Noom is a healthy eating programme allegedly based on a psychological approach to improving eating habits that can help toward weight loss.

Pros

  • Clean interface
  • A human guide/coach who can give little tips
  • Jokey tone
  • Helpful information in the daily articles

Cons

  • Almost all foods I scanned have incorrect calories and serving sizes (items from Co-op, Lidl, Tesco, etc…)
  • Step counter randomly resets to zero
  • After completing daily articles the app’s home screen shows a popup to “Take a break!” every single time you open it
  • The barcode scanning function only focuses the camera when you first open it, after that you have to cancel scanning the barcode and exit the food logging function then go back into it to make it focus on a different target. This is especially a problem when you are indoors with uneven lighting (like, for example, a kitchen in the evening)
  • The app is heavily focused on American women with the articles quoting stuidies like “percent of American women find…”
  • Tech support team is unhelpful but very polite about it
  • The option to show you have skipped a meal is intermittently available, sometimes the button just doesn’t exist in the app
  • Works out expensive at between £20-£25 per month, though you have to pay this all in one go
  • The guide/coach is in another timezone so it’s not possible to have a real time conversation

Summary

At the time of writing, there are too many problems with Noom to ignore so this is definitely an app to skip for now. The daily articles, though, are helpful so if Noom offered these as a separate book I could easily see that being worth a one-off £20 spend. When trying to use the service it’s almost like it has a split personality, the core of it is “psychology-based” tips to building better habits but then everything around it is unfinished, buggy, or just wrong.

This review was written for version 9.28.1 of Noom.