What Is the Noom Diet App? Advantages, Disadvantages, Effectiveness, and More

Noom is an app-based diet. With a personal coach, chat-based community, and nutrition plan, the app provides motivation and professional guidance for users to make easy lifestyle changes on their own.

But some questions remain. Will it help you lose weight? What are its downsides? Are the coaches available 24/7? In this detailed guide, we answer all these questions and more.

The Noom app, found in the App Store and on Google Play, offers two monthly memberships: the Noom Weight program, with a range of different plans, and the Noom Mood program, available as a single four-month plan.

For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be discussing Noom Weight.

Over the duration of your plan, you’ll be asked to document your fitness activities and food intake — normal weight loss app stuff.

But Noom then takes its process to the next level by encouraging users to read daily nutrition and health articles (and take quizzes after) to encourage lifestyle changes. Noom bases its lessons around the ideas used in cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychological treatment for establishing helpful patterns of behavior.

It also helps users distinguish healthy foods from not-so-healthy foods by color-coding your food entries as green, yellow, or orange, according to how much they fill you up and their calorie content.

Last, Noom connects you with a personal coach as well as millions of other users on the app, so you’re able to chat with and support each other.

Angela Lemond, RDN, a dietitian based in Plano, Texas, likens Noom to WW (Weight Watchers) because of its personal coaching component. (WW offers in-person personal coaching, while Noom offers it virtually.)

That similarity may be why Noom claims to be the “Weight Watchers for millennials.” But how good is it as a weight loss strategy?

Pros

• Its focus on behavioral change, rather than quick fixes, can lead to longer-lasting results.
• Users may find an app-based program convenient and enjoy its anonymity.
• Access to a community of other users provides support.
• The lack of a one-size-fits-all approach gives users some flexibility.
• Research indicates that users can successfully lose weight through the app.

Cons

• Coaches cannot provide expert nutrition advice.

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• Labeling foods could trigger or encourage disordered eating.
• The focus on calorie density is limiting and doesn’t account for other nutritional content.
• Food logging and guidance on what to eat is limited.
• Research suggests you’ll need high levels of motivation for success.

A four-month Noom Weight program costs $169, with longer plans cheaper and shorter ones more expensive.

• Monthly auto-renewing plan, $70
• Two-month auto-renewing plan, $129
• Three-month auto-renewing plan, $159
• Six-month auto-renewing plan, $179
• Nine-month auto-renewing plan, $195
• Annual auto-renewing plan, $209

When you sign up for a trial, you can try Noom for 7 or 14 days for as little as 50 cents.

Foods in the green category are the ones that you should eat most frequently. You should eat foods in the orange category least frequently and in smaller portions. Yellow category foods sit between the two.

Here are some examples of green and orange category foods to give you an idea of what this means:

10 Foods to Eat

• Apples
• Bananas
• Broccoli
• Brown rice
• Nonfat cheese
• Nonfat yogurt
• Oatmeal
  
• Spinach
• Tuna (canned in water)
• Whole-grain bread
  

10 Foods to Limit

• Almonds
• Chia seeds
• Coconut oil
• Desserts
• Sunflower seeds
  
• Olive oil
• Peanut butter
• Raisins
• Red meats
• Walnuts
  

The Noom diet is flexible. As no specific foods are off-limits, you should be able to tailor it to any dietary needs or preferences you might have.

Here is a meal plan for a week, created by one of Noom’s coaches. It is based on the Mediterranean diet, an eating pattern focusing on plant foods and healthy sources of fat.

This meal plan allows for batch cooking, with dinners also on the menu as lunch the following day. The coach recommends different meals in subsequent weeks so that you can eat a wider variety of foods.

Noom Diet Shopping List

Here’s a list of green category and yellow category foods to include on your shopping list if you’re starting out on the Noom diet:

Proteins

• Chicken
• Tofu
• Tuna (canned in water)
  
• Turkey breast
• Salmon

Produce

• Bell peppers
• Broccoli
• Cucumbers
• Spinach
• Tomatoes
  

Grains

• Brown rice
• Oatmeal
• Quinoa
• Whole-grain bread
• Whole-grain tortillas
  

Eggs and Dairy

• Eggs
• Low-fat cheese
• Nonfat cheese
  
• Nonfat milk
• Nonfat yogurt

You can track your exercise with the Noom app, and the lessons Noom provides go over how important exercise is in the bigger picture of weight loss.

When that time comes, people who are new to exercise will start with a goal of 200 steps a day, with this amount growing as your confidence and ability grows.

Here’s how it works. After downloading the app, you’ll answer a series of questions about your current weight, your weight or fitness goals, and what your past experiences with dieting and weight loss have been like.

On the basis of this information, you’ll receive a plan that includes:

• Daily lessons about nutrition and behavior
• Interactive challenges
• Food and exercise logging
• Calorie budgeting
• Tools for tracking water intake, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels

Noom programs are broken down into stages. You’ll begin by working with coaches to build up the baseline skills you need, followed by refining those skills and integrating them into your daily routine.

Several published studies have investigated whether Noom works for weight loss.

Researchers followed 140 people with prediabetes and observed that the mean weight loss in starters who read one or more lessons per week on four or more core weeks — the phase of the program where users learn baseline skills — was 6.15 percent body weight.

Completing the program and reading nine or more lessons per week on core weeks resulted in 7.36 percent body-weight loss. And those who completed the maintenance phase of the approach — the phase where users practice and refine skills developed during core weeks — and performed any action in the post-core weeks, lost 8.98 percent of their body weight.

After 24 weeks, participants lost an average of 16.8 pounds (lb), and at 65 weeks, they lost an average of 19.3 lb.

The researchers argued that since, on average, women weigh about 10 pounds more one year postpartum than they did pre-baby, this may be a tool to help prevent permanent weight gain.

The takeaway is that Noom doesn’t appear to work if you aren’t motivated. Because Noom is based on lifestyle changes, it requires you to put in daily work and continue those changes even after 16 weeks — whether that means documenting your every morsel or reading up on (and studying) nutrition tips.

Also, your health coach is only available for an eight hour window of your choice between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., so you’ll have to face down those midnight munchies on your own.

One final important thing to keep in mind is that many of these studies were coauthored by Andreas Michaelides, Noom's chief psychology officer. That doesn’t mean the findings aren’t valid, but the company does benefit when the research concludes with favorable outcomes.

The Noom diet is an app-based approach to weight loss that focuses on counting calories and developing healthy behaviors. You can log your meals, water intake, and exercise through the app, and have access to Noom coaches and a community of other users.

Though Noom says no foods are off-limits, some argue that the app’s color-coding system for foods can encourage unhealthy ways of viewing food.