Losing weight is often easier said than done. With traditional calorie counting and restrictive eating, it’s hard to stick to the diets and programs we sign up for. Noom, the self-proclaimed “Weight Watchers for millennials,” claims to be different. 

Using a psychology-based approach, Noom aims to not only help you lose weight but also form healthy habits so you can reach your goals. But before you sign up and pay for a subscription, it’s good to know more. Here’s everything you might be curious about Noom, including its pros, cons, who should use the app and who shouldn’t. 

What is Noom?

Noom stepped onto the scene in 2008 and is now one of the most popular weight loss apps on the market. Despite claiming not to be a dieting app, Noom uses all the self-monitoring tools of traditional diets, like calorie deficits and food entry. 

However, it’s unique in a few key ways. Noom uses a psychology-based method that aims to help you make healthy eating choices and habit changes, all so you can reach your goals — weight loss included. It’s about a healthier lifestyle, not just fitting into your old jeans. The jeans are a bonus, but being healthy is the real goal. 

With Noom, it’s not just what you’re eating; it’s about learning healthy recipes and examining how you think about food. Noom seems more like a comprehensive wellness program that integrates diet, exercise and behavior. Now, this isn’t a new concept — Noom just packages and markets the tools better than other programs. 

There aren’t any studies that investigate Noom’s effectiveness in comparison to other dieting apps. However, a study of 36,000 Noom users found that after nine months of using the app, 78% of participants lost weight, 23% of which lost more than 10% of their starting weight. That’s not enough research to get a full picture, however. There’s no data on how well people are able to maintain their new weight long-term, which is one of the biggest obstacles for dieters.

How does Noom work? 

Noom considers itself a “lifestyle,” not a diet app. While I partly agree with that, Noom’s core goal is to help you lose weight. 

When you sign up, you’re asked a series of questions. They’re a lot to get through, but if you answer them all, Noom has the best chance of personalizing your health plan to fit you and your goals. The questions start standard — weight, height, gender — then move into your goals and motivations. You then have the chance to set your weight loss goals and time frames, which impacts how many calories Noom advises you to eat during your program. (The more weight you aim to lose, the more of a calorie deficit you need to maintain.)

Note that regardless of your goal weight, Noom won’t recommend a plan that is less than 1,200 calories per day for women and 1,400 calories for men. Based on online reviews, it’s fairly common for Noom to recommend that bottom limit. However, 1,200 or 1,400 calories is far too low for most adults. For context, the US Food and Drug Administration only recommends such a low number of calories for a young child (and one that’s not very active, at that).

What you get in the Noom app

• Educational content. One of the ways Noom stands out is the educational content it offers. Instead of just helping you lose weight, it teaches you about nutrition and you’re prompted to reflect on your motivations and goals. 
• Goal tracking. Most apps offer the option to set and track your goals. Noom also includes biometric tracking. 
• Virtual coaching. With the virtual coach from Noom, you can choose how often you want to interact with them. I like this flexibility because it allows you to decide how much support you need. Note, the coaching is through a chat function, not through phone or video calls. 

Not surprisingly, Noom all comes down to what you eat. Noom categorizes food into three groups: green, yellow and red. Each color signifies the caloric density of the foods within the category. Foods in the green category have the lowest caloric density and the highest level of nutrients. Conversely, red food has the highest calories and the least nutrients, like cake or chips. 

Noom recommends a breakdown of 30% green foods, 45% red foods and 25% red foods. I like this because it’s more realistic than other apps. While it’s suggesting that you eat fewer foods that fall in the red category, it isn’t wholly restricting anything. Noom also has a pretty thorough list of recipes and their color breakdown. So if you’re starting from scratch, you can meal prep from the app. 

How much does Noom cost?

A monthly subscription to Noom starts at $70 a month, with discounts if you purchase multiple months at once. It’s not the cheapest app on the market. In fact, there are free apps with some of the same features. That said, if you think you’ll benefit from the coaching aspects and really want to learn more about living healthy, Noom might be worth that cost. 

I should mention that, at least presently, Noom is altering its prices. I can’t say how long this will last, but for the time being, you have the option to sign up for a lower price. Don’t expect this trial price to last forever, though. 

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When I signed up, I was prompted to buy a three-month subscription — which now costs $159. Even if you take advantage of the lower price tag at first, a three-month sign-on isn’t preferable, especially since it was my only option on the screen. I tried to find an option for a month-by-month subscription package but couldn’t find one. The trial is only seven days long; that’s not a lot of time to decide if you like the app enough to pay a large sum of money. 

After some digging (and already being subscribed for three months), I found that you can opt to buy Noom in “bulk” to cut costs. The monthly auto-renewing plan will be the most expensive option, but you can save some money by subscribing for multiple months or even on an annual basis. 

