.

Amy says that she had a productive conversation about the article with her supervisor, and saw plenty of her colleagues discussing it in good faith

Ultimately, though, Amy felt that Noom’s response to the article was dismissive

The anti-diet movement has been around since the 1960’s

The relationship between weight and overall health is unclear

• It’s possible to be both a healthy fat person and an unhealthy thin person
• Most of the time, dieters end up gaining back all the weight they lost within five years of the initial diet
• Studies consistently show that it is very, very rare for dieters both to lose weight and to maintain their weight loss
• Human bodies don’t like scarcity. If you restrict your calories, after an initial period of losing weight, studies suggest that your metabolism will slow. It will become easier, not harder, for you to put on weight. And your body will crave more calories with more and more strength, until you break your diet.
• In addition to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and high cholesterol rates, diet-related death rates also double or triple for people with diabetes and heart disease.

Amy decided to leave the dietitian program after hearing the message over and over again that “we’re not a diet”

Shortly after the HuffPost article came out, Amy transitioned from full-time to part-time.

• Six months later, she had enough money to leave for good and focus on developing her private practice as an anti-diet dietician

Backlash to Noom intensified during the pandemic

In January, Alina Stone tweeted, “every noom ad is like ‘we’re NOT a diet. we’re an eating disorder :).'”

• The joke was enough to get Noom trending worldwide, with former Noomers sharing their stories in the replies
• For ex-Noomers, the anti-diet nutrition principles that the company claimed to teach aren’t quite neutral territory anymore
• Sonya Renée Taylor, the founder of The Body Is Not an Apology, says she wasn’t surprised to see Noom present itself with co-opted anti-Diet language
• “I expect capitalism to capitalize,” she says, but that doesn’t mean Noom isn’t hurting people

She has Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder that can include weight gain among its symptoms, and she had been gaining weight steadily for years.

Noom presented itself as an affordable solution: a way to lose weight that wasn’t really a diet

• She was already tracking her daily exercise and food intake in a series of detailed charts and graphs
• The one big change Noom did offer Davis was that it cut her daily calories, by a lot
• On 1,200 calories she was very tired, very achy, and very irritable.

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