The Noom Mindset: Learn the Science, Lose the Weight

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Learn the Science, Lose the Weight

The Noom Mindset

Make Good Health a Habit

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We dedicate this book to our Noom coaches—you are Noom’s soul!—and to our whole Noomily (that’s Noom family), who relentlessly seek to expand and improve life in the Noom-iverse. But most of all, we dedicate this book to each and every Noomer who has come to us for help and found community, support, self-confidence, and better health. You are the beating heart of Noom.

INTRODUCTION

Hey, Noomer!

Welcome to the very first-ever Noom book. Whether you are already a tried-and-true Noomer or just Noom-curious, we are so glad you’re here.

Noom is most known for our digital health platform that has helped millions of people lose weight, gain energy, feel better, and get healthier. We constantly strive to share—dare we say—lifesaving techniques, technology, resources, and information with people who could benefit from our health-changing, behavior-shifting tools. That’s because, in the Noom-iverse, we’re obsessed with growing, changing, and evolving to discover what works best and what helps the most people achieve their health goals. It’s all integral to our mission to help people live better lives, and, in terms of our grand vision, we believe we’ve achieved only a fraction of what’s possible. We’re constantly envisioning what Noom can be and considering how many avenues we have yet to explore, how many places we want to go, and how many ideas we have about how to help people take their health into their own hands. Helping people to achieve weight-loss goals is just the beginning.

While we are always improving and developing our digital resources, we recently had a brilliant idea (if we do say so ourselves): What if, along with all our technological tools, we also went old-school and wrote a book? This book could complement the interactive and coach-supported Noom digital course by delving even deeper into the psychological concepts that are so effective, and by creating a new entry point for how to make some of our best techniques stick. It could also serve as a stand-alone guide to the psychology of weight loss and behavior change for those who aren’t familiar with us yet. As soon as we thought of it, we admit, we all got pretty excited.

Now, we love technology, and we know a lot of you do, too. If that’s your thing, then we warmly welcome you to join us on the Noom app (head to the back of the book for information on how to get a free trial). But there are things a book can do that an app can’t do, like taking more time and space to expand on the science and psychology behind the concepts that make Noom work so well for so many. The app has a lot of information about cool science, it’s true, but this book includes even more research (we conducted some of it ourselves!), more examples, more strategies, and more opportunities for self-experimentation. It’s a peek behind the curtain. We’ve also got lots of thoughts, psych tricks (our best psychology-based tips), and best practices from our incredible coaches. Everything we do in this book is based on what we’ve learned through our constant experimentation. We’ve got quizzes for you to take, questions for you to reflect upon, and sage advice—all of which will help you understand and put into practice the psychological concepts that are the foundation upon which Noom is built.

Whether your goal has anything to do with weight loss is totally up to you. You can use the wisdom in these pages to change any habits or behaviors in your life that you want to change, in ways that can make your life better.

We will show you how to feel more empowered, how to set goals for yourself, and how to stay motivated, and we’ll give you tools to ditch old habits and create better ones. We’ll also help you monitor your progress and celebrate all the victories that behavior change can bring—not just weight loss but also more self-confidence and personal autonomy, better self-awareness and intuition, more energy, less pain, a more positive mood, better fitness, and a calmer, more peaceful mind. We call these NSVs, or non-scale victories, but they apply even if your goals have nothing to do with weight loss. Whatever you want to do, this book is a place to start, or a place to dive deep, and we think both of those options are pretty awesome.

Noom is about options. You can take what you want and leave the rest, since the combination of factors that leads to success for one person will be different for another person. This book is just one more tool in the Noom toolbox, among many others that can help you achieve better health and wellness. We hope you’ll browse through all our offerings, but that’s 100 percent up to you. For now, you’re here, and we love that.

How Noom Was Born

If you’d rather just skip straight to the science, head to chapter 1! If you want to hear the story of Noom, read on.

How did this whole Noom thing get started in the first place? We’re relatively new to the weight-loss scene, in the scheme of things (considering that the first actual book about how to lose weight was published in Italy in 1558 and other weight-loss programs have been around since the 1960s or even before), but we think that gives us an edge because we base all our material on the latest science and developments in behavioral psychology. Our jokes may be old-school at times (sorry about that in advance), but our information is best in class.

Yet Noom, as it is today, was a long time coming. Maybe you want to know more about us, since we’re going to be hanging out for a while. Maybe you’re wondering who even thought of this whole Noom idea in the first place. Well, then, you are in luck!

