139. I tried Noom for a week - here's what happened

Hello, intuitive eaters! I'm thrilled to be back with you after a short break. I initially planned to return in September, but I missed our conversations and your wonderful support. Thank you for your lovely messages wishing me well during my time off; they truly mean a lot to me!

What’s New?

During my break, I took some time to reflect on the Eat From Within membership options. I’m excited to announce a new 4-month subscription plan! Imagine entering the holiday season with a healthier relationship with food and body image. You could enjoy Christmas dinner without the stress of calorie counting or worrying about your outfit. Check out the links section below in the show notes to sign up!

This Week’s Topic: My Experience with Noom

In this episode, I’m telling you all about my experience with Noom, a popular app that claims to support weight loss through a unique approach. 

I wanted to try it on your behalf and share my insights from an intuitive eating perspective. I’m going to spill the beans on all of this:

• The sign-up process
• Calorie counting, and whether I was given enough
• Tracking and logging food
• Colour-coded food categories
• Daily weigh-ins and how they made me feel
• Exercise tracking
• Constant reminders from the app
• In-app lessons
• Noom’s holistic approach to well-being
• How it works with intuitive eating
• How it feels mentally as well as physically
• And whether I’d recommend it or not

Also, the episode I refer to about standing on the scales and weighing myself, and what that brought up for me, is way back at episode 4. Go give it a listen!

Get 'Eat From Within - The 3 Steps To Food Freedom' course totally free!

Chapters

• 0:00 I'm back!
• 1:59 Eat From Within update
• 5:53 Noom initial impressions
• 14:07 The features and their problems
• 32:11 All the notifications
• 36:22 My thoughts and challenges
• 43:02 Final verdict

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity podcast. I'm Terri  and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity and health at every size, and shaking off weight stigma, diet culture and food rules so that we can all have a better relationship with food and our bodies. Hello, hello, I've had a few weeks off but I'm back. I said I wasn't going to come back until September, but changed my mind because I missed you. I've really missed doing the podcast actually. I've really missed chatting with you guys and spilling my thoughts out somewhere. This is a place like no other for that and I enjoy it and I've missed you. And it was really lovely because I had some really nice messages off you saying that you love the podcast, you're glad to hear it's not going away completely and to wish me a happy holiday and enjoy the break and that sort of thing. So that was really nice. So thank you very much. I really appreciate your support. It makes a difference to me to hear that you're out there listening and enjoying it and sad at the prospect of it going away. But somebody said to me, I can't remember who it was now, so I apologize if this was you and I've forgotten your name, but someone said, I had a heart attack for a minute there. I thought you were going away for good. I was like, no, no, no, it's okay. It's all right. I'm back. I'm coming back. It's been nice to have a break. I've got some stuff done. I've got some stuff straight. I've worked on some different stuff, but I missed it. So I come back a little bit earlier than intended. Story of my life. I always do that. I just can't leave anything alone, can I? Right, what else? What else is happening? 1 of the things that I've done while I've been off is to look at the Eat From Within membership options and I've given you something new. So up until now, you've just been able to sign up for 1 month and it's a rolling monthly subscription. I'm now giving you the option to sign up for 4 months. And what that means is, you get to sign up, pay for your 4 months, but you get it a little bit cheaper than if you were paying for 4 months individually. So you get that initial discount anyway for signing up to a slightly longer period of time. But what's more important for you is that you get to sign up for 4 months, which means that you get to take a look around the membership. You get to find your way with it. You get to really get into it and start to put things into action. And this is really difficult to do in just 1 month. It's really hard to do all of that just signing up for a month. I've always had the option of sign up, you get a 14-day trial, and if you don't like it, then that's fine. You can leave no penalty. But I know for some people, when they're looking at the membership, I know some of you look at it and go, well, What if I don't really get into it? What if I don't like it? What if it wasn't going to work for me? What if, what if, what if? And it feels like it's just going to be another thing that you're not going to commit to. So I'm helping you to do that. I'm giving you a 4 month container and you can then spend a good month getting stuck in finding your way, seeing what the coaching sessions are like, seeing what's in the membership and having a look around that sort of stuff. And then it's going to take you about a month to do that, you know, properly, have a really good look into it. But then after that, you get to put it into action. And you've then got 3 months where you're like, right, I'm going to give this a go. I'm going to try it. I'm going to see if it makes a difference to me. I'm going to see if I like Terri  as a coach. I'm going to see if I like the other ladies in there. I'm just going to see if this is for me. And it's no big deal because it's not a 12 month subscription. I'm not signing you up for 12 months because that's massive, right? 