November 2, 2022 • 63 mins
Noom’s app promises a long-term approach to weight loss based on psychology and personalization. And it’s popular. It has 250 million downloads, ads that pop up everywhere from podcasts to the Superbowl, and a valuation of $3.7 billion.
But is being a weight loss app even the right goal? Or is it just the perfect business model?
Show Notes
- Read Taylor Majewski’s deep-dive into the app titled ‘‘The Dark Side of Noom’.
- Check out Eling Tsai’s full-service nutritional consultancy work at Food in Common.
- Buy Jane Ogden’s recent book Health Psychology which examines health behaviors through reviewing key research in the field.
If you love the show, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Find out more at https://callingbullshitpodcast.com/.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's Friday, June. I'm about to do my first way in. UM.
I'm a little nervous because my friend and I got
dinner last night, but it was mostly vegetables. UM, but
I did have a drink. Associate producer on the Calling
Bullshit podcast, Haley Pascal Des and I'll probably go for
(00:28):
a run this morning because they don't have any meetings.
But I usually like to wear myself after a run
if I run in the morning, because then I wait less.
But now I miss telling me I need to win
myself first thing in the morning. New is a digital
health platform. Their flagship product is an app that promises
(00:49):
a long term approach to weight loss, one based on
psychology and personalization. To help us understand if they're living
up to that promise, Haley volunteered to try it for
thirty days and document or experience. So I just got
back from my run. I am trying to run three
(01:10):
times a week and this was my third run this week,
so I'm feeling pretty good about that. And I logged
it in noon. I listened to some of the lessons
about the different foods that like. It was saying, like
a cheeseburger and arugula are a pound of arugula are
the same calorie density, and they'll both fill you up
(01:30):
the same, but you obviously won't gain as much weight
if you're eating a pound of arugula, which like, who
was eating a pound of arugula versus eating a cheeseburger.
But anyways, I'm a little nervous to start tracking my calories, Like,
I feel like this is going to be difficult, but uh,
(01:50):
let's see how it goes. Welcome to Calling Bullshit, the
podcast about purpose washing, the gap between what an organization
says they stand for and what they actually do and
what they would need to change to practice what they preach.
(02:12):
I'm your host, Time Montague, and I've spent over a
decade helping organizations define what they stand for, their purpose
and then help them to use that purpose to drive
transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of institutions today,
there's still a pretty wide gap between word and deed.
That gap has a name bullshit. But, and this is important,
(02:36):
bullshit is serious, but it's also a treatable condition. So
when our bullshit detector lights up, we're going to explore
everything the organization should do to fix it new is popular.
(02:58):
It has two fifty million downloads ads that pop up
everywhere from podcasts to the Super Bowl, an evaluation of
over three point seven billion dollars, and as they explained
in this promo video, Noon claims to have been purpose
led from the start thirteen years ago. Save Young and
(03:19):
Art and Patakov founded Noon with one mission to help
as many people as possible live healthier lives. Noon was
created because healthcare has really become sick care and inefficient
system designed to treat patients after they're already sick. Today,
Noon is a trusted, consumer led digital health platform helping
(03:41):
people around the world live healthier lives. Guided by principles
of proven behavioral science. We've discovered the right combination of psychology, technology,
and human coaching that empowers people to change their habits
and take control of their health. I can fit in
close that I've never been able to where before I
lost eighty pounds on New. There's a much bigger connection
(04:05):
with my mind and body now with New that I
didn't have before, and I think that's the biggest difference.
By pairing the power of the individual with proven science
and psychology, we're building products that change behaviors for good
and create transformational health outcomes. At Noon, we believe that
better health begins with you, and behavior change starts with
(04:25):
us co founders who spent years working towards their goal
check tackling a real problem double check. At a glance,
Noon looks fairly low BS. But digging a little deeper,
I learned that health is incredibly complex and equating weight
(04:47):
with health this puts New in murky territory where they
risk harming the very people they say they exist to help.
So have founders Artem and Saves You created an app
that truly focuses on long term health or is now
just another one size fits all diet that promises the
(05:07):
unattainable while luring users into a cycle of failure, all
in the name of wellness. Get out your BS detectors, folks,
and join me as we weigh now on the bullshit scale. Alright,
(05:27):
I see NOOM Healthy Weight Loss. It has seven hundred
thousand reviews five star reviews, so well, it has a
four point seven out of five, so it sounds great. Okay,
it's downloading. It's like a little orange glow. So it says,
(05:48):
Noon creates long term results through habit and behavior change,
not restrictive dieting. Do you have an important event coming up?
I mean one of the events is just summer, so
don't choose that. How how confident are you in reaching
one pounds by August? I'm uncertain. Why are you uncertain?
(06:11):
I haven't had success in the past. Previous plans were
too restrictive. There's a bun I'm going to say, I
haven't had success in the past, and I will try
to stick with it for a month. Noon I believe
considers itself to be a wellness app, not a diet app.