Long before this book was a twinkle in Noom’s (metaphorical) eyes, there were two young men on a collision course to become business partners, best friends, and founders of Noom: Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov.

Saeju was raised in a small town in the southern part of South Korea, and from a young age, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He tells us that he didn’t watch cartoons as a child. He watched documentaries about entrepreneurs. Saeju’s father was an entrepreneur—he was the founder and CEO of a hospital, and also an extremely industrious ob-gyn who delivered four to six babies every day. He had a contagious energy and he naturally motivated everyone around him. Saeju calls him a zero-to-one-hundred kind of person. The hospital he created grew into a chain of hospitals; and even as a young child, Saeju paid attention to how his father had created a hugely successful business out of nothing.

Saeju and his father were very close. Every night after dinner, they would sit together and drink tea and talk. Saeju’s father watched the nationwide daily news in his big chair, and Saeju sat in what his father called the apprentice chair, right next to his father. When Saeju asked his father questions about what was happening on the news, his father would say, Let’s listen first. After they listened, he put the television on mute and explained what the news story was about, and asked Saeju’s opinion. That made Saeju feel important and lucky to have that kind of relationship with his father.

The first sign that Saeju’s life was going to be different from how he had imagined was when he wasn’t accepted into medical college like his father and so many other members of his family had been. Instead, he enrolled in electrical engineering college, but he quickly lost interest in his classes and eventually stopped studying. The only thing that he was really enthusiastic about was heavy metal music, so at just nineteen years old, he started a heavy-metal record label in South Korea, BuyHard Productions. It was a surprising success, but then fate dealt him another blow: Saeju’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Saeju’s whole world changed.

Saeju spent a lot of time with his father in the hospital, and much of their conversation turned to lessons Saeju’s father wanted to impart to his son. Sometimes, Saeju’s father lamented that as a doctor, he had always felt frustrated that so many of his patients came to him when it was too late to help them. He wished the medical profession were focused on helping people to maintain their health, rather than on trying, often unsuccessfully, to save those who were already sick and had sought help too late.

Other times, the conversation focused on Saeju’s career. I hear your business is a great success, his father said one day.

Saeju proudly admitted that it was true.

Saeju, what is the purpose of your business?

Saeju paused, then answered: I want to prove myself. I want to be an entrepreneur.

That’s a good answer. But why do you want to prove yourself? his father asked.

Well… I think it’s a good thing to have money, Saeju said.

Why is it a good thing to have money? his father said.

Because…

Saeju had to think. He doesn’t remember what he said exactly, but he produced some reply; and to that reply, his father asked, Yes, but why? And to every reply after, his father kept asking, Why? until Saeju finally couldn’t answer him anymore. (This was the origin of the Why Test, which you’ll get to try for yourself on page 56

.)

Saeju had gone from feeling proud to feeling completely stripped down and vulnerable in front of his father. He knew his father wasn’t scolding him—that wasn’t his way. What he was doing, ingenuously, really, was demonstrating to Saeju that behind every great business is a great passion—a true reason. A purpose. He wanted Saeju to find his. Saeju’s liking heavy metal music, it seemed, didn’t quite pass his father’s litmus test for changing the world. But what would?

Finally, Saeju’s father said, Always think about your company’s mission and how you will impact the community. He wanted Saeju to have a real why. He wanted his son to figure out his own core values in this life, before he left his son and his own life behind. This conversation would change Saeju’s life.

Not long after, at just fifty-one years old, Saeju’s father passed away. Saeju was twenty-one, and he felt like the sun that had always lit up his life with meaning had stopped shining.

Confused and grief-stricken, Saeju decided to enter the South Korean Army for his three-year service—something required of all young men in South Korea—as an IT specialist. This experience helped him deal with his grief, clear his head, and get his priorities straight. After he returned, he realized college wasn’t going to help him accomplish what he needed to do in the world, so he dropped out and did something daring that his father had always encouraged him to do: He moved to the United States.

He chose New York City for its diversity and international atmosphere, and he vowed that he would change the world. He decided he would do this not through electrical engineering or even the music business but by trying to improve the state of health care that had so troubled his father. And if he couldn’t do it as a doctor, well then, he would do it as an entrepreneur.