12 months is a long time to sign up to something you don't really know anything about. But also it's a bit of a commitment on your part. Where does 4 months take us from now? So we're at the end of August. So August, September, October, November, December. How would it feel to you to have all these changes, positive changes in your life, ready for Christmas? How would it feel sitting down to Christmas dinner, not worrying about the calories and the macros and how many steps you've done and how you feel in your Christmas outfit? How would it feel going into January not having to worry about a new year diet. Because you sign up now, 4 months takes you to that kind of period of time. So what could that 4 months do for you? Have a little think about it. But go hit the link in the show notes, the Eat From Within membership link, go have a look and sign yourself up. Take advantage of the discounted 4 months. Have a little look around, get stuck in, have a go. And I promise you, it's brilliant. You're going to love it. Okay, this week we're going to talk about Noom, aren't we? I did put a little teaser out and said that I had tried Noom on your behalf, because I'm quite good like that. I tried Noom to see what it was really about and that I was going to tell you about it. That's what I'm going to tell you about today. So just to make this clear, I saw an advert for Noom. It popped up. It gave me this ridiculously cheap offer. And so I thought, right, I'm going to take this opportunity and I'm going to come in, have a little look around, see how it works, get a feel for it. And then I can genuinely talk about it then from an intuitive eating perspective or a dieting perspective, I can actually talk about what happens if you are a member of Noom. And I couldn't do that before because I knew about it and read about it, but I hadn't experienced it. And I like to always do these things from a place of experience. So let me tell you about my time with Noom. I took that offer up, but I was always going to go into it with the view of being an intuitive eater. Okay? I was never going to go in and abandon my intuitive eating. I was going to do it that way for a multitude of reasons. Like you all do, I have food and body image issues. I've had them for a long time. I've worked hard to get rid of them. And I was not about to destroy that trying a diet just to see what it was like. So I was always going to go into this from the perspective and still being an intuitive eater. Okay. So I didn't go in there following the plan to the letter, but I did enough to look after myself, but also get a feel for it. This will become clear, I promise. So signing up, what was that experience like? Signing up for Noom was like an interrogation. It felt like it was never ending. There were loads of questions about me, my life, my aims, my goals. There were loads and loads of questions before it even took me to a place of, right, here's what you're going to get. Here's how many calories you're going to be allowed to eat each day, that sort of thing. So the signup process was pretty long-winded, but a few things stood out to me in the beginning, and that was there were questions like, How quickly do you want to lose weight? Now, if you remember, Noom always said they are not a weight loss program. They are an intuitive eating aligned thing. They've used that in their advertising, but they have always kind of gone on this, well, we're not really a weight loss thing, are we? We do do weight loss, but we're not really a weight loss plan. That's not our intention. Well, 1 of the first questions I got asked was, how quickly do I want to lose weight? Now, if that is not going in with the intention of weight loss, I do not know what is. So I had some choices. How quickly did I want to lose this weight? And I had to put in, if I remember rightly, a kind of timeframe. And it told me when I would achieve things if I followed the plan based on how fast I set my weight loss requirements. That sounds a little bit convoluted, doesn't it? Let me try and reframe it. So I had to tell it what speed I wanted to lose weight. I had to tell it a goal weight. I had to tell it what my target was. So already this target is this pie in the sky number, right? I've plucked it out of thin air. What do I want to be? And how quickly do I want to get there? No rhyme or reason to why those things might be chosen, but that's what it asked me. And then it said, right, at this speed, you will get