(06:32):
Why do you think our culture has moved away from
the word diet and toward wellness? I think there's two reasons.
The less cynical reason, the positive, let's be generous to
people reason is because diet is a negative thing that
(06:52):
people now think about. Diet means eating less, it's stigmatizing
people that are overweight, and it's telling you to impose unreasonable,
unhealthy restrictions on your eating behavior that aren't going to
be good for you. So we're moving away from a
diet culture because we're recognizing that dieting is problematic and
we're using another term to try and capture something which
(07:13):
is more positive and that's you know, that's a good thing. Yeah,
that sounds like it's at least the right idea. It's
the right idea behind that. Anything which is about changing
your diet or eating less in your diet to lose
weight is still really a dieting culture. My more cynical
hat says that it's actually still the same old thing,
it's just being slightly rebranded. Dr Gene Ogden is a
(07:36):
professor of health psychology at the University of Surrey in
the UK. She spent the last thirty years teaching, researching
and writing about the intersection of psychology, food and health.
Her six books include Health Psychology, The Psychology of Eating
and Fat Chance The Myth of Dieting explained. My key
(07:59):
area is to look at how psychology in terms of
the perception of hunger, the meaning of food, the lives
that we live, the childhoods that we have, the experiences
we have in the world that we live in shape
our relationship with food and make it very hard for
us to actually eat less and to stay well. So,
can you talk about some examples of unhealthy diet fads,
(08:22):
either past or current, Just to give us a little context.
I mean, there's an endless slimming products, which are just
drinks really that you have as meal substitutes. There was
the Beverly Hills diets, which said you just eat lots
and lots and lots of fruits. You have constant diarrhea,
and there was a quote from it which said something
like the more time you spend on the toilet, the better.
(08:45):
There was the cabbage soup diet, where you just drink
and eat cabbage soup, which gives you the most horrendous wind.
You spend a lot of your time bloated. It's very unsociable,
but friends have no friends, No one ever wants to
be near you. But eventually you lose a lot of
weight because you're just eating cabbage soup. I mean, that's
the thing, you know. If you eat cabbage soup for
(09:08):
six weeks, you're loot weight. If you have diarrhea for
six weeks, you will lose weight. And that is the
problem with the diet industry and always has been. Is
there anyone can invente anything to get you to lose weight,
but you cannot maintain that for any length of time,
So all weight pretty much goes back on again. That's
also the money making fabulousness of the diet industry is
(09:29):
it's designed to fail. So if you design a product
which fails, people keep coming back and buying more of
the product. So we're here to talk about Noon, the
weight loss app that seems to be sweeping the world,
and it's an app that promises to help as many
people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change, and
(09:49):
their flagship product, as best I can tell, is essentially
a diet and psychology app rolled into one. And I
understand that you've actually downloaded NEWM the past and and
taking a look at it. What were your initial thoughts
or impressions of new I mean, I like the idea
that they're trying to bring psychology into it. I think
(10:10):
that they're trying to take a holistic view of the individual,
which is also a really good thing. My feeling when
I've had a look at it is that it probably
hasn't got as much psychology in it as I would like,
and also it's not as careful about not doing harm
as I think it probably should be. So anybody can
go on it unless you've got to be am I
(10:31):
under eighteen point five which includes an awful lot of
people that don't need to lose weight. I would say,
if you'll be a eyes between twenty and twenty five,
don't try and lose weight. Why would you try and
lose weight, because you're fine as you are. Growing up,
Like I remember, we'd get US Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazine
(10:52):
and like just the women in there, It's like, yeah,
celebrities were just so thin. And we were obsessed with
celebrity culture when I was growing up, and I'm not
so much anymore. But we would just like inspect these
magazines and like to say, how good these women looked.
And we always talked about like we want to look
(11:12):
like them, Like how do we look like them? I
feel like the way I look is the most important thing. Sometimes.
I used to have a certain body that I don't
have anymore, and I'm always trying to get back to
that body. Like I've stayed the same way for the
(11:34):
past two years, and I've been trying to like lose
the same five pounds for that that time. But I'm
also wondering, like maybe I'm just getting older and my
metabolism slowing down, and this is just what I weigh
now and it's just what I look like now, which
I might just have to come to terms with. But um, yeah,
(11:58):
so I'd love to hear you talk about out the
connections between physical health, mental health, and emotional well being
when it comes to food. So for me, it's very
very clear that the mind and body are related, absolutely interrelated,
so that how we think, our emotions, our childhoods are
learning have a direct impact upon our physical bodies and
(12:21):
our physical health, and our physical health has a direct
relationship on how we think and how we feel and
our emotional well being. So those two things are very
clearly interrelated. Everybody has a very personal relationship with food,
a personal relationship with their physical bodies, and also a
meaning around the body size that they have. That is
(12:41):
why trying to change somebody's eating behavior is so incredibly difficult,
because food means something to each person in a very
different way. And what you need to do to get
someone to change their eating behavior is to first understand
the role that food plays in their lives and then
help them see that role of food and then help
them change that. And that's a very difficult thing to do, right,
(13:05):
So can dieting. Lest we just curse the darkness. Can
dieting ever actually benefit a person's health, Like, is there
such a thing as a beneficial diet? Absolutely? And that's
where the word diet, you know, has been kind of
I don't know, has has got so much kind of
negativity around it where it's ruined. There's nothing wrong with
(13:26):
deciding to eat more healthily, to change your diet and
to make healthier choices, and that's got to be a
good thing for you. And if that involves reducing your
calorie and take eating fewer snacks, making sure that you
have more fruit and vegetables, or that you have brown
bread rather than white bread, or that you don't deep
fry your foods, those are all dietary choices and those
(13:47):
are sustainable. And if that's called a diet, so be it.
