Noom

Noom is a jack of all trades, and a master of none

I loved the idea of Noom. Learning why you make poor food choices and how to combat impulsive eating is what made me excited to sign up. Having a personal goal specialist and a group coach made me think it would be more personalized for me and help me when it got tough. Being able to find food with the CORRECT nutritional information in their database was great too. It made it way easier to log my food without having to double check the calories of everything. However, Android users don't get the option of creating custom recipes, and it seems like they won't get that ability for some time. While the recipes Noom has are good for the most part I don't want to be eating those few choices every day, and trying to figure out how many calories are in my own recipes is impossible (unless you want to dedicate significant amounts of time to it). Their recipes are also not measured by weight, so I wonder how many times I was over-adding something and going over my calorie limit. Many of their recipes are not as low calorie as you need them to be either considering how many people get put on a 1200 calorie plan. My goal specialist was also not very helpful, and while that may have just been bad luck on my part it didn't make me confident that any of their other specialists were going to be any different. Many of the responses I got felt canned, and even if she did reply to something specific it didn't feel like a real person. Most of the time it was her just sending me articles that I've already read, or regurgitating information from them. What are you supposed to do when that specific article doesn't work for you? Read it again and again until you force it to work? That's what having a goal specialist felt like. When I signed up I also set it to have my specialist message me to get back on track if I didn't log in for a day, and it could be 3 or 4 days before I got that message from her. I also received only 2 messages total even though I didn't touch the app for 2 weeks. It could also take her a few days to reply to messages I sent her, and by that time I've already figured it out on my own. The groups were also not much better. Rather than fostering a community and generating discussion it was just people posting their "reply" to one of the articles, and hardly anyone commenting on each others posts. You would get entire days of people posting two word answers to whatever question the article asked, with no context. If someone didn't know that and decided to look at the group they would think they were all insane. Even if you do post a reply to someone the most you get back is a "like" and no reply to yourself. Eventually I just stopped caring, stopped replying to the articles questions in group, and stopped liking and replying to peoples posts. What's the point? I don't understand what you're supposed to get out of this?? I know it's not Noom's fault that my group members are not the best, but the group coach basically did nothing to try and foster community either. Another thing I disliked is that all the articles seem to be focused on the one type of person. It felt like everyone in their mind was someone who drives to their 9-5 job everyday and gets home to sit down and watch TV. If I did everything they told me to do I would have zero time left for myself. It also felt like if I did everything they told me to do I would spend a lot of my time thinking about food, which I don't find very healthy. It made me feel stressed out that I had to constantly be "on" all day when it came to food. I was stressing out about what foods I could cook that will fit into my calorie allowance while still being able to enjoy a snack or something. The articles also got kind of old pretty quick. They attempt to be relatable and funny with their hashtags and "noom nerd" quips, but I found I spent more time trying to decipher their weird phrasing than I did understanding it. In the end, the idea of Noom still interests me. I just felt they executed it poorly and everything felt very linear when life is anything but linear. If there was an option for Android users to create their own recipes I probably would have found it easier to stick to their plan, but what's the point of paying for a program if I end of needing to go to other websites to check my recipes calories anyways? I might as well just use MyFitnessPal exclusively if that's the case.