Benefits of Noom

Overall, there are a lot of good things about Noom that stood out to me. The app itself is user-friendly, and it’s easy to sign up. Everything on the app is organized to make sense, and nothing is hard to find. If you didn’t want to use any extra features offered, you could get by just using the home page. 

Doesn’t cut out food groups

A lot of diets out there rule out certain food groups. And while this might be an effective way to tip the scales in your favor, ultimately, it can lead to unhealthy eating habits. With Noom, no food groups are off-limits. Yes, food is categorized by calorie density, and there are recommendations attached to each section, but nothing is presented as untouchable. You have the flexibility and autonomy to eat what you want, even if Noom encourages you to eat less of those high-sugar or fatty foods. 

Focuses on behavior, not just what you eat

In the end, it’s all about losing weight. However, the journey Noom takes you on is more holistic than that. It’s about more than just the foods you input into the tracker. Noom aims to help you establish healthy eating habits and break the bad ones. It also actively reinforces the fact that it’s OK to slip or eat something just to indulge. Noom feels more like an understanding friend and less like a drill sergeant. This could help promote long-term weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. 

You learn along the way

When I first opened my Noom app and saw all the lessons that awaited me, I was hesitant. However, the lessons were helpful, and I did learn a lot. The lessons and tips provided are integral to the Noom experience. When you use Noom, you’re learning and truly thinking about the habits you have.

The lessons vary and are generally pretty quick. There’s even an option to have the app read them to you. You’ll start off pretty simple, covering things like caloric density and which foods are better for you. Then you’ll pick up helpful insights like past dieting fads and debunked food myths you shouldn’t believe. 

Cons to consider before you sign up

It’s still a diet app

For all of its benefits, you can’t forget that Noom is a weight-loss app at its core. Unhealthy habits can still arise. In addition to calorie counting and food tracking, the app encourages you to weigh yourself each morning, another common dieting technique. It might seem harmless and even necessary to track progress, but it’s also easy to fixate on and could lead to disordered eating. 

Studies have shown that self-weighing can be connected to lower levels of self-esteem and lower body satisfaction. I’m not saying that weighing yourself each day means you’ll definitely experience these things; it’s just something to watch out for. The scale isn’t the only representation of the process made. 

Low calorie recommendations

Noom’s low calorie recommendations are one of its most concerning cons. If you do sign up and receive a low calorie “budget,” it’s worth getting a second opinion from a trusted doctor, dietitian or nutritionist before you start restricting any foods.

It’s not cheap

Another thing to consider is the price. Noom isn’t cheap at $70 a month. Noom offers a lot more in terms of education than other programs, so if you’re interested in a holistic approach to your health, then the price might not be that scary. For someone who just wants an app that tracks their steps and food intake, the advanced features Noom offers aren’t likely worth the money.

It’s virtual

If you thrive in the digital space, then this one won’t phase you. But for those who like the accountability and relationship of a personal trainer or gym partner, the fact that Noom is virtual might be an issue. It’s completely technology-dependent. You can register online, but everything else is on the app. So you’re required to access and track everything on your phone or tablet.

The bottom line

I like Noom for its virtual coaching features and educational content. Yes, it’s a dieting app, but if you commit to using Noom to its total capacity, then you’ll get more than just weight loss. All in all, Noom is a potentially healthful app, but it will only work if you stick with it. Ultimately it’s still on you to commit to healthy living; Noom can only do so much.

Who it’s good for

• People looking for more than just a dieting app. You’ll like Noom’s educational features that are geared towards a healthy lifestyle.
• People who need a virtual coach to keep them on track. 

Who won’t love it

• Anyone on a tight budget. Yes, some of the features are cool, but the cost is pretty high and the trial period is only seven days.
• People who thrive in a face-to-face relationship.
• People with a history of disordered eating. Noom’s calorie and food tracking could trigger unhealthy habits.

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.

— Update: 16-03-2023 — cohaitungchi.com found an additional article My Honest Noom Review After Trying It for 30 Days from the website www.active.com for the keyword reviews of noom diet.

By clicking on the product links in this article, we may receive a commission fee at no cost to you, the reader. Sponsorships and affiliate commissions help support our research so we can help you find the best products. Read our full affiliate disclosure here.

What is Noom?

Noom is a weight-loss app that has a unique approach to helping you manage your diet and lose weight. Instead of designing a rigid, one-size-fits-all system that restricts your food choices, Noom has developed a psychology-based approach to help you heal your relationship with food. I tried Noom for 30 days to see if this approach really works.

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Our Ratings

• Overall: 4.1/5
• Value/price point: 4/5
• UX: 4/5
• Information quality: 5/5
• Personalization: 5/5
• Convenience: 3/5
• Easy to follow: 4/5
• Accessibility: 3/5
• Community: 5/5
• Customer support: 3/5
• Goal attainment: 5/5

Getting Started on Noom

To complete your account set-up on Noom you have to first take a quiz. This quiz gathers information about you, your weight-loss goals, and your motivation. Based on this information, along with your height, weight, age, activity level, etc., Noom customizes a plan for you that includes a target for how many calories you should eat and lessons to help you change your habits and behavior.