But that's sustainabul and that can work. I started on Friday.
It's been good. I don't hit it. There's like these
little mini lessons that I have to complete every day
and it starts out like newm one oh one. So
it's kind of just trying to tell you about the
(14:08):
psychology of what you're eating. One of the first lessons
was like start eating less dense, so it categorizes like
fruits and veggies are green. It like encourages you to
eat as many fruits and veggies as you want. Then
there's like a yellow category, which are things that you
are supposed to eat moderation, and then there's an orange category,
which are things that you're not supposed to eat a
(14:30):
lot of. It hasn't been as hard as I thought
to track calories. There's a weight loss though, So if
you're in the zone, you're good. I'd love your take
on on some of the more technical aspects of the program. So,
first of all, New employs a traffic light system for
(14:52):
categorizing all foods. What is your perspective just on that
kind of categorization. I think actually that quite effective. You're
not saying these are good or bad food, so I
think sometimes that kind of dichotomized demonizing a food can
be quite problematic. But you're giving people fairly simple information
saying these are the foods to go for fill your
(15:13):
plate up with these, So it's a fairly simple way
of doing that. When you drill down into the nitty
gritty of that, it can become a little bit problematic
because things like nuts, which are good for you are
also really high fat, so you know where do they belong.
It's not like smoking, where you can say don't smoke
cigarettes are bad for you. There's very few just bad foods.
(15:35):
I'd love to get perspective on a couple of other
new strategies here. So one is to weigh yourself every day.
It's you know, theoretically it's a good motivational strategy because
you get instant feedback. So the thing about behavior change
is quite often the goals are in this short term,
but the rewards are in the long term. So you know,
(15:55):
you want to lose weight now, but the reward is
that you won't have a heart attack when you're saying
ext or that you will not get diabetes in the
future years, and that steels such a long way in
the future that people just ignore that and they really
want immediate benefits. The problem with weighing yourself every day
is a weight naturally fluctuates, and from our studies, weighing
(16:15):
yourself every day was good and reinforcing if your weight
went down. But if your weight goes up because of
whatever else is happening in your life, then that can
lead to kind of catastrophizing and thinking oh god, it's hopeless.
All the effort I put in yesterday, why bother? And
I still didn't lose weight. So you're far better off
getting the reinforcement not on the body weight, but the
(16:38):
reinforcement on the behavior. So it's andy, do I four
and yesterday and to do? I wait in at one
one five points six, which is the lowest I've been
in time. I'm happy about it. Another thing that the
(17:02):
new map asks for actually is for you to enter
a goal weight, and in some cases with a timeline attached,
so a goal weight for an upcoming event, a wedding
or a vacation something like that. How do you feel
about that? Well, again, it's double edged. Sorry, this is
going to be my answer to everything. So the research
(17:26):
shows that it's good to plan and it's good to
set goals. So it's no good saying to yourself I
will eat well or I will lose weight. You need
to say I will eat well tomorrow, and I will
eat this, this and this, and I will lose weight
by next Saturday or lose weight by June. So goal
setting is really good if that goal setting is based around,
you know, stereotypes of having to be thin for your wedding,
(17:49):
or stereotypes of wanting to go to a party and
looking attractive by having lost a bit of weight, or
wanting to be beach ready and get onto the beach
in your bikini. That's not great because that's really forcing
the stereotypes that you know, the only way to be
attractive is to be thinner. And the other problem is
that when goals fail, we then feel worse about ourselves. Okay,
(18:11):
today with one eighteen point for which I'm a little
disappointed in um. The other day I was like one
sixteen something, So I will lock that in newm now.
