Eating the amount of calories recommended to a toddler. Logging every piece of food eaten, no matter where or when. Drinking water in order to "fill up" when you're hungry. Weighing yourself every day. Categorizing foods as green, yellow, or red based on their value. These are just some of the incredibly upsetting, dangerous tactics that the dieting app Noom recommends to its vulnerable users. And while Noom may claim to not be a diet, it is the definition of one. Noom is, in fact, probably more dangerous because it denies being a diet. CEO Saeju Jeong says Noom is "hard to define." It's hard to define because it's a toxic body-policing program that can lead to eating disorders.
Sign the petition and demand that app stores include warnings of the dangers of Noom before people download the app!
Rigidly tracking calories and categorizing food as "good" or "bad" are classic strategies from within the diet industry, and easily lead to ways of thinking that are associated with many eating disorders, which are the deadliest mental illness second only to opioid addiction. Logging and counting calories steals time and brain space away from people, triggering obsessive thinking and making them think about food way more than if they were not dieting. And assigning moral value to certain foods and not others is clearly detrimental to a person's mental health, especially when they perceive themselves as "bad" or "failing" for literally just eating a certain snack or meal.
The fact that Noom so openly uses these tactics is quite a tell for an app that claims to not be a diet. Another huge sign that Noom is a diet, and a dangerous one at that, is it's rate of success. Scientists have known for a long time that dieting, in any form, is not actually effective for weight loss. So even if we needed to lose weight to be healthy – which, to be clear, we do not – the rate of failure among diets should tell us that they shouldn't be recommended or pursued. Noom, for example, only saw a 23% success rate in users after 1 year (their metric being a 10% loss of body weight), and only 14% of that group maintained that less than a year later, according to a 2016 study.
Weight does not define a person's health. In fact, there is strong research to show that a person's weight may have less to do with their health than the way they are treated because of their weight. Stigma, lack of access to care, stress, and yo-yo dieting take a massive toll on a person's physical and mental wellbeing.
If we actually cared about other people's health, as is so often the justification of fatphobia, weight shaming, and diet culture, we would quickly recognize that restrictive, dangerous, ineffective diets that steal time, social capacity, and peace from people are not the way.
As the hosts of Noom, and a slew of other apps that have a grip on people's mental and physical wellbeing, multi-billion dollar companies Apple and Google have immense sway and immense responsibility. If they at least included a warning with every download of Noom that reminded people how dangerous Noom has clearly proven itself to be, it would at least give people a chance to abandon it and not be exposed to the harmful diet culture within.
Sign the petition if you want to see a disclaimer in Google & Apple's app stores with every download of the dangerous Noom app!
