Noom Review : It Works

At the beginning of the month, I promised to give you an update on my journey with Noom.

If you watch TV at all, you’ve seen the endless commercials for the diet plan. They say it is not a diet plan. It is a diet plan, but it is different from any of the others I’ve experienced.

There are some of the usual things you’d expect from a diet plan:

• Logging weight every day
• Logging food intake
• Logging exercise

Yes, it’s lot of logging, but you do everything on your phone and it’s easy and easy to see your progress.

You have a personal coach and a support group, which I have found to be of mixed value. My personal coach gave me some great non-weight bearing exercise insights last summer when Achilles tendonitis kept me literally off my feet for six weeks.

Then there’s the educational component. At the beginning, you let them know how much weight you want to shed and how much you are willing to pay for the program. It’s completely voluntarily, although I don’t know what would happen if you said you’d pay 10 cents a pound.

Then you commit to spending a certain amount of time daily (I chose ten minutes a day) to do Noom lessons. As a professional health writer, I thought I knew a lot about weight control. Not true! I have learned huge amount about myself and about the science and psychology of weight control. It has been so helpful.

Without giving away the store, I’ll tell you that there is a great deal of emphasis on relationships with food, recognizing the when-why-and-how I am eating, psychological tips that are extremely helpful and, in the later stages (my progress in the course has designated me as a Noom Master), have given me some pretty profound personal insights.

Unlike any other diet, Noom has given me a new way of looking at food without guilt or without prohibitions or deprivation. It has empowered me to take control of my food, my weight and my life.

I know. Diet plans come and go. Those of you who have been with me for a looooong time may remember that I shed 100 pounds on the HCG diet ten years ago. I even wrote a book about it. But I didn’t realize at the time that the long-term physical and mental deprivation associated with eating only 700 calories a day for ten months was psychologically devastating. Over the years, I put all those pounds back on.

I don’t think there is one be-all and end-all diet plan. Many friends have had huge long-term success with low carbing, keto, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem. I say, “Great! Go with what works for you.”

Yet I have seen many friends successfully “complete” their “diets” and slowly put back on the weight they have shed with such difficulty.

For me, I know this time is different because I now have a different relationship with food without guilt, without prohibitions, without toxic body images, without feeling in any way deprived, with personal responsibility and enjoyment of life, of which food is a big part.

Most important, it has shown me a new way of living rather than a diet (I know I sound like the commercial) that I know I can sustain for the rest of my now-longer life.

Based on results, Noom works: I am now 40 pounds lighter than I was on June 15 when I started.