And one of the things I assume you'll think this
is a good thing, but I don't know. One of
(18:32):
the other things the app asked you to do is
ten minutes of what they call CBT cognitive behavioral therapy
per day. Well, if that's kind of encouraging mindful eating,
that's probably quite a good thing. If it's encouraging being
kind to yourself, that's a good thing. And if it's
encouraging changing the way you think about food, I think
(18:53):
that's a good thing. The problem with that is that again,
all those thoughts that we have and the role of
food in our lives is so personalized. It's quite good
to have someone to help us do that really, just
to ask you how does food feature in your life
and then try and change the way that we think
about foods. So I think it's you know, it's slightly
easy just tossing that out as a kind of psychological
(19:15):
bits to do a bit of CVT, you need to
properly support and structure that process. The reason I'm making
this audio diary is because I just got a new
one on one coach and I just, what's a little
confused about what she said to me. She just sent
(19:37):
me an intro message and it says, I'm your coach, Catherine,
And she read my Big Picture survey, which is like
the big thing I want to complete at the end
of noon, And I said that I want to run
ten miles um. But she said, after reading a Big
Picture survey, it sounds like you were motivated to give
yourself what you know that you deserve, making yourself a priority.
(20:00):
It can be tough to live life to the fullest
when you do not feel comfortable in your body. What
excites you the most about the possibility of hitting those
ten miles um? I thought That was a little strange,
that message, because it starts with saying that I'm not
comfortable in my body, and that is not something I
said in my big picture. Running ten miles is a
(20:22):
fitness goal and it really has nothing to do with
how other people see me. I think it would just
make me really proud if I could do it without walking. Yeah,
I'm I'm confused about her message. So is this just
(20:45):
a bump in the road that leads to a healthier
life or is there something fundamentally flawed about noons approach
the conclusion the Hayley's Thirty Days of New and News
final BS score right after the break definitely falling behind
(21:09):
on the lessons. They're feeling a little repetitive, so it's
kind of a challenge to do them. I was frustrated
this weekend because I pizza and ice cream on Friday
and I weighed myself and I it like one up,
like two pounds, like almost back to where I started.
And it was just like frustrating and annoying because I
(21:33):
want to be able to enjoy pizza and ice cream sometimes,
but my weight is not really going down. I mean,
I guess we'll see, but it's almost three weeks. But
I do feel like healthier overall, Like I'm definitely When
I want to snack, I'm like, oh, eat a handful
of cherries instead of a handful of chips. But it
(21:56):
is getting harder to do it, Like it's getting harder
to track everything I eat. Eat and New makes you
obsessive because I constantly have to do the lessons. I
can't have to lick my food. I have to put
in my exercise like you're always in New. One of
the other things that the app asked you to do
is track all of your food and count all of
(22:18):
your calories. Well, so there's also attention. All of this
is so problematic. It's all problematic because a good thing
is to eat mindfully. It's a fine line between eating
mindfully and becoming obsessed with what you're eating. The chances
are if you're a bit that way inclined, you will
(22:39):
slip across into food obsession. And I think that's the problem.
You know, what you really want is for food to
be a bit of your life, but not everything in
your life. I got a new phone, and yeah, my
new all my new progress is gone. My one on
one coach has been super unresponsive. She only answers like
(23:00):
every three days. UM, so she really hasn't been helping
me much. And I contacted support and they said that
she's the only one that can reset my progress. So
it's been four or five days that I haven't been
able to like do my lessons, which I'm realizing our
(23:21):
big part of the motivation for me to be in
the app. I feel like I definitely had a plateau recently.
I am definitely not as good about portion sizes. I'm
definitely going back to some of the bad habits that
I had before I started. Now. I think I was
(23:44):
so excited in the beginning, and now it's just like
this is getting old? Is new? Getting it right? Would
you say? Or do they have some work to do?
I think the thing about any app, including Noom, is
that they are only as good as the people who
(24:05):
carry on using them. So you have to carry on
using an app in order for it to work. And
any app, including Noom, has got a high drop out rate.
So I think that's the first problem, is that it's
not helping as many people as it perhaps would like
to do because people are dropping out of the actual app.
I think the second thing is that it's always in
(24:27):
danger of doing harm. So that's always a problem with
weight loss. Always a problem with food is that we
can slither into doing harm very quickly. If it works,
some people feel better about themselves. If it stops working,
then people feel worse about themselves. So it's it's always
getting that balance, really, And I think the other thing
is it's dealing with people who don't necessarily need to
lose weight for their health. That's problematic. It needs to
(24:50):
target people who I would say, you know, be am
I thirty and above, maybe twenty seven and above, nobody else,
and then those people can benefit from it, but no
one else is potentially harmed from it. Hello. Today is Friday,
July twenty two, and it's been a week now since
I lost my progress um and someone at support said,
(25:14):
why don't you try deleting the app and reinstalling the app.
So I did that and now all my progresses back
to where it was. I can see my lessons, So
I'm really excited to start doing lessons again. I'm looking
at my weight graph, excited to have it back so
I can see my progress, and yeah, it looks like
(25:38):
it's mostly going down. I mean it's definitely fluctuated. A
lot um started at one one point four, then a
week later I went back up to one one eight,
then it went back up to one one seven point eight,
and now it's been declining for a couple of days.
(25:58):
And I see this little red at the one one twelve.
It looks pretty far away, but it looks like it's
trying to get me there by mid August. So maybe
I can do it. And So if says you Jong,
the co founder and CEO of the company, we're here,
what kind of advice would you give him about changes
(26:20):
that he ought to consider making to the app in
order to serve and help as many people as possible.