to this weight by whatever month. And for me, putting in what I put in, now I'm not going to also tell you about actual numbers and things, right? That's not fair on you and it makes no difference to me. So I'm not going to tell you what numbers I've put in, but for the goals that I set and the speed that I wanted to achieve it, it put me at something like April or May next year. And in my head, I automatically went, well, that's not quick enough. That's not quick enough. I want to lose the weight now. I want it gone now. Don't give me months in advance. I want you to tell me 2 months, 2 months and it'll be gone. Unrealistic thoughts, right? The numbers that I put in, that was unrealistic thinking. If you're going to go slow and steady controlled weight loss, then possibly the stuff that it put in for me, The timeframe that it gave me might be reasonable, but in my head, I'm going, well, that's not quick enough, is it? So already before I've signed up, my brain is going, weight loss, weight loss, weight loss, fast weight loss, fast weight loss, please. And then when I go through all these settings that I've put in everything that you usually have to put in, you know, like your height and your weight and all of that sort of stuff, then it asks me what I want to lose it for. What is my intention for losing weight? So I had options like health, holiday, to be fitter, all these things that were just again what and it was like which 1 do you want the most I could choose 1. Great thanks well what if I wanted for lots of things but no I choose my 1 main goal. And then it gives me the calories that I'm allowed to eat each day. I say allowed because obviously these things are targets, right? They are goals. They are settings that are given to you that you will stick to rigidly. So it gives me my target that I'm allowed to eat each day. And my immediate thought was, oh hell, that's low. That's really low. And I know what a reasonable amount of calories is for the human body in general. I do not know what your individual calorie requirements will be. I don't even know what my individual calorie requirements are really because it's 1 of those numbers that's really difficult to generate without knowing your actual DNA, right? You can't work this out accurately without knowing what your body does. And of course it changes on a daily basis. But I've been given this number and even knowing what an average person would be nourished by, I'm looking at that number and going, oh my god, that's really, really low. How will I stick to that? How can I stick to that? Now you can change your settings, you can change the calories that you decide you want to eat in the settings. But it is buried deep, right? Go find that. Took a bit of work. It was buried right deep down in there. So they are intending you to stick to the calories that they set each day. So already, I've put myself in a place of, well, I want fast weight loss. And I've also put myself in a position of, oh my God, that doesn't look like I'm going to eat enough food. What am I going to do? And that starts all kind of other thoughts rolling, right? So the plan, because it is a plan, is based on weighing and counting your food. Everything has to be weighed or counted. Everything has to be logged in the app. The food you eat, the exercise you do, the fluid that you drink, the alcohol that you have, all that sort of stuff, you log it all. You log every last bit. Everything you eat, everything you drink has to be weighed, measured, counted. And it is constant tracking, constant tracking of food and drink. And the app even says, we know that tracking is hard. Actually, let me tell you what it actually says. The app itself actually says, we know it's tough, but you're tougher for doing it. What kind of a message is that? We know this is hard, but dig deep love and recognize how strong you are. You are not strong for fighting against an app. You are not strong for digging in and reducing your calories to that degree. You are not strong for being able to track and log every last thing you eat. That's not what being tough and strong is. And there's a whole other discussion to be had around, well, do we have to be tough and strong anyway? You know, what is the meaning of that? Why do we have to be strong? Why do we have to be tough? There shouldn't be a fight when it comes to food. You shouldn't have to battle with your will and battle with an app and battle with the food that you eat. That's not ever the intention behind eating and comfortably eating and intuitively eating, you know? So for this app to say, we know it's tough, but you're tougher for doing it, I don't think that sends out the right message. Not at all. The food that you log, the food that you choose to eat, all has a color-coded scale. It's a bit like a traffic light system. It's not red, orange and green, or red, amber and green, but it is a color-coded scale. And the worst food to eat is red shock. Everything you eat gets put to this allocation of color-coded food. So you have a calorie allowance for the day, but you also have this scale that you've got to work to. So you can have so