Noom vs. Keto: Which Weight Loss Approach is Right for You?

Are you on a quest to discover the most effective path to weight loss? You've likely encountered the ketogenic diet, celebrated for its potential to rapidly reduce body fat. But is keto the only answer, or are there alternative strategies worth considering? This article provides an in-depth comparison of Noom and Keto, two popular approaches to weight management, to help you make an informed decision.

While both methods aim to help you shed unwanted pounds, they differ significantly in their approaches. Noom is a lifestyle management app designed to facilitate steady weight loss through sustainable changes, while the Keto diet involves a drastic reduction in carbohydrate intake to induce a metabolic state called ketosis.

Noom: A Comprehensive Approach to Lifestyle Change

Noom is a popular lifestyle adjustment app designed to help you steadily lose weight without resorting to extreme dieting. The Noom app is available for download from the Google Play and Apple App Stores. After installing it on your device, you take a brief introduction quiz. After analyzing your quiz answers, Noom creates a custom diet plan to meet your needs.

Pros of Noom

  • Customized Diet Plans: Noom creates custom diet plans to suit your favorite foods.
  • Accurate Calorie Tracking: Noom calculates and tracks the calories in your meals, allowing you to figure out the nutrition value of food.
  • Community Support: Noom gives you community support.
  • Personal Coaching: Noom provides personal coaching, all through the app.
  • Sustainable Lifestyle Changes: Noom is more of a lifestyle adjustment app than a dieting app. With Noom, you can keep eating the same foods you enjoy, but you understand when to call it a day.
  • Nutritional Education: Noom offers you the best platform to learn about the nutrient value of the food you’re eating. As you learn which foods are calorie-dense, you start making better food choices.

Cons of Noom

  • Price: Noom can be a very expensive diet program to use, at around $50 per month for membership. According to Noom reviews, you can start with the app for a monthly subscription fee of $59. However, if you take year upfront, you get a discount, with a total subscription cost of $199, or less than $17 per month.
  • Language: Though Noom is designed to help you stay motivated, some people may cringe at the words. For example, lines like “conquer your food triggers” may indeed be problematic for people who suffer from emotional eating and struggle with trigger foods.
  • Virtual: If you prefer a more personal experience or face-to-face coaching from nutrition to personal training, Noom may not be right for you. There’s no in-person or video coaching.
  • Color-labeling: Though coloured-labeling works as a great guide for some people, it can result in disordered eating habits, especially for those with an unhealthy relationship with food or at risk of an eating disorder. For example, almond butter is marked red because it has high calories and fats.

How Noom Works

The Noom app is available for download from the Google Play and Apple App Stores. After installing it on your device, you take a brief introduction quiz. After analyzing your quiz answers, Noom creates a custom diet plan to meet your needs.

Noom calculates and tracks the calories in your meals, allowing you to figure out the nutrition value of food. As you learn which foods are calorie-dense, you start making better food choices.

Read also: The Noom Weight Loss Zone explained

Noom promotes the concept of self-awareness, unlearning bad eating habits, learning better habits, and trading a bad habit for a healthier one. The Noom diet plan helps you learn healthy eating and weight loss strategies that will be sustainable and work for the long term.

The basis of the Noom diet is focused on caloric density, which means eating foods that are high in water and low in calories by volume. No food in the Noom diet is truly off-limits because you can eat whatever is on the list, provided you keep an eye on the calorie and percentage recommendations of the Noom app.

Is Noom Right for You?

Noom is a more comprehensive solution, teaching you about the nutrient value of food. If you’re looking to lose weight and have no idea what you’re doing with your diet, go with Noom. Noom gives you customized diet plans, community support, and personal coaching, all through the app.

If you’re the type of person who enjoys all good groups, appreciates smart technology, enjoys tracking what you do, the Noom diet could be a great fit for you.

Keto: The High-Fat, Low-Carb Approach

The Ketogenic diet involves eating a diet consisting of 70-80% fat, 10-20% protein, and 5-10% carbs.

Read also: Weight Loss with Noom

After a few days, your body runs out of glucose and flips a switch in your liver, telling it to metabolize fat stores for energy in an effort to fuel the body’s energy requirements.

Keto essentially uses your fat stores for energy, and as long as you remain in a caloric deficit, you’ll lose weight at a rapid rate.

Pros of Keto

  • Fast and Effective Weight Loss: Keto can lead to quick and dramatic weight loss, but sustaining it could be an issue.
  • Potential Therapeutic Benefits: As for the keto diet, research suggests it could be helpful in treating epilepsy.