What I would say is that it's about building in
as many short term rewards as possible really into the system,
and you should always focus on the behavior and the
feeling and not the weight. The problem is is that
(26:43):
this goes back to our initial discussion about whether it's
a diet app or a well being app. We still
live in a dieting world, and a dieting world is
people who want to lose weight. So you need to
find a way of saying will make you happy, we
will help you develop healthier habits and have a good
relationship with food and being more active and then and
by the way, you might also lose some weight, but
(27:04):
you take weight out of the picture really right, exactly,
I mean the focus of the app. It puts weight
right at the center, and that does feel like the
emphasis is wrong. If they truly believe in helping people
live healthier lives, so the ideal app would actually not
address food at all in a way and make it
(27:24):
or or at least try to de emphasize it. It
would emphasize weight. I would de emphasize weight. I think right, Hello,
it's Saturday, July four, Um, I think for my thirty
days is tomorrow, and I am being less restrictive than
(27:46):
I was at the beginning of this, and my weight
is not my weight is kind of plate towing because
of it. Just thinking about what I was about being
less restrictive with my diet, I think, I'm I'm pretty
proud of the way I've lost and I worked out
(28:10):
four times this week, and um, I also feeling good
about the way I've been eating, um and hoping to
continue to all this weight, but but pretty happy with
the with the results so far. So you know with
(28:34):
an app like noomor with Noom, you're going to set
a goal. If you meet it, you feel great. If
you fail, you feel like you've failed. If you lose weight,
you feel great. If you haven't lost weight, then you
feel rubbish about yourself. And so it only works for
those people that it works for, and then it could
possibly do harmful all the people that it doesn't work for,
which is why they drop out. Today I weighed myself
(28:57):
and I weighed one one eight point four, just the
same weight when I started new and I don't know
what happened. I feel very frustrated. I'm just I feel
like I put a lot of effort into it. I
put a lot of time into it. I really wanted
to be I've been like steadily at and I wanted
to end this on that note like, oh I had
(29:19):
lost three pounds, like I did it um, but no.
One of my big goals was to just work out more.
I basically have been running three times a week for
the past month, which I feel so good about. And
I can just tell that I'm getting stronger, so I
(29:44):
am really proud of that. I just find like the
scale very confusing because I like literally just jumped from
one seven yesterday and then I jumped again today. So
I'm like, did I actually lose three pounds? I don't
think I did. I think this is just like the
way I am, and I'm just I'm just thinking that
(30:08):
I really don't know what way it means. And I
don't want to put so much pressure on losing five
pounds because there are some good habits I've learned from Noon,
and yeah, and I want I want to take that away. Okay,
this is my last question for you, Jane. We have
(30:32):
something on this show we call the BS scale, and
it goes from zero to one. On our scale, zero
is the best I eat zero BS and a hundred
is the worst total BS. So, given that Noon's mission
is to help as many people as possible live healthier
lives through behavior change, what score would you give New
(30:57):
And I'm allowed to justify this on tie of course
you are yes, very interesting and why well, okay, I
would give them probably a forty I think zero. Okay,
So I admire some of what they're trying to do.
(31:18):
I admire that they are making it more psychological, admire
that they are bringing in goals. I admire that they
are trying to get people to do a bit of CBT,
and I admire their their big picture thinking. I mean,
how wonderful to change as many people as possibles relationship
with food and well being and health and and all
of that. I think that's fabulous. At the same time,
I think they're setting their sites far too high. I
(31:40):
think they're underestimating the possibility of doing harm to those
people that they include in it. And I think they're
including too many people. I think they need to be
more selective in who they collect in their little group
so that they can minimize how much harm they do.
But I mean, as a marketing strategy, fabulous. I mean,
let's have world health and peace and the rest of it.
That's as goal, isn't it, which you know isn't going
(32:07):
to be met. Yeah, Jane, thank you. I've so enjoyed
talking to you today. Thank you for coming on the show.
You're very welcome. You're very welcome. Everybody has a complex
relationship with food, and helping users to understand this relationship
and ultimately make choices that will serve their health is
(32:28):
a massive goal for any company, and a noble one
to so. In some ways, I understand newmes approach here.
We do need to have some way of measuring health,
but his body weight or body size the right metric.
Newmes stated purpose is to help as many people as
possible live healthier lives through behavior change, and there's no
(32:52):
doubt that the app has helped tens of thousands of people.
But as Jane points out, they've set their sights too high.