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How Does Noom Work?

Noom is a weight loss program designed to help you lose weight. Like other apps, Noom does this by creating a calorie deficit based on estimated caloric needs. Noom factors in sex, age, weight, height, and other information to determine these needs for each individual user.

The difference between Noom and other weight loss apps, like Noom vs. Weight Watchers,  is that Noom focuses on small behavioral changes. This helps users establish a healthier lifestyle, rather than simply following a short-term diet.

Lifestyle Coaching

Every day, Noom gives you a short lesson about the psychological effects of negative thinking, focusing on food restriction, and why having the proper motivation will help you lose weight fast and reach your goal.

Weighing In

Noom wants you to weigh in every morning after you wake up. This is the best time to weigh in because you haven’t added any food or water to your stomach that could add pounds to the scale. Weighing in at the same time each day also helps you monitor your progress more accurately because your weight will fluctuate throughout the day. Keeping a daily record helps you see the bigger picture.

Tracking Meals

The meal tracking on Noom is the meat of the program. There are three ways to log your meals:

• Search. There is a database of dishes with preloaded nutrition content. Some of it seems input by other users, some of it seems more professional. If you search for common items, you will likely find some version of it in the database.
• Create your own. The app also lets you fully customize your own dishes. You’re responsible to input the ingredients and portion sizes to get an accurate count of your calories.
• Scan. Noom also lets you scan barcodes of ingredients or pre-packaged foods to streamline your food logging.

Food Categories

Instead of giving you recipes to follow or restricting foods in a list, Noom labels all foods based on caloric density, or how many calories a food has based on its weight. Noom puts all food into three categories:

• Red foods: These are calorie dense foods like red meat, cheeses, and processed foods. Small portions of these foods are higher in calories and the nutrients they offer aren’t enough to justify the calories.
• Yellow foods: In this category you have foods like legumes, fish and lean meats, and some vegetables like avocados that have high fat. These foods have nutrients but are also fairly calorie dense.
• Green foods: These are the foods with the lowest caloric density like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and other foods that will fill you up for very few calories.

Other Measurements

You can also input your exercise, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels if you’ve made those part of your weight-loss routine.

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How Much Does Noom Cost?

The average user begins with a 3-4-month subscription, which comes out to $42.25 per month, but you will be billed up front for the full amount of $169. Keep in mind that these prices can fluctuate, so check the Noom website beforehand to stay up-to-date.

Here’s a breakdown of Noom’s current subscription plans:

• Monthly auto-renewing plan: $70
• 2-month auto-renewing plan: $129
• 3-month auto-renewing plan: $159
• 4-month auto-renewing plan: $169
• 5-month auto-renewing plan: $174
• 6-month auto-renewing plan: $179
• 7-month auto-renewing plan: $184
• 8-month auto-renewing plan: $189
• 9-month auto-renewing plan: $195
• 10-month auto-renewing plan: $199
• 11-month auto-renewing plan: $205
• Annual auto-renewing plan: $209

If you’re still unsure about making the full financial commitment, start with the 14-day free trial and then decide if this is a weight-loss plan that you can stick with.

My Personal Experience with Noom

Before I started, I thought I would use Noom as a way to jump-start good habits, because I am about 15 pounds over my goal weight and I have a wedding to attend in August. I decided to make my overall goal on Noom to lose those 15 pounds by that time. Full disclosure, I’m a fairly active person and while I was trying Noom, I tried to work out once or twice per week to supplement my efforts.

I started Noom in May, which meant I had three months to hit my overall goal. For the sake of this review, I also set a 30-day goal to lose 5 pounds because I felt like it would be a good measure of how effective Noom is. I put all of this information into Noom’s initial quiz, downloaded the app onto my mobile device, and set up my account. My custom plan was $149.00 for three months, and after paying, I was ready to go.

My ideal way to split my calories was 25 percent coming from red foods, 35 percent from yellow foods, and 45 percent from green foods. Some days when I logged my foods, I saw a larger percentage of red or yellow, but no matter what food choices I made, I stayed pretty close to my calorie goal. At my final weigh-in at the 30-day mark, I had lost weight; 4.8 pounds, to be exact. Noom does a lot of things well, and that certainly contributed to my success. That said, there are also a few things I think you should be aware of before taking the app plunge.

