I’ve been involved with the Noom program for a week now, so let me give you my first impressions.
On the plus side:
- I like the psychology behind the program. It’s geared to help me change my habits. There are no banned foods, nothing I can’t eat, but all my foods are classified as Green, Yellow, and Red, based on caloric density. Green foods are best with low caloric density. Red are highest in caloric density. Learning that, embedding that into my mind, will help me as I make future dietary decisions.
- Along those same lines, Noom is designed to train me and let me go. No lifetime commitment. That makes me think that once I’m done with Noom, I may be able to maintain a healthy diet. It’s not like other plans I’ve been on where I was essentially told what to eat, but once I was done with the plan, I was left hanging, and I inevitably went back to my old eating patterns.
- There are no mealplans, no boxes of food to subscribe to. Noom is all about training and coaching. I get some kind of knowledge sharing each day, and periodic coaching. This means the program is more affordable, because the cost is only for the electronic infrastructure. No food or supplement purchases are involved.
- The app is pretty easy to use. It doesn’t sync with my Letsfit fitness tracker, but it’s easy enough to manually enter my steps each day.
On the down side:
- For some reason I didn’t get into the app at first, so my first two days were not logged, and I didn’t follow the program at all. Surely that was a failure on my part, but perhaps something more could have been done to prod me, like a ping after the first day of missed entries.
- It sure would be nice to enter a meal into the app and just call it back every time I had it. I have certain meals that I eat often, and being able to enter it as one item rather than as a series of single items would be easier.
- Same with recipes. I wish I could enter the ingredients for a recipe and have Noom figure out the caloric density and calories for me.
All in all, as you might assume reading the above lists, I really like the Noom program, and I look forward to the ensuing weeks, as I engage on yet another quest for fitness. Hopefully this one lasts a lifetime.
ADDED NOTE: I just was asked by a popup in the Noom app to help by rating the program. I’m, like, sure, I’ll do that, so I clicked the button.
Oops. Apparently I was supposed to select a numeric rating prior to clicking the button, and by clicking the button I auto-selected 5.
I perceive 5 to be bad, because they asked me negative questions about Noom, like why would I not recommend Noom. I would, I would (at this point, anyway) recommend Noom?
They asked me my favorite part of Noom, allowing me to select only from 3 items including Goal Specialist, Food Logging, and Daily Articles (I think).
I love the Food Logging best, so I selected that. Then I had to tell them why I liked it, so I selected from the answers they provided.
But here is the bad thing.
The next question asked me to select from the three which I liked least. Well, I like them all, but I guess I like my Goal Specialist least. (I like Kyle just fine, and I think he does a good job, but if I have to choose…)
Then I had to explain why I liked Kyle least, and all the answers were negative, as if I were disparaging Kyle! None of them were true! I think Kyle does great by me!
So I backed out of the rating system, the whole questionnaire, and I hope none of that goes to corporate, because the way I got into that mess was through a weird (to me) presentation of the initial choice.
I love me some Noom!