After following Haley's journey, I will say that Noon certainly
seems to be pulling off the behavior change part of
their purpose, but their end goal of health is at
odds with some of their tactics. Overall, I have to
(33:15):
say my PS detector is pegged higher than Jayne's Noons
approach to eating and health is definitely more similar to
the diets that preceded than it is different. But Noons
position certainly doesn't feel hopeless. We'll be back right after
the break to talk through some concrete ways that Noon
can close the gap between word and deed. Okay, I
(33:54):
am very excited to get into today's panel. I want
to ask you both to first introduce yourselves and tell
us a little bit about your work. Let's start with you. Sure, um, Hi, everyone,
my name is Ealings. Hi. I'm a registered dietitian based
in Brooklyn, New York, and I currently provide nutrition counseling
(34:15):
through a private practice. UM. I have a special interest
in supporting those with eating disorders or anywhere along the
spectrum of disordered eating, as well as those with endocrine
related conditions like diabetes. I practice nutrition through the lens
of weight inclusivity, and I do my work informed by
the theories of intuitive eating, mindful eating, health at every size,
(34:37):
and other non diet approaches to nutrition. M love that.
Thank you. UM Okay, Taylor your turn. Hi. Everyone, I'm
Taylor Madjuski. I am a journalist based in San Francisco, California.
I started my career writing about technology, but over the
past couple of years have really started to cover health
(34:58):
and science more in a out of my work touches
on those topics through a gender lens. And I'm so
excited to be here. Awesome, let's jump right in. Each
one of you has come prepared with an idea to
help new better live up to their mission, which is
just to remind folks to help as many people as
possible live healthier lives through behavior change. Taylor I'm gonna
(35:21):
let you go first, this time in two minutes or less.
What's the one thing that you would change about now? Sure?
So last year I wrote an article on newon. I
investigated them for a couple of months, and I think
that the biggest thing that stands out for me is
that new claims that it's grounded in evidence based science,
(35:42):
and to their credit, they have published a number of scientific,
peer reviewed articles, but I think that none of these
studies support its central marketing claim, which is that it
will help you lose weight and keep it off for life.
And that's sort of the ultimate claim in the diet
weight loss world. And the study that they cite to
support this was published in and that tract users for
(36:06):
seventy two weeks. And so I think that my suggestion
is quite simple, and it's simply to conduct a longer
and more robust scientific study because they need academic research
on long term behavior change to support their claims. Great idea,
and that makes a ton of sense, right, If you're
going to say it, you've got to be able to
back it up. Thank you, link. I'm gonna ask you
(36:27):
to go, now, what's the one thing that you would
do to help newm better do their story. Yeah, I
mean I have so many issues just with the mission
statement just starting there. You know, in my opinion, it's
pretty steeped in health is um, which is this idea
that health is a within someone's control and their responsibility
is something that they have a moral obligation to fulfill.
(36:49):
You know, the fact that they focus just on behavior
change really leaves out some of the structural systems that
can really impact someone's health, like economic status, housing status,
employment rachel by us in the healthcare SISM. I could
go on, and so I think the mission statement itself
is already pretty faulty logic. I think once we get
into the meat of the product, it's a weight loss tool,
(37:10):
and we also know that there's a lot of physical
and mental emotional harm that comes with intentional weight loss
and weight cycling. So my suggestion for new to better
improve their company and just do better in general, is
to scrub all of the diet and weight related messaging
from their platform. I know it sounds extreme, but the
(37:32):
way they're currently conducting business is perpetuating a lot of harm,
particularly for people who have vulnerable relationships with food and
their body. To be in with so I would invite
them to untie the cognitive behavioral therapy part from the
promise of weight loss and improved health. Maybe maintain a
platform that's educational and allows people to learn about how
(37:54):
they each have developed their own relationship with food and body,
but not make this promise that by acknowledging some of
the psychological components of eating that you'll automatically lose weight
and become a healthier person. That's a very valid idea.
My fear has always been that we're all going to
come up with the same ideas, but I think we
(38:14):
have slightly different takes on this. So um, I'm very
curious to know what the experts think. I I submit
this humbly because I know very little about this, but
it's fair to say that there are a lot of
folks in the medical community who seem to believe that
the measurement that matters more to health is your body
mass index. And the other relevant fact to my idea
(38:37):
is that we have an obesity crisis in the US,
and all the science agrees that obesity causes a bunch
of health problems. So here's my idea. If Newon really
is a health and wellness app, then it should be
guiding us to a place where getting your b m
I into the healthy range is the goal. So for reference,
a healthy b m I is supposedly between eighteen point
(39:00):
five and about twenty five. So if you're already in
the healthy range, let's say up to five, it should
discourage you from even setting a weight loss goal and
discourage you from counting calories, and maybe that functionality is
actually turned off in the app below a b m
I of to really discourage it, because the current apps
(39:20):
obsession with weight goals and calorie counting feels so much
more like a diet app than a health app. So
that's my idea. I would guess that they've emphasized dieting
because it's the ultimate sort of business model, right. It's
super hard to lose weight and keep weight off, so
they know you're going to fail and you keep paying,
(39:41):
and that's kind of the special sauce. I mean, the
diet industry has thrived for years on that dynamic. So
I guess my question is do we think that there
is a viable business model that isn't about losing weight?
