Dear Diet Culture Letter: Why it’s Harmful that You Promote Diets like Noom

Dear Diet Culture,

As a Dietitian who helps support people in creating peace with food and their body, I have seen the research that apparently supports you and I don’t know how to say this kindly, so I won’t: your track record is appalling. (see here, here and here)

As public opinion starts to shift as things like Intuitive Eating and HAES become more integrated, as well as people becoming increasingly aware of the research showing and supporting the harms of dieting, you become less and less appealing. People are starting to really question you and your existence, and so you have to innovate and shape-shift. After all, the weight loss industry is worth 66-billion dollars. But what you fail to realize, or actively choose to ignore, is that changing your language to trick users and vulnerable people into buying diet programs and products causes long-term harm and is manipulative.

You have now taken diets that previously advertised themselves as diets (aka we know how to call a spade a spade) and turned them into “wellness,” “lifestyle changes,” and “healthy habit choices.” One of these is your most recent brainchild, Noom.

Noom advertises itself as “anti-diet” while recommending to adult humans the amount of calories that a toddler needs in the name of “health.” It claims to use psychologists to help individuals use CBT (cognitive behavior therapy) in order to make “long-term weight loss changes” despite there being not one single study that supports long-term weight loss. It’s catchy though, and also horrendously deceiving. Also, body size is not a behavior.

There is also nothing revolutionary about Noom. It is a diet in the way that all diets have ever been diets. It uses a “stoplight” system to “warn” users when they should or should not proceed with caution with food or to alert them when they should limit their portions based on the energy density of foods (this stoplight system ironically was the same method used in the WW app for kids that the anti-diet community was very upset about, rightfully so.)

Noom recommends the same-ole’ diet advice by giving extremely low-calorie food recommendations and moralizing food while also literally asking people to pledge to weigh themselves every single day. Noom’s recommendations are useless at best, and harmful at worst. It is not innovative to slap a new label on a program and then offer diet advice to cut out foods and food groups that can cause eating disorders, weight cycling, food moralization and lead people to taking even more dangerous steps to pursue weight loss.

Diet Culture, your diets-that-pretend-like-they-are-not-diets like Noom attempt to “stay current” by using deceiving language that it steals from the anti-diet-culture movement. Shame on you for continuing to push rhetoric that is not backed by science and harms all people, especially those most marginalized and oppressed.

Noom is absurd and deceptive.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most passionate anti-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that diet culture is a deceptive shape-shifter and promotes super harmful diets like Noom in order to continue generating billions of dollars and cloaks itself in “wellness” when it’s literally the opposite of that which is health-promoting. Also, Noom sucks.

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