Saeju still loved heavy metal music (and does even today—really, he seriously loves it), but he realized that what he did in this world had to be important. It had to help people. It had to matter, and he had to know why it mattered. He had an ambition to start some kind of business that would put the power of health back into the hands of the individual, so they could avoid becoming like so many of his father’s patients, seeking sick care when it was too late. He had the business savvy, but Saeju had an inkling that he needed someone with serious technology skills, so he began looking for potential business partners.

If we turn the clock back a few years, we find a young boy from Ukraine who had begun programming computers at the tender age of nine in his spare time, when he wasn’t shepherding goats. He might not call himself a genius, but anybody else would (we think even the goats would agree). He came to America when he was thirteen years old, but unlike Saeju, who as a child wanted to be an entrepreneur, Artem tells us his initial dream was to become a farmer. However, his fascination with both technology and psychology won out over animal husbandry, and Artem soon found himself at Princeton University studying computer science, psychology, finance, and theater (because even tech nerds have their dramatic side).

During Artem’s freshman year at Princeton he built a chess program, called Golch, with machine learning, which became part of his senior thesis; but one of his favorite classes was the psychology of decision-making, a class taught by Daniel Kahneman, a renowned psychologist and economist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. During college, Artem interned at Microsoft’s SQL and Sun Solaris server groups and learned a lot about running software teams. After college, he began working as a software engineer and tech lead at Google, where he founded and then led the Geosearch Project, which became an integral part of Google Maps.

Artem loved working for Google, but for him the job was missing one thing that had always been so interesting: the study and exploration of psychology. He didn’t think there would ever be a world where he could pursue both his love of technology and his interest in psychology—until he met Saeju at a dinner party for Princeton graduates.

Artem was a friend of Saeju’s cousin, who introduced them, and they connected right away. Artem told Saeju about all the things he wanted to create, including a fitness product that would reinvent the gym experience. Saeju told Artem about his frustrations with the health-care system and his desire to empower people to take control of their own health. Soon they were brainstorming, as if they had known each other and worked together all their lives.

Saeju saw in Artem exactly the partner he had been seeking, even if Artem hadn’t yet considered becoming an entrepreneur. They both had a vision: From the beginning, their unwavering primary purpose and compass was to have the largest possible positive impact on human health.

They began working together informally in 2005, while Artem was still at Google and had just won the RoboCup World Championship (because that’s the kind of brain he has). It took Saeju two years to convince Artem to leave Google and commit to their business full time. In 2007, they started a company called WorkSmart Labs, Inc. Their first company office was in a dorm room. Their next office was a bit bigger—a two-bedroom apartment, from which they launched their first ever prototype: the CyberTrainer. It consisted of tracking technology installed on a stationary bike. Their first employee was Artem’s robot-building buddy Mark Simon, another tech-minded genius type, who became their senior software engineer (he would later be Noom’s chief architect). They raised money to build more prototypes for other kinds of gym equipment, but they soon saw that the future was in mobile technology.

In October of 2008, they launched CardioTrainer, a fitness tracking app, and by 2010, CardioTrainer had one million users. CardioTrainer was initially for hard-core runners, but through user testimonials and feedback, the team noticed that most of the users were actually logging more moderate exercises like walking into the app, for weight loss rather than fitness goals. So, in 2010, they launched a calorie-tracking app called Calorific. Soon, that app had a half-million users.

A year later, Saeju and Artem decided to pivot again. They wanted to combine the best features of both their popular apps into one single app that could help people lose weight and keep it off through both fitness and weight tracking. They tell us it was a bit like boiling the ocean, but with a lot of research and analysis, they discovered that behavior change requires more than tracking. Consumers wanted something—or someone—to help them with some of their health problems. Saeju and Artem needed to do more.

In 2011, they changed their company name to Noom. Why Noom? We played around with a lot of name ideas, Artem tells us, and one name our designers liked was Moon because it was interesting from a design perspective. At first, it seemed like an unnatural choice for us. What does health have to do with the moon? It’s not a word you see associated with companies, and it felt like a strange fit—a little like how trying a new health behavior can feel strange or unnatural at first because you aren’t familiar with it or used to it. But instead of going with our gut on this one, we experimented with it, testing it on people to see how they responded to it, and were surprised by the positive response.

