Anyone doing noom? I’m reading up on it and it sounds nice. But do I need to spend $149 for 5 months? I have gone back up to 192, +2 from my low of 190. I May have gotten into a cookie dough habit. Anyway, what intrigued me about this noom is the behavior modification angle. I know why I’m fat. I’ve had 11 babies over 20 years and lived on mnms for most of that time. I’d like help with changing behaviors and understanding why I’m doing what I’m doing. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer is I’m lazy and addicted to sugar. So do I need to pay for that insight?
I've done Noom and have had a good experience, although I think that's because it's a good fit with my personality and habits. (My wife tried it and didn't have nearly as good results).
I don't know what their current pricing structure is, but at the time I started I think it was two weeks free and then $50/month. The part that provided the most value to me was the food diary. Now, there are tons of food-tracking apps, many of them free (more on that in a second), but what I like about Noom is their green-yellow-red classification system. I found that if I focus on total calories and red calories, I get the best results. (The one downside is that you can only enter food via the mobile app; sometimes I really would have preferred to have a desktop interface.) But in general, I've become a huge believer in food diaries. It used to be something I could only do for a short period, like a week at a time. Now, I can see myself doing it every day for the rest of my life.
I found the behavioral articles helpful ... for awhile. The first time I did Noom, I felt after a few months like I had pretty much gone through all the useful articles and they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. But prior to that point they fit well with my style. It was less about the specific assignments as it was making me think about my behaviors and reflect on changes I could make.
The parts I never found particularly helpful were the coaching and group chat. Just didn't work for me. Weight loss to me isn't a social activity; I'm someone who could never in a million years imagine going to an in-person Weight Watchers meeting.
Anyway, I did it the first time from January 2019 until around August. The results were great; I lost more than 15 lbs during that time. At that point I stopped paying and used another food tracking app, but my weight loss stalled and then started creeping back up. So the following January I started it again, but after a couple months I decided the articles were no longer helpful (they were mostly just repeats of what I had done the year before). But -- and this is the key part -- at that point I realized that the only feature that I wanted to keep using, the food diary,
was completely free!
So that's what I've been doing for the past year and a half. I've lost an additional 17 lbs, and I haven't had to pay anything. (A lot of the weight loss is due to behavioral changes I made during the pandemic, which is a whole other post).
TLDR: If you can get a free trial, try it out for a little while and see if it fits your style. If it does, pay until you no longer find it useful. It's not for everyone, but if it is I think it can help develop some good lifetime habits.