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You guys have no idea how excited I am! I started this blog because I absolutely love sharing anything and everything that makes life easier or better and lately I have thrown myself into both seeking those things and sharing them. When it came to my success story with Noom and weight loss though, I was a little hesitant. It’s hard to share personal things. But then I thought of the people who inspire ME the most and their stories and the little bits of their lives that they share that are the very things that inspire me the most and realized I had a responsibility to use this platform to share something that changed my life so drastically. So I shared and since then I have had so many friends reach out and say they were thinking of starting Noom or already had! I am almost in tears because I know this works and I know this is going to change your lives as well! In all of my excitement for everyone just getting started, I got to thinking of all of the things I wish I had known when starting out with Noom. So here are some of my best tips to help you be successful! If you haven’t started Nooming yet, you can find a link to the two week free trial at the end of this post or at the top of my home page (Click on “This Changed My Life”)!
1) Drink water. Lots of water. All day. Water will not only help you feel more full (because decreasing calories is tough at first) but will also help prevent bloating, water retention AND it will help you get your steps in because you will be walking back and forth to the bathroom all day. 😉 Which brings me to #2.
2) Get your steps in. I started when the weather was nice out so I just added extra dog walks, long walks with the kids in the evenings and then longer, faster walks alone and eventually started jogging. Now I go to the gym and do a fast 5k on the treadmill, ab workout and weights but just getting some kind of activity in is the most important thing. Plus getting in extra activity earns you extra calories for the day which is great motivation!
3) Weigh in EVERY day…but don’t put that much importance on any single day’s weight. It’s all about the big picture. Your weight is sometimes gonna go up even though you did everything right the day before. You will have plateaus where you stay the same weight for days of even a couple of weeks for some. You will still be making progress! Inches will be coming off even when pounds aren’t and pounds will come off when inches aren’t. Weight will be affected by sodium intake, water retention, hormones and all kinds of other things. Just keep Nooming! Here is a little clip of my weight chart.
There are ups and downs and plateaus. But when you squish it all together and look at the whole picture:
You see the overall trend was downward even with all the little bumps in the road!
4) Do your best to stay in your color limits but more importantly stay in your total calorie limit. If you go way over on yellows but way under on reds…great! That just means you are going to feel fuller on less calories. As long as you stay under your total daily limit you will lose weight. And remember, Red foods aren’t bad. They just aren’t going to fill you up as much.
5) Log EVERYTHING. No cheats. Even the teaspoon of butter you put on your toast (which I recommend using Sara Lee 40 calorie bread or Daves Killer Breads for). You will start learning how many calories are actually in things and how quickly they add up so you gotta log ’em all!
5) There are a lot of errors in the Noom food log database. Items are entered by users and people make mistakes, companies change labels and nutritional information, etc. There are several items in the wrong color groups or with wrong calorie info. It’s ok. I promise. Check the packaging rather than 100% trusting Noom and manually enter your calories, buy a cheap food scale ( I got this one from Amazon)
and weigh your fruits, veggies, meats, etc. And don’t stress that much about the colors. Following the colors the best you can will make this easier on you but at the end of the day calories are calories and they don’t know what color Noom decided they were.
6) Caloric density. This is what Noom is mostly based on, yet the thing that people have the hardest time understanding. This photo puts it into really good perspective:
Each stomach is full of 400 calories worth of food. Yet obviously if you eat 400 calories worth of oil (ewww) you aren’t going to be full. Noom helps balance your foods for the day by helping you to combine these colors in a way to fill you up while still reducing your calories. There is actually an equation to figure what color an item is. This is handy if you have a feeling a color is wrong or if you are eating something that is not in the database yet and want to know it’s color. (By the way, did you know you can scan the barcode on items instead of typing them in? Just click on the little barcode photo under the word “cancel” where you log your food.). Anyway, here is the equation:
CD = Calories per serving divided by Grams per serving
The table below shows how we classify our foods:
Types Green Yellow Red
Solid Foods Low CD (<1) Medium CD (1 < x < 2.4) Higher CD (2.4 < x) Liquids Low CD (<0.4) Medium CD (0.4 < x < 0.5) Higher CD (0.5 < x) Soups Low CD (<0.5) Medium CD (0.5 < x < 1.0) Higher CD (1.0 < x) Because our program helps you to manage various types of conditions and promotes nourishment through wholesome and fresh foods, there are some things that might be exceptions to this calorie density rule. Here are some of these exceptions: Whole vs. refined foods White and wheat breads or white and brown rice might have similar calorie densities, but we want our users to know which is the better option. To do this, the color of whole grain foods will be adjusted (CD < 2.4=Green and CD > 2.4=Yellow).
Dairy
Non fat dairy is Green
Low fat dairy is Yellow
Whole fat dairy is Red
Drinks with artificial sweeteners
We categorize diet sodas and other low calorie drinks that contain artificial sweeteners as yellow because although they have no calories, many studies have shown that diet sodas do not satiate your desire or thirst and they are super processed. We want to encourage our users to consume these with caution because they can potentially contribute to weight gain and might have high sodium contents.
7) Join the Facebook group: Noom Weight Loss Support. Once you start the paid program, Noom will assign you to one of their groups within the program but honestly most people don’t find them all that useful. The facebook group has almost 30,000 members and is full of ideas, support and success stories! Just try using the search bar before posting a question because it’s probably been covered several times.
8) Starvation Mode. So this comes up a lot in the Facebook group when people get frustrated that they aren’t losing fast enough, etc. Someone always mentions that “maybe they are in starvation mode”. Here is the way to determine if that is happening:
Have you ever seen Naked and Afraid? Those people live off of nothing but grubs and acorns for weeks and still manage to lose an awful lot of weight. Now, some people have reported success with adjusting their weight loss speed (like from Cheetah to turtle) which does increase your calorie limit. My theory is that with a lower limit maybe they were cheating a little even if they didn’t totally realize it and by increasing it, it was more manageable to stay in the limit. A lot of Noom is mental though so if that is what works for you…great!
9) Read the articles. In the beginning I read them but it was reluctantly. I figured out pretty early that my big issue was running around like crazy all day and not eating regularly and then when I finally did sit down to eat I was binge eating or telling myself that I was pampering myself after a hard day. Simply reducing my daily calories pretty much resolved that problem so I didn’t feel like the articles were that important for me. But there were so many times along my journey that I ended up remembering and using something I read or that I realized there were several thought distortions I didn’t even know that I had.
10) Your goal specialist is not your coach and can’t tell you what you need to do. This is one of the most common complaints I see in the facebook group. People say their Goal Specialist (or sometimes they even refer to them as a coach) just answers questions with another question or that their responses are obviously scripted or maybe they are just a robot. The Goal Specialist is there to hold you accountable, help YOU figure out your goals and the best way to reach them. Not do that for you. Everyone has different goals and the best way to reach them for one person isn’t the same for someone else. That’s why they ask you questions that make you think. And yes, a lot of what they say is scripted because let’s face it, they are having the same conversation over and over all day every day if you think about it. But they are real people and there is real conversation in there too. If you are truly unhappy with your GS though, you can request a new one.
Well, that’s it for now. I hope these tips help and that you all will share your progress with me!
If you haven’t started yet and want to do the trial, here is a link:
Noom