Artem says that as the concept became more familiar to the team, they got more comfortable with it and liked it more and more. We liked it because the moon is a presence that’s always there, even when you can’t see it, Artem says. It appears to wax and wane, grow and shrink, just like goals do, just like visions for companies do. Then someone suggested flipping the word to spell ‘moon’ backward. It tested really well, and so ‘Noom’ became our name.

They launched the Noom Weight Loss Coach on Android soon after, and a year later, the app debuted on iOS. A year after that, Noom began the Noom Group Coach program, while also expanding globally.

Never complacent, Saeju and Artem often discussed the fact that people knew what to do to be healthy, but they still had trouble actually doing it. Then they met Tom Hildebrandt, who worked at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Eating and Weight Disorders Center, and they realized that their missing element was psychology. Noom needed to provide psychological solutions in addition to purely physiological solutions. It was a revelation.

In 2014, Dr. Andreas Michaelides joined the team as Noom’s chief of psychology. In 2015, Saeju and Artem began to hire professional coaches, and in 2017, they introduced the Noom Healthy Weight program. This, as they discovered from their research, was what people were seeking: an effective weight-loss tool with real human support systems built in. By then, they had over one hundred Noom coaches and an ever-increasing number of people engaging with the program.

Since then, the Noom team has continued to expand and keeps internally experimenting, researching, developing, and innovating. In 2019, Noom hired their one-thousandth employee and hosted their first Noom Leadership Summit in New York City. By 2020, Noom had more than three thousand coaches, multiple programs, and a vision for the future that included—and still includes—expanding in ways that can help people manage or even improve chronic conditions like anxiety, diabetes, and hypertension.

At Noom, we continue to broaden our behavior-change platform to help people change their lives in all kinds of different ways—in whatever ways they wish. As Artem puts it: If you know how your brain and body work, you can outsmart yourself and reach the goals that have been difficult to reach before. Put the guilt down. When you understand the psychological principles behind your behavior, you can make changes more easily. Noom is here to help you be the best version of yourself and unlock your potential. We aim to save years of life for all of humanity. It’s a big goal and we aren’t there yet, but we’re always trying new things and looking through the lens of our mission. We want to inspire you to do exactly the same thing for yourself.

Our Wish for You

Our company has changed a lot, but our mission never has. It has always been to help as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change. We pride ourselves on the long-term results our program has helped people achieve. That’s why we don’t consider Noom to be a diet; it’s a method for changing behavior and developing a healthy lifestyle. Our curriculum has been meticulously created and is continually updated by psychologists and researchers, all experts in the fields of health and psychology. We want to help you get to the root of your weight-loss or other health struggles and to prevail. It’s not about numbers. It’s about life. Ever since we brought psychology into the fold, we have been about so much more than numbers on the scale.

With Noom, you’ll learn about social eating, stress management, cognition and food, managing emotions in relation to food, how exercise and sleep affect you, and most important, why we eat and act the way we do as humans. You’ll explore how to take back the reins rather than feeling like you’re being controlled by your emotions (although sometimes your emotions are just the guide you need; we’ll talk about that, too).

Engaging with Noom in any form (whether this book, our online curriculum, or both) will help you start forming new neural connections, and over time this will help you change your habits. Habits are powerful and ingrained, but the more you retrain your brain to practice and even default to the healthy habits you want and choose to practice, the more likely you will find weight-loss success, better health, and an easier mind. We’ll show you how, and we’ll help you understand why. It doesn’t do much good to give someone an instruction manual if they don’t understand why they’re using it or if they’re not motivated to follow through. Instead, mastering change involves sampling lots of different tools and trying them out with guidance and curiosity. Noom offers you those tools. We have discovered the right combination of psychology, technology, and human coaching that empowers people to take control of their health.

Noom’s goals are expansive, we admit. We start with weight loss, but the more you know us, the more you will see that weight-related goals are just roads to understanding yourself better. Our real mission is to share with you how to use psychology to change your behaviors in ways that can make your health and your whole life into what you dream they can be. Noom has become a tool to help people master stress, anxiety, confidence, and self-care, in addition to health.

In short (or is it too late for that?), we are here for you, with powerful tools for change. We are here for you, as you learn how you can change yourself. We are not about rules. We are not about shoulds. We are certainly not about guilt, shame, punishment, or any of those things science has proven do not work to help people change. We are only about helping and supporting your goals to live a happier, healthier, stronger, more confident, Noomier life. That’s what we wish for you.

