I am a registered dietitian and a certified personal trainer. Today I am going to share a story about a client I had a couple of years ago that had been following the Noom app for weight loss before we started working together and also during our short time working together.
When this client came to me she had lost some weight using Noom, and she came to me because she wanted to “tone up,” which is a non-specific goal that a lot of trainers, myself included, don’t love to hear because it doesn’t give us any direction.
During our initial assessment, I realized how weak she was. She had been walking and doing some light stuff on her own at home, but of course she had no one looking after her workouts at that point so she overestimated her abilities.
She struggled a lot with the basics (squatting, hinging, pressing) so we spent most of our sessions doing stretching and mobility to get her ready to advance in the program. This is an important thing for me to say as a trainer but also as a dietitian because I would not put someone through a workout of any intensity if I knew they weren’t capable or if they were undernourished.
I was curious how she lost weight so I would ask her some questions during our sessions. I was familiar with the app and the idea of it, but I didn’t know anyone that had ever done it.
The more she shared, the more I hated it!
She told me she was probably (definitely, in my opinion) eating less than 1000 calories a day. Noom uses the traffic light system to categorize foods, so foods that are “green” you’re encouraged to eat a lot of, “yellow” foods you are meant to eat less frequently and “red” foods you are meant to really limit. She would tell me that when she started the diet she threw away all the red foods she had. This is akin to high point foods in Weight Watchers, which people typically avoid to save up points.
She also told me she wasn’t really eating any fats (they were red foods) and she wasn’t eating much protein. She said sometimes she would have chicken for lunch, but not all the time.
She was frequently dizzy and tired. If I had her test a plank position (on her knees) she wasn’t able to hold herself up without shaking.
She struggled with the stairs in her apartment, both climbing them without getting out of breath and descending them (she had fallen more than once).
It’s probably important to mention that by this point I told her I’d look at her plan but she kept saying no, so there wasn’t really much I could do aside from sneak some advice into conversation.
One day, and this is where it got worse, she told me her hair had been falling out. She said she was stressed, but I knew she needed to eat more.
We stopped working together before making any progress because she kept getting sick and had no energy for exercise or anything else, and her doctor advised her to stop doing any physical activity after she saw him for heart arrhythmia. I bet he didn’t inquire about her diet at all.
The point of me sharing this story is to make it clear that no diet is worth doing if you can’t do anything else when you’re on it. If you can’t function on a diet, don’t do it.
No amount of weight loss is worth your hair falling out.
No amount of weight loss is worth you not having energy to live a healthy life.
She got absolutely nothing out of losing weight.
Her life was worse off, and she was hungry and weak the entire time.
When I saw her a while after that she had gained the weight back. I say this not to shame her but to emphasis that even if you go through the motions and you “suffer” like diet culture wants you to (that’s when it’s working, right?) it can still be for nothing. There is no scenario where she would have maintained her weight loss without extreme repercussions to her health.
We need to do better and stop putting ourselves through this. Who’s with me?