Illustration by Elysia Stent.
TW: eating disorders, body image, calorie counting, dieting.
Noom is a diet app for the 21st century. Forget cutting out food groups, crash dieting, and unrelenting restriction. With Noom, you’re the boss – or so you’re meant to think.
Noom focuses on educating its users to lose weight “mindfully”. Most diets, especially popular ones, end in failure, as we lose control and pile the pounds back on. However, Noom takes a common-sense approach to dieting, putting the consumer’s wellness first. It makes sure that your psychological, as well as your physical needs are met. It’s dieting, but without the self-hate.
For a generation still reeling from the skinny culture of the early ‘00s, Noom seems like a perfect fit. No wonder, then, that it costs a breezy $60 (£54) per month.
However, beneath the wellness marketing, Noom is really nothing new. Like any weight-loss scheme, Noom pushes its users into calorie deficits. Calorie deficits, when moderate, can still be healthy; but the app allows users to set their calorie goals to as low as 1,310 kcal per day. Though an improvement on Noom’s previous minimum goal of 1,200 kcal, this level of restriction is dangerously low for most people.
The app’s traffic light system, used to categorise different foods based on how well they help you to achieve your weight-loss goal, also promotes unhealthy attitudes. Nominally, the app encourages balance. But the red, yellow, and green colour-coding makes it clear which food groups to avoid. This “good food”, “bad food” thinking is a staple of disordered attitudes towards eating, turning weight loss into a moral crusade.
To make things worse, nutrient-dense foods such as nuts, beef, and seeds are labelled “red” (for “bad”) alongside French-fries, cakes, and processed burgers. Clearly the focus is on calories, rather than nutrition and health.
Worst of all, the app encourages obsession with control. It encourages the user not only to log calories and food eaten, but also to monitor weight, blood glucose, blood pressure, and water intake. Reading user testimonies, this controlling element seems to be the main reason that people end up shedding weight, rather than the focus on education and sustainability. “I’m able to enter what I eat, and the food log is honestly 90 percent of why I have lost weight.” The demon of control that so often characterises disordered eating is being enabled and even encouraged.
Noom is not the first product to sell itself on wellness and bitterly disappoint. In fact, this strategy seems more and more profitable, and thus increasingly popular. The wellness industry is now worth over $4 trillion worldwide, according to the Global Wellness Institute. This figure includes the beauty industry, fitness products, and mental wellness services, as well as the elusive “wellness real estate” category.
Wellness seems like a 21st century fad, but it began its integration into the western mainstream in the 1960s. Halbert L. Dunn, Chief of the National Office of Vital Statistics and sometimes called the ‘Father of Wellness’, helped to pioneer the idea of health as wellbeing. “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. This idea is tied up with an approach to wellness “which is oriented toward maximising the potential of which the individual is capable.” Hence the wellness industry’s all-encompassing product base, promising mental, spiritual, and physical enrichment.
The culmination of wellness’ growing social presence was reached with the mental health crisis of the 2000s, and was reinforced by Covid. During the COVID-19 crisis, reports of mental distress increased globally. Over 50% of consumers surveyed by McKinsey say that they want to give greater priority to mental wellness. In a consumerist society, mental suffering opens the door to profit.
It might seem strange to criticise an industry for catering to people’s desire to be well. Okay, profit maximisation might feel a bit icky, but if companies are producing products to help people lead happier lives, that seems to be a positive side-effect of what many feel is an unfortunate reality of business practice.
I am not going to deny that there have been positive impacts from the shift towards wellness. Most notably, taking care of one’s mental health is increasingly normalised, and even celebrated. Marketing promotes self-care, even if ultimately to sell a product. It is heartening to see culture celebrating looking after oneself, rather than demonising it as self-indulgence.
However, mixing wellness with profit is a dangerous game. Industry marketing portrays health and wellness as the default. Therefore, if one is falling short in these areas, there must be something wrong. The question then becomes, “What is wrong?” Industry’s answer: “insufficient or inadequate consumption.”
The wellness industry has constructed a mythology of wellness, where wellness is achieved through a careful balance of goods and services. If you want to get fit, regular walks and playing with the kids isn’t enough; you need to buy this gym membership, or these supplements. Mental distress can’t be helped by relying on friends, family, and if necessary, professional intervention, but can be solved with yoga classes, wellness retreats, and subscriptions to meditation services. Wellness is mystified, and the solution is consumption.
One of the most glaring problems with this consumerist wellness is its fragility. Rather than depending on our own mental resilience and the support of people around us, our sense of well-being depends on ticking the right boxes. Wellness is disrupted when we don’t drink two gallons of water, go to the gym, do our daily meditation, and log our calories on our tracking app. Failure to live up to the pressures of the wellness industry creates guilt.
This problem arises because the consumption, rather than the wellness itself, is glamorised. The reasons for this are obvious: “actual” wellness isn’t glamorous, and cannot easily be bought. Being well isn’t glamorous; rather it is a quite boring combination of knowing what actions make one’s happy chemicals start flowing, and having the accountability to make oneself do those actions, even when they seem unappealing. This is not very alluring, nor can it easily be packaged and sold.
So, the wellness industry is a bit morally dubious. It sells us things that purport to change our lifestyles, but that normally have little impact. But why should we care about it? Sham products and industry dishonesty are hardly new. Why can’t we just avoid wellness products, and carry on living our lives?
The problem is that, with social media, the wellness industry has a growing cultural footprint. In the superficial online space, wellness has been reduced to an aesthetic. This aesthetic has been leveraged by wellness companies, shaping the cultural conversation around wellness and mental health. By fusing wellness marketing with social media, companies have perpetuated the idea that wellness is chic. In order to be well, one must be pretty, skinny, and fashionable. Trends like the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic turn a certain type of wellness into an online identity. One must have the right looks, wear the right clothes, and buy the right products to belong.
Hence why, even as consumers report wanting to prioritise mental wellness, they still cling to warped ideas of health and beauty. The same McKinsey survey that showed consumers’ increasing concern about mental wellness also paints a picture of a culture drenched in superficiality. Over 1 in 3 consumers surveyed reported that they “probably” or “definitely” planned to increase spending on nutrition apps, diet programs, juice cleanses, and subscription food services. Anti-aging products, beauty supplements, non-invasive cosmetic procedures, and nutrition were especially popular products. If wellness is more than skin-deep, we don’t seem to have noticed.
And it’s not just toxic ideas about health and beauty. The wellness industry taps into a whole host of unhealthy tendencies in their target demographics. An obsession with control is catered to with restrictive diets, rigid skincare regimens, and wearables that seemingly track every biological function. Workplaces seeking to avoid accountability for stressful working environments can hire wellness consultants, rather than confronting unpleasant bosses and unrealistic targets. Instead of making us well, the wellness industry is encouraging us to become complacent about harmful attitudes.
The cultural impact of wellness is something that we should question. While luring us in with romanticised marketing and sympathetic language, the wellness industry is preying on our collective desire for escapism. It’s selling the lie that wellness can be bought- and people are believing it.