many red foods, you should have so many orange foods and so many yellow foods. And they're categorized by calorie density, basically. So you are encouraged to choose foods with the least dense calories, which basically means you're encouraged to eat the food that's got the higher water content. And the app actually tells you that. It says that eat food with more water content and you're going to be fuller for longer. Well, that's not true, right? That's not how food works. The water will fill you up in the short term. It does not fill you up in the long term. But your food that you log and the food that you eat all gets put to this allocation of coloured foods. And as you go through the day, you can see how you are faring against these allocations. So not only are you watching your calories, you're also watching the type of food that you're eating against this scale. And it's hard work. The first thing I ate, the first thing I ate put me quite a way into my red allowance. I'd got right through that red allowance in quite a short space of time and I'd eaten quite intuitively. I had eaten the stuff that I needed to eat for me and for what I was going to be doing in the hours coming up after that. I'd eaten according to what I needed to eat and what I wanted to eat. And immediately it was going, whoop, steady up, you're eating too much of that type of food. And I was like, great, thank you. How am I going to possibly manage this? Because it was, it felt a bit impossible. You know, it felt a bit impossible to stick to this scale. Also, this means there is an allowance. Again there is an allowance of food. You're being told how much you can eat. This really knocks sideways any intuitive eating that you're trying to do, doesn't it? You can't be intuitive and be trying to follow an amount of food or a type of food that you've been given. It's impossible. In the app, there are food lists. So you can go in and look at the lists of food that fit the red category, the orange category, the yellow category, whatever the colors were, I actually can't remember now. Other than red, I know something was red and angry and, you know, don't eat much of it. But in the app, I digress, in the app, there is lists, there are lists of food and what color they fall into. And it took me right back to Slimming World. Those lists made me think of my old Slimming World book. You know, when you join Slimming World and you're given this handbook and in it, it's got these lists of your free foods, your protein foods, your fiber foods, that sort of thing. Very, very similar to that. Very, very similar to the old Slimming World days. What can I eat? Don't know. Let's go have a look at a list, pick some stuff off the list, see what I've got or what I fancy and go from there. It just felt so much like the old Slimming World book. And when you think of it in terms of color coding and the old slimming world, free foods, protein foods, dairy, fiber, it's all categorized. Well, this is what Noom is doing. It's categorized to food. Very, very, very diet-like. I mean, it's all very diet-like. It's all very extreme diet-like so far. And I'm only just exploring the app, really. The database of foods is just like MyFitnessPal. That's how it felt to me. When you log your foods, you go in, you can search for it, you find it in the app, you allocate the amount that you've eaten or drank, and it logs it in your diary. That database felt very much like my fitness pal when I used to use that. It is so full of other people's entries that you don't actually know which 1 is accurate and which 1 isn't. I mean, where is that database coming from? Because you can add your own food. If you can't find it in there, you can add it. So this database probably has a degree of stuff that's been set up by Noom as correct measurements for that food type. But realistically, the amount that people are contributing, the amount of members that Noom has had and the amount of food they must have contributed, can you imagine the amount of human error that is in there, I didn't trust it at all, just like I didn't trust my fitness pal. But somebody who doesn't know that, somebody who doesn't know that there's human error behind the entries, somebody that doesn't know how problematic that database can be might just be blindly guided by it, not knowing that actually the data that they're putting in isn't inaccurate. So by now, what's happening is you're working to a set number of calories and a set allowance of color-coded foods and using a database that is not accurate. None of this is accurate so far for your body, right? None of it is tailored to me. None of it is individual to me other than what I put in in the initial settings. But there are many millions of people in the world that probably match those same settings, right? 