The Dark Side of Noom

Noom’s literature on weight loss is full of lofty guarantees, even for a weight loss app. Get life-long results. Stop dieting. Get fit for good. Change how you think. Learn about psychology. Break bad habits. Try “The Best Diet”—this one is different. Actually, Noom is more like an “anti-diet.”

Like Weight Watchers, SlimFast, Jenny Craig, The Atkins Diet, and countless fads before it, Noom is the new solution to long-term weight loss that everyone is talking about. In 2020, the app generated $400 million in revenue (double the amount from the year before) and gained more than 50 million downloads in response to demand. (Since the pandemic began, nearly 61 percent of adults in the U.S. gained weight, averaging about 15 added pounds.) Last month, the company announced a $540 million Series F, gearing up to a potential near-future IPO with a $10 billion targeted valuation. 

Noom has been around in some form since 2007; the company's founders, Saeju Joeong and Artem Petakov, started the venture by selling stationary bikes with a connected calorie-counting app. It wasn’t until 2017 when Noom was released in its current iteration: a weight loss app that employs calorie counting, a rating system that assigns colors to different foods, small group support, and behavior change techniques. These days, the company’s website says it wants to help people “live longer and experience the gift of true physical, mental, and emotional well-being” while simultaneously referring to itself as a “growth machine.” 

Noom is ‘moon’ spelled backward. According to one outlet in 2017, Petakov said the name was chosen because “the moon is calm, wise, and always there for the whole world." With each Noom ad I was served over the long course of 2020—on YouTube, Google, Instagram, a million podcasts—I failed to grasp what wisdom was on offer, or what made this app worth a potential $10 billion. Could mixing the prospect of weight loss with a subscription model really be all that revolutionary? Is encouraging behavior change to achieve thinness a scientific breakthrough? Why are these thin model-types telling other people how to lose weight? The more ads I saw, the less I understood, and the more eerily familiar the language and imagery became.

 Much like the moon itself, maybe Noom had a dark side.