Cons of Keto

  • Challenging to Manage: It’s challenging to manage the diet, especially if you have no experience in tracking macros and calories. It’s easy to make a mistake, throwing the body out of keto, without you realizing it.
  • Not for Beginners: The Ketogenic diet is not for beginners, requiring an advanced approach to the dieting strategy. Many newbies find they experience problems with including so much fat in their diet. Most people running the diet for the first time require professional assistance from a nutritionist when structuring their meals.
  • Potential Side Effects: In the beginning, you may suffer what’s known as “keto flu” symptoms (nausea, fatigue, headaches), as your body adjusts. Over the longer term, research suggests, following a keto plan can increase the risk of kidney stones and digestive issues such as constipation, diarrhea and bloating.
  • Restrictive: Maintaining either diet for the long run is problematic because both are restrictive and not in line with a lot of people's typical eating patterns. In restricting certain fruits and vegetables, you may not get enough vitamins and nutrients.
  • Sustainability: A low-carb, high-fat plan can be hard to sustain. If you return to carbs, you may gain the weight back.

How Keto Works

The ketogenic or keto diet is a low-carbohydrate and fat-rich pattern of eating that is sometimes used to treat epilepsy, says Lana Nasrallah, manager of clinical nutrition at UNC Health, a not-for-profit integrated health care system based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It's owned by the state of North Carolina.

A keto eating plan focuses on low intake of carbohydrates, moderate intake of protein and high intake of fat, where 70% to 80% of calories from the diet comes from fat, Nasrallah says.

Keto emphasizes weight loss through fat burning. You slash the carbs you consume and fill up on fats instead. By doing so, you enter a state of ketosis, according to diet proponents. In ketosis, your body breaks down both dietary and stored body fat into substances called ketones. Your fat-burning system now relies mainly on fat - instead of sugar - for energy. In general, keto plans call for restricting carbs to about 15 to 20 net carbs a day. Fat intake makes up roughly 70% of daily calories. In comparison, the 2015-20 Dietary Guidelines for Americans call for a minimum of 130 grams of daily carbs and fat intake ranging from 25% to 35% of daily calories.

Read also: Noom Diet: Pros, Cons, and Expert Analysis

Is Keto Right for You?

The Ketogenic diet is not for beginners, requiring an advanced approach to the dieting strategy.

If you were to use the Noom app to manage your food intake, you’ll get accurate tracking of your calories and macros. As a result, there’s a better chance of you seeing the results you want out of your diet.

Noom vs. Keto: Key Differences

  • Approach: Noom focuses on lifestyle changes and education, while Keto is a restrictive diet.
  • Sustainability: Noom aims for sustainable weight loss, while Keto is often difficult to maintain long-term.
  • Flexibility: Noom allows you to eat your favorite foods in moderation, while Keto requires strict adherence to specific macronutrient ratios.
  • Support: Noom offers community support and personal coaching, while Keto often requires professional guidance from a nutritionist.

Can You Combine Noom and Keto?

Yes, Noom caters to any food choices. With Noom, you can create keto-friendly meals and track your calories and macros with professional precision. Try a Noom low carb diet that’s similar to keto, and manage everything through the dashboard.

Other Weight Loss Options

Besides Noom and Keto, several other weight loss programs are available, each with its own unique approach and benefits. Here are a few notable alternatives:

  • Weight Watchers: Weight Watchers is a fantastic weight loss program used by millions of people worldwide, with great success. With Weight Watchers, you get allocated points to your calorie intake each day. Once you reach your calorie threshold, you stop eating. However, with Weight Watchers, you have to pay for personal coaching, while Noom includes it as part of your plan.
  • GOLO: The GOLO is another specialist weight loss program aimed at people with diabetes. The diet’s structure revolves around timing your insulin release through effective management of your carb intake. Noom is a more comprehensive solution, teaching you about the nutrient value of food. While GOLO is effective, it’s more of a specialist diet for people that are already unhealthy and dealing with the onset of chronic disease.
  • Low-Carb Diets: On many low-carb diets, it is encouraged to choose complex carbohydrates such as whole grains, legumes, fruit and starchy vegetables, for they will provide more fiber and protein, healthy fats and protein from lean meats, fowl and fish.
  • The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH): The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH, for short) plan was designed to reduce blood pressure. Turns out, it’s also good for weight loss.
  • MIND Diet: An offspring of the Mediterranean and DASH diets, the MIND (short for the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) plan focuses on plant-based foods and limits foods high in saturated fat.
  • Plant-Based Diet: A way of eating that focuses mostly on whole plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains. Key word: mostly. In other words, meat, fish, eggs and dairy are all allowed on a plant-based diet, but they’re meant to play a supporting role.
  • Intermittent Fasting: Under this plan, it isn’t so much what you eat as when you eat.

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