Are you ready to go there with us, to explore the Noom-iverse, to embrace the changes you’ve longed for, and to empower yourself to make it all happen? We know you’re going to accomplish great things for yourself, and we will always have your back.

You truly are the greatest force and biggest asset in your own journey. As you transform your own health, you will become part of the solution: a world where people know how to create health for themselves. No matter where you are on your journey, thank you for making us a part of it.

And happy reading!

1

You Rule: Your Role in the Change You Want to Make

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

—Anonymous

We suspect (since you are here) that there is something about your life that you would like to be different. Maybe you would like to get back to a healthy weight, where you felt good in your body. Maybe you would like to get fit, or break some bad habits, or feel better, or just feel more like yourself. Maybe you know what you need to do, but you’re having trouble doing it; maybe you’re not even sure where to begin. Maybe you’ve already made some positive changes, but you want to make sure they stick.

Whatever story brought you here, you are in the right place, because Noom is all about helping people make and sustain positive changes. Our methods may not be like the ones you’ve tried before. We don’t throw a bunch of rules at you, control what you eat or how you work out, or even say that you need to change at all. Instead, we approach behavior change from a psychological perspective: What do you want to change about your life, and why do you want to change it? And why haven’t you changed it already?

We’re all about the why of behavior. Knowing your why is motivating. According to self-determination theory, or SDT, people are most successful at meeting goals when those goals relate to their innate psychological needs,¹

especially autonomous motivation.²

Autonomous motivation is about doing something because you’ve decided to do it for yourself, and because it is consistent with your personality and values. Making that connection between why and your inner reasons for making a change—reasons that come from you, not from what someone else tells you that you should do—will, according to SDT, increase your motivation and make you more successful at achieving what you set out to achieve, whatever you decide that will be. This is what we here at Noom believe to be true based on the research we’ve done,³

and what we have seen in our most successful program participants. Understanding your why is an integral part of our program. In fact, Why? is our favorite question. Why do you make certain decisions, have certain thoughts, or form certain habits? To begin answering this question, we help you develop your self-awareness and learn how to experiment on yourself. We love experiments, as you’ll soon see! Our entire program is rooted in experimentation, and everything we implement is rigorously tested. Experimentation is key, not just to how we run our company and develop our curriculum but to how you can quickly and efficiently figure out what works for you. We’ve purposefully optimized Noom to maximize learning speed via experimentation, says cofounder and president Artem Petakov. Experimentation is how I figure out what works in my personal life. It’s how we figured out what works for Noom. And it’s how you can figure out what works for you.

But we don’t experiment just for the sake of experimenting. We base our experiments on research. We pull from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and a lot of other psychology concepts we’ll introduce you to along the way. We teach you how to identify and change destructive thought patterns that keep you from reaching your greatest goals, achieving your biggest dreams, and having the life you want for yourself, but the way we show you how to do this is always based on the evidence. We’re here to help you reach your goals your way, rather than trying to make you do things our way. There is no one right way to do anything because everyone is different, so we help you pay more attention to your own body and tune in to your psyche—because that is where all the answers lie. You just have to access them. Noom doesn’t give you a program. Noom gives you the tools to access the success program that’s already running in your own brain.

That’s how you build a life you love. We can show you how to shift painlessly into a calorie deficit that will lead to weight loss, how to have more fun moving, or how to feel calmer or more energized. Whatever your goal, we will always encourage you to ask Why? and we will always let you take the lead. We’re just here to hand you tools when you need them so you can set goals that are in line with who you are, and so you can stay motivated, inspired, and reassured that science is in your corner. You know yourself better than anyone else ever could, so while it’s your life, your plans, your goals, we’re in your corner, too. Because we trust you, and we want you to trust yourself. Because we believe in you, and we want you to believe in yourself. Because we know you can do whatever it is you decide you want to do for yourself.

Because you rule. You are the single greatest force in your health and in your life. You are the most influential, are the most powerful, and have the most control over what you will and will not do. All you have to do is understand, unlock, and harness that superpower you already have within you. Our goal—because we have goals, just like you do—is simply to help you figure out how to do that.

If you’ve struggled in the past with how to eat healthier, exercise more effectively, lose weight you don’t want to be carrying around, or have a more comfortable relationship with food or your body, fear not. Noom has a ton of new tools. We can help you reframe how you look at food, exercise, weight, and even yourself, so you can stop fighting with food, the scale, the mirror, or your inner critic and start living in a way that can help you feel