I would argue there is because people do have a
desire to learn and have insight about their relationship with
(40:03):
their body and food, But the only way we've ever
talked about that is in relation to weight, and so
I think neutral information would then help people make informed
decisions about how they would like to eat and maybe
even connecting that to how they feel when they eat
different foods. So I don't think we're losing an opportunity
(40:23):
to have people engage with the company if we were
to eliminate weight loss as the goal. Yeah, that makes sense, Taylor.
Do you have any any thoughts about that? Yeah, so
many thoughts, Like there's two things happening here. It's a
business that's targeting your health, and I think that those
things often are just in conflict with each other. You
(40:45):
kind of maybe get roped into that education piece of Okay,
I want to kind of start to learn, like how
the things that I eat affect me or whatever. But
then what they're capitalizing and it is all of the
different signals that are all around us all the time
that are saying beef in lose weight. At the end
of the day, their business, they're trying to make money,
(41:07):
so they're trying to sell you something. When I reported
on them, the sort of growth at all costs mentality
came up all the time. And I think this is
a larger problem with like health tech in general, which
is that, like these are businesses, they have to grow
at all costs. There is venture capital dollars behind them,
(41:28):
and so they have pressure to do so. And I
think that we need to be very wary of that
when it comes to like actually using these products to
address health concerns that we might have, Because wanting to
lose weight or wanting to take some control over your
health is a perfectly valid thing to want to experience,
(41:49):
Like we all care about our bodies. It's our vessel
for living. It's so hard because health and capitalism aren't
conflict with each other on a fundamental level. Yeah, I
very much agree that this sort of the big like
health and tech and and and capitalism, how do they
work together? So newm is making money off of people
(42:10):
being promised to lose weight, not necessarily if they are
you know, um, sustainably. I think that goes back to
what Taylor said about getting a study going. We just
don't have the evidence, necessarily, num or otherwise that weight
loss can be sustained. But I did want to address
this thought about um tie your idea of b m I.
That's what That's what I was going to bring up,
(42:32):
is that is that a valid measure? Yeah, I don't
fault you at all for thinking b m I first, Right,
my backgrounds in public health, so all of the research
we had to read use b m I as a
way to categorize people and then learn about different outcomes.
But actually there's been a lot of dialogue recently, and
not not just recently, but I think it's gaining steam
(42:53):
that really can see all of the many faults within
the b m I too. So just to clarify what
it is, it is just a mathematic, full equation of
height and weight that was developed by an astronomer a
long time ago, UM to just generally understand the average
man and also Caucasian man. Right. It's also very it's
(43:16):
a very non inclusive measure exactly, That's exactly right. And
so the b m I does not do a good
job of giving us any indication of somebody's health. The
truth is that in my experience counseling people in lots
of different settings, is that people can uh work through
ways of changing parts of their behavior to better manage
(43:38):
a medical condition. It doesn't mean the lose weight or
that their b m I will change, but indicators of
health like their blood pressure, or like their cholesterol, or
like their feelings of well being, our stamina and all
those things can still be improved. So I would invite
us to just think more broadly about what other ways
we can define health and make sure people are defining
(43:58):
that for themselves. Some thoughts on that, and I think
this also comes back to health tech. Health apps like
new who promise personalization because health is personal when you
sign up for an app, how much can a questionnaire
really gather about your health when it's trying to appeal
to that large of an audience. I think actually being
(44:21):
honest about the limitations of your technology and what you
can deliver to improve people's health can help to earn trust,
to be like, you know, we can't offer this right now,
but we're working on it. Or take this information, bring
it to your doctor. There are companies that do that
sort of thing, and I think it really from a
marketing perspective at least, like really helps to build that trust.
(44:45):
That's another thing is if if their body language as
an app was we're constantly learning, We're trying to improve
all the time. And so, for instance, to your your idea, Taylor,
of them fielding a study to get at a better
grip on you know, what works and what doesn't in
weight loss, that could be an ongoing thing. In other words,
(45:07):
there could be a drop down that says, these are
the ten studies that we have going right now, would
you like to participate in any of them as a user?
And you know, maybe they pay you to participate, or
maybe the app is free if you participate in studies,
or and so that the relationship that you forge with
people is you're both learning together as opposed to we
(45:31):
are the people who know everything and you are just
going to count your calories and and lose four pounds, right,
mm hmm exactly. I think I would like that app better.
Maybe I think I would to. I also think it
would be so interesting in such an opportunity for a
company to talk about health in terms that are not
(45:52):
so so quantitative. It's not necessarily something that can be
boiled down to one number. But for example, maybe there
could be encouraging someone to go to the doctor and
make all their fallow up appointments I think it'd be
interesting to think about actual actions that people could take
that just connect them to their health without saying and
then now you're also going to be rated or even
(46:14):
pitted against yourself. Here's where you were last year, look
at where you are now. That type of thing. Yeah,
I think it comes down to the value system that
they're enacting. Kind of as it stands right now, there's
a lot of value on Thinness because, for example, again
even going through that onboarding today, they were asking questions
(46:35):
that I had seen before around you know, do you
want to lose weight for an upcoming event like a
vacation or a wedding. That's not weight neutral. That's valuing Thinness.
