Diets for weight loss usually focus on reducing calories, sugar, or fat to lose weight. However, not with the Noom diet. This diet reportedly uses special technology that will help change your eating habits.
What is Noom Diet?
The Noom Diet, or Noom’s Healthy Weight Program is a diet program that focuses on behavioral psychology.
The program claims that behavioral changes not only help you lose weight, but also keep it off in the long run.
Through the app of the same name, the Noom diet helps its users to lose weight, maintain fitness, and maintain health.
Everyone will get a diet and fitness program according to their conditions and needs.
Armed with the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this diet program will train you to lead a healthier lifestyle.
Instead of pursuing instant results, the Noom diet encourages users to understand the importance of meeting nutritional needs and physical activity.
During your 16-week diet, you’ll learn to make better food choices.
You’ll get interactive articles and quizzes on nutrition, weight loss, and physical activity until all these good changes become regular habits.
Noom diet guidelines
To get started, you need to download the Noom diet app and enter the data.
The data you fill out includes height, weight, age, gender, general health, and ideal weight you want.
You’ll also answer questions related to your lifestyle, eating habits, physical activity, and how quickly you want to lose weight.
After that, you will be given a food recommendation and directed to an instructor.
The Noom diet advises you to increase your intake of natural weight loss foods. These foods also keep you energized and feeling full without contributing a lot of calories.
This diet program also classifies foods into green, yellow, and red categories based on their nutritional density.
Your daily intake should consist of 30% green food, 45% yellow food, and 25% red food.
Here are the food categories on the Noom diet.
Green label food
This food group contains the most nutrients and the fewest calories, for example vegetables, fruits, egg whites, whole grains, and lean dairy products.
Red label foods
This food group contains the least nutrients and the most calories, such as various types of oils, nuts and other things, red meat, full-fat milk, burgers, French fries, cakes, and pizza.
Yellow label foods
The nutritional content of food is in the middle between green label foods and red label foods, such as avocado, fish, tofu, eggs, tempeh, low-fat meat, and low-fat milk.
In addition, the Noom diet also encourages users to consume nutrient-dense superfoods. Foods that include superfoods include:
- Sweet potato
- Spinach
- Blueberries
- Chia seeds,
- Flaxseed, and
- Quinoa.
The advantages and disadvantages of the Noom diet
The Noom program helps its users to monitor their weight on a regular basis.
According to a study in the Journal of Diabetes Research, this habit is indeed powerful enough to lose weight in the long run.
Even so, the way the diet by monitoring weight is usually prone to failure.
To prevent this, the Noom diet app provides features that keep its users motivated, such as personal instructors, interactive quizzes, and so on.
In 2016, several researchers finally conducted research on the efficacy of the Noom program for weight loss.
Of Noom’s 35,921 users, about 77.9% reported weight loss during using the app.
Other studies in respondents who were overweight and obese also gave similar results.
About 64% of respondents lost 5% of their total weight after dieting for 16 weeks.
Although there is scientific evidence supporting the success of this diet, Noom also has shortcomings.
This program only classifies food without providing more information about its nutritional content. In fact, people who diet need the intake of macro and micronutrients.
The Noom program will probably also keep you away from nuts, seeds, and healthy fats.
Plus such a large reduction in calories, your body will lack energy and various essential nutrients.
A diet with a lifestyle monitor like Noom is effective, but it may not be suitable for some people.
However, if you can go through this program without any problems, Noom could be the start of a healthier lifestyle.