1 day in this week's trial of Noom that I was doing. There was a birthday in our house. Yay, love a birthday. Really love a birthday. And what do we have every birthday? We have birthday cake. We do not go through a birthday in our house without having cake. And I had to log that birthday cake. And imagine what that looked like. Imagine what color that birthday cake went in as. Imagine how many calories it zapped up. Imagine weighing a piece of birthday cake. How sad is that? This is what calorie counting does. This is what food trucking does. It sucks the joy out of events that should be really happy, joyful moments. Instead of enjoying a slice of birthday cake with the people in the house, it was almost like, hang on, whoa, let me weigh my slice of cake, please. And then we can all eat. I mean, I didn't say that, but that could easily have been the situation. Then there's exercise. So when you're doing gnome, you can add exercise into your diary and you get calories back. Isn't exercise always tied to food in these diet plans? Earn some calories, eat some more calories. That's basically what it says. Now, Noom say you can add back half of your calories. So they're being what they think is sensible with the calories that you're burning. But in reality, you're still burning calories in order to eat more food. Now, it's no secret in life that if you do a lot of activity, you do need to eat more. However, that should be just a simple way of life. It should be, I've got a busy day, I need to eat some more food. I'm going on a long run, I should probably eat for that and fuel myself properly. I have had a busy, busy, busy week. I really, really need some extra, some extra food, some extra carbs, some extra sustenance for my body. What it shouldn't be is if you'd like to eat more today, can you go and have a run? If you want to eat more today, can you hop on your bike and go for a cycle? If you want to eat more today, can you hop on your bike and go for a cycle? If you want to eat more today, can you go to the gym and burn some calories? Only when you've done that can you have some calories back. Only when you've done that can you have some more food. That's not the right way to approach food and exercise. It makes you step count. So you can rig up an app that automatically feeds in the amount of steps you're doing each day, which then means that you've got to set a target, doesn't it? A target number of steps each day. And I am right back on another diet that I've done. I remember step counting for multiple diets. I specifically remember standing in my kitchen at 11.30 1 night thinking, oh my God, I've got 5, 000 steps to do before I go to bed today. Today, I have to do another 5, 000 steps. And so I jogged in the kitchen until I had done them. That is not a healthy relationship with exercise. Step counting is just an arbitrary number. Step counting bears no relevance to the food that you eat. In this app though, it does. And that's all wrong. The steps are just it every day. So it set me at a starting step count. And then if I hit that step count it increased my steps the next day and if I hit that step count it increased my steps the next day but if I didn't hit it it dropped them down a little bit because it wants you to feel like it's achievable. So if it's manipulating the numbers like this every day, what does it mean? What is the point in having a step count target if it means nothing because if you don't hit it, it'll drop it down the next day. Now I know that the intention in the app behind this is let's start you small, let's encourage you to get moving, tomorrow we'll encourage you to get a bit more in, the day after we'll encourage you to get a bit more in. And if you don't manage it, we'll drop it down so you don't get demotivated. I get that. But doesn't it also make a mockery of the numbers? If they can be flexed so much, what's the point in having them there in the first place. Let's talk about weighing too. Noom encourages you to weigh every day, every single day. And it's another of those things that in the app, it says, we know it's tough, but it's really good for you. We know it's tough because it's hard to see those numbers, but it's really good for you because you habituate to it, you get used to it, you start to not be bothered by it. Well let me tell you, in my history, with my body image and with my calorie counting and with my dieting, it could not be further from the truth. Standing on those scales every day became an addiction. It became a habit. It became something I had to do. Noom tells you to weigh at a certain time of day, mostly in the morning, before you've eaten and drunk anything, before you've really got your day going. And then that becomes normal. But for me, that became, in my previous dieting times, that became stand on the scales. Please don't have eaten anything. Please don't have drunk anything. Go to the toilet. Take all your clothes off. Have the scales in the same spot. It becomes obsessive when you do it. There's a whole podcast episode on this, so go find it. I can't remember what it's called. Something about standing on the scales for you, or I weighed myself for you, but go find it. I'll see if I can remember to put it in the show notes for you, the episode number. But it became an obsession for me. And this is what happens with many, many people. So for Noom to be saying, stand on the scales every day, it's good for you. You'll get used to it. It's fine. Numbers