Noom: Weight Loss & GLP-1 Care reviews
What users love and hate · 500 reviews analyzed · ★ 3.8
Noom is a behavioral weight-loss program built on psychology and micro-lessons that wins beginners through education and coaching, but loses serious calorie-counters with a weak food database and a pivot toward AI and GLP-1 sales.
What users love
It sells thought-retraining, not tracking
Noom's core product isn't the calorie counter but the daily psychology-of-eating micro-lessons and habit work; people who failed every diet because they hate restriction stay precisely because the program explains WHY they eat rather than banning foods. It retains the segment that needs meaning, not a spreadsheet.
If you want the psychology behind your relationship with food, it's there.
It's all about the psychology of eating!
Well-rounded approach, nothing is "off-limits" - focuses on why we have the food habits we do.
Duolingo-grade gamification turns weight loss into a game
Seeds, levels, streaks and micro-challenges pull people back daily — users openly admit they're "ridiculously motivated by earning meaningless seeds." It's a rare case where the behavioral hook drives the daily logging habit rather than one-time novelty.
I am ridiculously motivated by earning meaningless seeds.
Its gamified brilliantly. Duolingo level!
I like the rewards of seeds and levels gaining, like a game a bit.
The weight loss genuinely works — but only for those who follow the plan
Despite the chaos, the program's core delivers durable results for the disciplined segment: people lose 40-55 lbs and keep it off for years, attributing it to compounding habits and lessons rather than a quick fix. This is the success cohort whose stories sell the subscription to newcomers.
After a year with Noom, I lost 55 lbs and fit in a size medium for the first time since I was a kid.
been using app since February..lost about 40 pounds. really like this app
This isn't a fix all. You have to stick to the plan, calorie goals and protein goals and you will see progress.
What users hate
The same gamification crossed the line into annoying noise
When seeds, unskippable streak animations and "art break" pushes pile on top of logging, the same hook starts to repel: people force-quit the app over animations and cancel specifically over the "distractions." By over-tuning engagement, Noom drives out the very users it used to retain.
the "streak" mechanic adds unnecessary and unskippable animations, and the "seeds" reward system is completely unnecessary
there are too many distractions now. I cancelled my subscription and uninstalled the app.
There is a recent update that involves seeds, and I hate it
Photo meal logging is the wow-hook that breaks on a real plate
Noom sells AI photo food recognition as a flagship feature, but it consistently misreads: a cup of spinach with an apple is graded "red," a labeled 280-cal cookie logs as 190. The onboarding wow-moment turns into distrust of every number — and trust in the tracker is the whole product.
I took a picture of my cup of spinach and arugula, scattered on my plate and topped with an apple and it graded it a red food
the calories were 280 per cookie and it was only logging 190
interprets photos wrong most of the time. It makes calorie counting a struggle.
The food database is US-only and empty for everyone else
The barcode scanner and search find US, Canadian, UK and Australian products — and nothing else; users outside those markets simply can't log their food. For an app whose core is logging, this isn't a localization bug but a total loss of the international segment, which leaves for MyFitnessPal.
if you don't live in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia don't pay for this
the ability to use local (non-American) barcodes
knows almost none of my local products
Logged food vanishes — the tracker's memory leaks
Again and again users add a food to the database, then can't find it on the next visit; identical meals return different calories. A tracker that doesn't remember what you ate breaks the entire reason to keep a diary — and people leave for MyFitnessPal specifically for reliable re-logging.
when I go back to search for anything I've entered, it doesn't appear
you can scan, add information, and the next time not have it available
the next time I opened the app, the inputs were gone
Android is a second-class citizen with no recipes or custom meals
The recipe builder and saving your own meals exist on iOS but are cut on Android — users discover it after the fact and abandon the app. For people who cook their own food, the absence of reusable recipes makes daily logging unbearable, and it's a stated reason not to renew.
for android users this is missing a major component of food tracking, being able to add custom recipes and use them over and over
There is no longer the ability to save favorite meals or input recipes on Android.
Final straw was that Android doesn't have the option to create a meal.
The calorie budget is tied to steps, and steps don't count
Noom computes the daily calorie budget from activity, but step sync with Samsung/Fitbit/watches broadly fails and manual entry was removed. The result breaks not one feature but the program's whole math: without correct steps you can't trust the calorie goal either, leaving the user with no compass.
since your calorie budget for the day is tied to your exercise
my health app and watch BOTH show over 7000 steps, noom only shows 1000 steps
I walked a mile and a half the other day and it registered 16 steps
The green-yellow-orange color system punishes healthy food
The traffic-light classification is Noom's signature teaching tool, yet it drops vegetables, vegan protein and whole foods into the "orange" zone, contradicting actual nutrient density. For a nutritionally literate user it undermines trust in the app's core pedagogical mechanism.
The color system doesn't make sense with healthy foods in the orange category.
this program puts most non meat protien as sources in the orange
the differences between green orange and yellow foods is maybe less accurate to their relative nutritional density
The human coach was swapped for AI — and the reason people came back left
Personal human coaching and psychological support used to be what set Noom apart from plain counters; laying off coaches for AI hollowed the coach out — it just points to materials the user already has. Loyal past customers return, see the AI shift, and leave in disgust.
they've decided to layoff all of their coaches and make ai do the coaching
The coach is now obsolete - all they do is reference the new success kit or other things that I already have access to
laying off coaches for AI
The GLP-1 pivot turns a habit program into a drug-sales funnel
Users come for a behavioral program, then after months of lessons the app starts pushing its own GLP-1 drugs — a "slap in the face" to a paying customer. Strategically Noom monetizes meds on top of the subscription, but at the cost of the very "healthy without drugs" positioning that brought its audience in.
Noom kept pushing the diet drugs.
the app suggested I should start using their Glp-1s. Kinda a slap in the face when you pay so much for the app
Loved it until they started pushing GLP1, brands/stores, and now AI.
Navigation bloated: simple calorie counting is now buried in menus
What used to be quick food and exercise logging now takes several screens: activity logging is hidden in a "get your steps in" section, viewing past days is unobvious. Interface bloat raises friction on the core daily action and actively demotivates — people quit over the navigation itself.
It's so complicated now I can't count calories without going through multiple pages.
logging exercise is complicated and hidden in an embedded "get your steps in" section
The app is clunky and difficult to navigate
Spinning-dial serving entry — small friction that breaks the habit
To set a serving size the user must "spin a dial for five minutes to enter 160" instead of typing the number directly. In an app where logging should be instant, this per-meal micro-frustration compounds and erodes the daily discipline the whole product depends on.
give me a way to input a number directly in the serving size. Spinning a dial for five minutes to enter "160" is not ok.
it can't find it only lets you add calories, not protien etc
you have to enter just the serving amount to get accurate macros