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The Benefits of Noom

• Information quality. If you’ve ever tried dieting before, you’ve probably acquired a fair amount of knowledge about nutrition—macros, calories, hydration, etc. However, Noom also teaches you how psychology plays a part in your diet, and how the best diet plans can be hindered by psychological factors. Learning those principles gave me a new perspective and helped me diagnose the problem when I felt unmotivated.
• Personalization. Noom doesn’t have a blanket membership that gives you access to their system. Everything is personalized to you based on your body, your goals, and what motivates you.
• User experience (UX). Noom’s app is designed well and is very easy to navigate. The menus are clear and I had no trouble with the app crashing or being otherwise buggy. Logging your meals is a straightforward process, but only if you’re willing to settle for estimated calories based on recipes in the database. Inputting your own custom meal prep recipes can be tedious and time-consuming.
• Easy to follow. One of my favorite things about Noom is that you’re pretty much free to eat whatever you want as long as you understand the impact it has on your calorie split—red, yellow, and green foods. When you really boil it down, your plan will put you in some sort of calorie deficit to lose weight, but Noom’s approach makes the process feel a lot less restrictive.
• Community. Noom has support groups in the app that are monitored by coaches. The Noom official Facebook page is big and active, and although it is not particularly community oriented, there are a lot of unofficial support groups on Facebook. Noom also has a large community on Reddit that is very active and supportive.
• It works. That’s the bottom line. I lost 4.8 pounds in 30 days, which was actually surprising to me. For the first couple of weeks, I did not see any movement on the scale, which was disappointing, but the lessons on Noom targeted that disappointment on a psychological level which helped me stay on track.

What Could Be Better

• Convenience. I chose to make my experience easier by logging all of my meals using the search function. Food tracking can be simple if you do it this way. However, I had to settle for calorie estimates based on what recipes were in the database. There is a possibility that this method could sabotage you if you’re consistently using recipes that are counting fewer calories than you’re consuming.
• Accessibility. In my opinion, these plans are worth it because of the results I saw. However, there are no tiered membership options like you’ll see with other programs. You either pay the price or you don’t use Noom’s program. The lack of tiered-membership options could alienate you if you’re on a tight budget.
• Customer support. Every interaction I had with someone from Noom (personal coaches, guides, tech support, etc.,) was very friendly and professional. However, some of the messages from coaches and guides seemed scripted, almost as if the message came from an AI bot. I think it is understandable because of the amount of people who use Noom, but this discouraged me from using the coach feature.

Final Takeaway

Noom offers a unique approach to weight loss that worked for me. It is a little pricey compared to other weight-loss programs, but anyone who has been discouraged by a negative cycle with restrictive dieting and not reaching their weight-loss goals could potentially benefit from using Noom. Even though I only tried Noom for 30 days, I’m excited to keep up with the program and reach my overall goal.

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Why Trust Us?

At ACTIVE.com, we’re passionate about bringing you products that we trust and would personally use. That’s why we developed an 11-point evaluation system to determine the quality, effectiveness, and usability of the training programs we feature in our reviews. We test each program and vet it against our system before arriving at an overall score. Additionally, we consulted with ACTIVE’s Advisory Board, which includes nutritionists, competitive athletes, coaches, and certified trainers to make certain that the products that we feature are of the highest standards.

Disclaimer: The health and safety of ACTIVE’s readers is of the utmost importance to us which is why we recommend consulting with a doctor or physician before partaking in a new weight loss or nutrition program.

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FAQs About the Noom App

Does Noom work?

Individual bodies have different nutritional needs, but generally speaking, if you follow the program, log your meals accurately, and stay on target with your daily calorie allowance, there is no reason you shouldn’t see some progress from using Noom.

How does Noom work?

Noom is a psychology-based diet program that helps you lose weight by keeping track of your calories, meals, exercise, weight, hydration, and a number of other customizable measurements. Along with the diet, Noom gives you daily psychology lessons to change your relationship with food and goal setting.

Noom uses a color system—green, yellow, and red—to categorize food based on calorie density, or how many calories you’re consuming per portion of a given food. Noom also offers personal coaches to help you stay on track.

Is it worth paying for Noom?

Noom can be a little more expensive than other weight-loss programs, but Noom’s approach is unique. If you’ve tried restrictive diet programs with limited success, or if you find yourself in a yo-yo cycle of losing weight but not being able to keep it off, Noom may be worth the money for you.

Is Noom hard to cancel?

No, Noom is easy to cancel through your account settings in the app. If you cancel, you’ll have access to the app and the whole program until the end of the billing cycle. However, if you prepay for a plan, you can request a refund through the chat function in the app, or by following any of the other methods on Noom’s contact page.

How much does Noom cost for 3 months?

Noom’s membership fee pricing differs for each person based on their weight-loss goals.

For me, based on my goals, the 3-month plan cost $149.

Is there a free version of Noom?

If you use ACTIVE.com’s link, you can get a 14-day free trial. After that period, you’ll be billed based on the plan you signed up for. If you don’t want to be charged by Noom after your trial, make sure to cancel the account. Deleting the app won’t automatically cancel for you.