are neither here nor there. Just write them down. Just log them in the app and everything will be fine. You don't have to worry about it. But that's not the actual reality for a lot of people. It does become a worry. It does become the thing that guides you and structures your day. It becomes the thing that decides whether you eat well for yourself or not, whether you start restricting, whether you exercise more, what you wear, how you feel, your confidence levels, all these things. Standing on the scales daily for most people is absolutely not a good habit. It also tests you on this stuff. So every now and again you get a little pop quiz And it says, and what is the best time of day to weigh yourself? And what are the best types of foods to eat? And you go through these little teachings and these little quizzes, and then you go, yeah, look what I know. Hurrah, won that 1. All I've done is been guided by an app, been told what to understand about food and exercise and weighing myself. And then I've ticked the box to say I've understood what they've told me. Doesn't actually tick a box to say, yes, I know what's good for me. I know what's good for my body and my exercise habits and my mental health. What else? Let me just have a look at my notes. What else? What else? Oh, notifications. You get notifications from Noom. Of course you do, because they don't want you to leave their app. They don't want you to stop using it. So what they're going to do is remind you at least once a day, probably multiple times a day that you haven't logged your food yet. How are you getting on? Why didn't you come in and do a lesson? And you're permanently pulled back and back and back to this app and to the food and to the exercise and to the dieting. That is not what a natural relationship with food and exercise in your body should be. You shouldn't be thinking about food all day long. You shouldn't be thinking about tracking all day long. You shouldn't be sat eating your meal, logging it. That's not the way the food should be enjoyed. But Noom calls you back time and time and time again. It teaches you at the beginning that every day come in and do some lessons. You even set the amount of time that you want to spend learning in the app. So it's going to remind you. And at the beginning, if you're thinking, yes, I'm ready for this, I'm so ready for this. I am keen, I am energized for it, I am motivated. I want to spend 10 minutes a day learning about this stuff." Well that novelty soon wears off, right? So when you're a week down the line, you're like, I don't want to spend 10 minutes in an app learning about food again. Because you shouldn't have to think about it all the time and you shouldn't have to be forced into it. You know, because I'm a coach, I am all about people learning to empower themselves, repairing their relationship with food, feeling better about their bodies. But I am never going to tell you to spend X amount of time each day working on this stuff if it does not feel right to you. And I certainly don't want an app telling me that. There were other things in the app that were contributing to your wellbeing. So when I started the app, I said, I want to improve my sleep. I want to improve my relationship with exercise, I wanted to do X, Y and Z to make some improvements in my life. All this was arbitrary stuff that I just chucked in to see what would happen with the app, obviously. But I put these things in thinking, okay, this is going to be a balanced plan of here's some food stuff to do, here's some other stuff related to sleep and exercise and the other things that I put in there. It didn't tell me about sleep and exercise once in the week I was doing it. So why bother to ask me? So I thought, right, what was the purpose of that? And then I went rummaging around in there and there were little kind of training sessions and things that you could do, but they were in a separate section of the app. And okay, they shouldn't be in the middle of your food diary, but they certainly weren't prominent that way it was very heavily based towards logging your food, tracking your food. The other stuff, the stuff that Noom says is an overall picture contributing to the balance in your life, contributing to your wellbeing, all that is very much an afterthought. All that is very much tucked away over to the side and something that you will focus on if you think to go and look for it. So Definitely not the balanced approach to wellbeing that Noom says it's going to be. So what was my progress like in the week that I tried Noom? I'm not going to give you actual numbers. And also I just remind you that I didn't go into this following the plan completely. I did weigh myself every day. I did look at my food diary every day. I did log everything every day. I did look at how it was sitting in the color bands every day. So to that degree, I did pay attention and even trying to intuitively eat, while using this app, I questioned myself all the time. When the weight dropped on the scale, I felt good about it. When the weight went up on the scale, I questioned myself. And of course, there's going to be