After six months of Noom for losing weight I’m leaving it. Noom is great for starting a diet and exercise tracking habit. Once the habit is in place there are better apps for continuing.

I started Noom in January, 2023 as a New Year’s resolution to lose weight and get in shape. I had heard about Noom on NPR podcasts (Hidden Brain podcast) and I thought, “Why not?” My previous diet tracker from the last time I really lost some weight (2005 or so) had been a text file and a perl script, so I thought I would give it a shot. I bought a Garmin Instinct 2 smartwatch and signed myself up for Noom.

It worked! After six months I had achieved my weight loss goal for 2023, losing 13.9% of my body weight, and establishing a habit of diet and exercise tracking.

Noom weight loss graph

As the Noom subscription runs for six months I had it in my calendar to cancel Noom before they charged me again. I canceled and now I am using the free (with ads) version of Cronometer. I’ve been using Cronometer for one week and I’m happy with it.

What is great about Noom:

Noom is great for getting started and establishing a habit

If you’re just starting out all Noom asks you is your goals and to commit and say “I Believe.” Once you are using it Noom offers diet and fitness tracking, and a daily calorie goal to try and hit. It divides your eating into meals and reminds you to log each one, and it gives you a lot of pats on the back for weighing yourself and logging meals and losing weight. It offers daily lessons pulled from the material in the Noom book, ranging from how to shop in the grocery to how to evaluate a scientific study. The philosophy is a multi-pronged approach on getting rid of thought distortions and bad habits and replacing them with good habits from an expert psychology team.

Noom also does a good job of starting small and then slowly raising the bar. I pulled this graph out of the raw data from Noom which they gave to me as a data dump of everything on request. It shows my daily calorie budget (adjusted for activity logged) going from 2550 calories at the beginning to 2150 at the end. It does this automatically behind the scenes so that each day you just have to hit your caloric goal. This is a big improvement over my text file and perl script from back in the day where my calorie goals were pretty static, leading to hunger at the beginning and poor results at the end. Noom did a good job of making sure I ate enough to feel full but still kept losing weight.

Calorie budget vs. date

Why I’m not continuing with Noom:

  1. The cost. $200 for six months is fine if you are trying to get started with food logging. If you stick with it and lose weight it’s a very small investment. But for continuing, Cronometer is $50/year for the paid version, or free with reduced features and ads.

  2. Application bugs. I saw a week of the app crashing every time I logged food, I saw several times of weigh-ins disappearing randomly, whenever I would add a food to the database it still would not be available for me to select.

  3. Bad UI design. 3/5 of the menu bar at the top is dedicated to a Share link, a link to a marketplace where I could buy things like a wifi scale, and “Noom circles” which is a community of people using Noom. I never used any of these. To log meals (an action I do 3x-5x a day) I have to scroll down under the fold. To weigh in (an action I do 1x a day) I have to scroll down even below logging meals. The hamburger menu isn’t much better. It has a button for Memes, a button for “get $20,” and a button for “Recipes” but no button for “Log your meals.”

  4. No way to get long term trend of calories, only option is the weekly reports. No way to download all the weekly report. The calorie budget vs. time graph shown above I generated by hand from the noom data dump. script: grep calorieBudget= daily_calorie_budgets.csv | awk -F, '{print $19","$15}' | sort > dailyCalories.csv

  5. Food database is not that good. it’s missing many foods, I can’t add foods to it, and it has inaccurate calorie counts for some foods. After carefully adding Lidl yogurt to the database it still never became available as an option. I gave up and logged it as Dannon yogurt, which is fine, but it means I can’t just scan the barcode on the package.

  6. After a while it can be tedious. Once I have established the food logging habit, I don’t need all the extra bells and whistles. I don’t need to read about the paleo diet, or about veganism, I just want to log my breakfast, and I don’t need a notification or a pat on the back before or after I do it. Just let me do it as quickly as possible, with as few clicks as possible.

Upshot:

If you are looking to get started with diet and exercise tracking Noom is a great choice. You really just have to go to the Noom website and sign up and Noom will take it from there. If you can budget $200 to improve your diet and fitness just do it! You have nothing to lose but pounds and pounds of butter you’re lugging around on your body. Actually it’s closer to lard, but I don’t have two pounds of that handy.

Two pounds of butter.

Two pounds of butter, banana for scale

If you are already logging your food and exercise, but considering Noom, or if $200 breaks the budget, give it a miss. Cronometer is a great app, and if you want to read the Noom mindset, there’s a Noom book so you can buy that or check it out from the library for free.

P.S.

If you do decide to cancel Noom, be firm about it. I mentioned they are a team of psychology experts right? They will try to retain you as a subscriber, with about five different offers on your way out the door. I took a screenshot of the cancellation just to be sure.