those natural fluctuations, especially within a week. Weight is going to go down, weight is going to go up. That's what the human body does. But because I tied it so hard and fast into this diet that I was doing, it meant something different. I didn't think about that anymore. I was thinking, what have I done to gain weight today? What have I done? I thought I was eating okay. I was eating intuitively, but my weight's gone up. What did I do well to make my weight drop? I felt good about myself on the days that the weight came off. I felt bad about myself on the days that the weight went on. Back to old dieting thoughts for sure. Also with that came, okay, good, I've had a loss, but why is it not enough? Why is not more come off? All dieting thoughts. And how did I feel physically doing Noom? It's really hard to tell because I didn't follow the diet plan. I was still trying to be an intuitive eater. I didn't live by it. I just wanted to see how it felt to be using it. But it felt really overwhelming again. All the constant thinking about food that I managed to get rid of, it all felt really overwhelming. And it made it very difficult to be an intuitive eater. It made it really difficult to be an intuitive eater. And I knew that was going to be the case because you cannot be an intuitive eater and calorie count. Because the second you start calorie counting, the second you start monitoring the types of food you're eating, you're being guided by that and you are not being intuitive in your eating anymore. All those body cues that you're following, all those sensations, all the cravings, all the stuff that guides you in your intuitive eating, that goes by the wayside completely because you're being guided by numbers. You don't get a chance to think about whether you want to eat that food or not. You don't really get a chance to think, if I could have anything I wanted in this moment, what would it be? Because your next thought is going to be, where does that fit? Am I allowed it? Do I have enough left for my day? Can I afford it? That's what somebody said to me today. Can I afford it? You can't be an intuitive eater and calorie count. You can't be an intuitive eater and track everything you're eating. Completely disagree with anybody that says you can do that. And this is where I get annoyed at Noom and their advertising because they use the words intuitive eating and it's not and it cannot be. Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Absolutely not because it has messed with my head. Even just that week, even me coming from a questioning, how is this working perspective? How does this fit with intuitive eating? How do I feel calorie counting again? You know, really scrutinizing the process. It messed with my head. Just 1 short week. I had an absolute meltdown this 1 day over eggs. I was going to have poached eggs. I really wanted the poached eggs and they went wrong. I posted a photo on my Instagram stories. They were a hot mess. The comments I got back were like, oh wow, what the hell happened there? It was awful. But I had an absolute inner meltdown about that because I wanted poached eggs. And now my option because this pan of water was a mess, my option was to have fried eggs. And I didn't want fried eggs because then I'd have to add extra calories for the oil. Yeah. Still an egg, right? Just a little bit of oil. No biggie as an intuitive eater. That's not a problem for me. In that moment, because I was in such a dieting mindset, that's not what I wanted. I had an absolute inner fit about it. It didn't come out like it might have done in the depths of my bad eating habits, but inside I was like ready to cry. And that's what a week on Noom did for me. Shock him. And the fear, the fear of the scales, you know, that came back. The scales are now firmly tucked away in a hiding place again because there's no way that I can live like that. I cannot weigh myself every day. I shouldn't weigh myself every day. It's unnecessary. But the fear of the scales in that week really came back. Thinking about the calories, thinking about whether having another few hundred calories today is going to make a difference on the scales tomorrow, that sort of thing. That's not right. That's not right. That's not how anybody should live. So do I recommend Noom? Absolutely not. Would I ever do it again? Absolutely not. Do I recommend you go and do it? Absolutely not. No, if you come from a place of yo-yo dieting, obsession over food, binge eating, or any of the other eating disorders actually, this is not something that is going to be helpful for you. They dress it up like this big supportive package and it is not. It is a calorie counting app. It is a food tracker. That's what Noom does for you. So there you go. That was my insight into it. That's my week on Noom. It was not fun. Don't do it, people. Don't do it. Right. It's lovely to be back. Lovely to be chatting with you again. I've waffled on for quite long enough today, so I'll leave you to carry on with your day. Hit me up, send me some messages, be in touch. I love it. I'd love to hear from you. And yeah, speak to you soon. Take care, bye.