And to be fair, they are trying the cognitive behavior
therapy functionality in there that that's maybe a place where
(46:56):
I'd give them credit is like they are trying to
differentiate themselves as a company by saying we're not just
wait last you know, you're you're gaining insight into yourself,
but we we shouldn't be equating those two that gaining
and say into yourself means you need to lose weight
and will right, Taylor, just I want to delve into
(47:17):
for a moment. The comment that you made about growth,
that impulse seems to be a very common impulse in
let's call it Silicon Valley startups. There is a culture
of rapid growth. So what would you do to address that? Yeah,
(47:38):
so it's tricky because it's systemic. Silicon Valley is often
funded by venture capital dollars, and that's where the growth
had all costs come from. Because again, these are businesses.
You know, it's very common within a tech company to
also call people who use your product users, like that's
(47:59):
just the thing. And so I think that also, like
us reducing us reducing people at the end of the
line to users also serves to abstract that there's a
harsh reality to the kind of end experience of these products.
Makes sense. Healing a question for you. I'd love to
(48:19):
hear you just talk a little bit more about how
class income play into health issues. For instance, it feels
like inherently there may be an unmet opportunity for new
to reach out to a more diverse set of people
to begin with, if they, you know, really want to
build a healthier world for everybody. Yeah, I mean, what
(48:42):
does strike me about news branding is it it's extremely whitewash,
and you can see just from the onboarding the graphics
they use that it's meant for a very narrow demographic
and that really is in conflict with their mission of
a healthier world or as many people as possible, you know.
But you know, in my experience it's just working in
a couple of different settings all around New York, we
(49:04):
ignore so many of the systems that impact people's health
and just keep laying it back on to the individual
and saying you're just not eating well enough, when really
we're leaving out sort of just to name a few,
you know, employment status, how many people are you feeding
off of your paycheck? How are you getting to work?
And the other thing that comes to mind for me
(49:25):
is just how much bias exists in the medical community.
I'm including the dietetics field, the field that I work in.
If someone is coming in in a larger body, there's
an automatic assumption that they're not healthy before a provider
can even check a single vital and so you know,
this is it's all wrapped up, and I think when
we talk about health, we really really have to be
(49:47):
including that, including racial bias too, in terms of how
much we believe people are in pain when they say
they are, or how much do we believe them when
they say they eat vegetables. I think there's just a
lot of bias that gets integrated into the healthcare process
um that we have to be really honest about. That
brings up another thing for me, which I'd love to
(50:09):
hear either of you have an opinion about. You know,
it's a really hard thing as I think about it,
but I was watching Bill Maher talk about it the
other day. There's the body positivity movement, which seems like
a really good thing, just helping people feel better about
where they're at physically. At the same time, there are
(50:30):
real implications, like health implications for obesity, and we also
have created a a system where if you are lower income,
it is much harder to find and be able to
afford healthy food. And so it's like there's this vortex
(50:51):
of forces all in opposition to one another, Like where
does body positivity meet the medical need to a void obesity?
You know what I mean? How do you how do
you adjudicate that? You know, the obesity crisis. It sounds
scary when you talk about it, but really what we
know through the research is that we actually cannot draw
(51:12):
a causal relationship between weight status and health outcomes. Things
are correlated, I'm not saying they aren't. In the research,
we're always looking at correlation verse causation, because that's really
where we can understand true relationships and how to improve
the health outcome. And so when we talk about the
obesity epidemic, it continues to perpetuate this idea that it's
(51:35):
about losing weight when we really want to acknowledge that
there's no single disease that someone in a larger body
gets that someone in a smaller body doesn't get. People
in smaller bodies get high blood pressure, they get cancer,
they have strokes. This so absolutely exactly, So I really
feel it's important like to pull back on that, but don't. Yeah,
(51:58):
and if forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but
maybe I've been brainwashed, Like I have the strong impression
that people who are to use the term obese are
at higher risk for some of those things like diabetes.
Is that not true or is that true? What we
do know is that they can manage their diabetes and
they can improve um the way there condition shows up
(52:21):
in their body in ways that don't necessarily lead to
the weight loss that they're told they need to achieve.
You know, we could be talking about gentle movement, we
could be talking about stress reduction, medication management, and eating.
But if we were to frame it like if you
just were to lose twenty pounds, I'm pretty sure your
blood suckers would even out. This is not helpful language
(52:43):
to the person who's trying to manage their condition, and
it doesn't really give them the tangible information to take
control or feel empowered. As I think about that, it
maybe it's about essentially the value exchange between them and
its customers that feels off. It's like Noon could be
doing more to add value for people beyond just helping
(53:06):
them count calories and lose a few pounds, right, They
really could transform the relationship that people have with food
and with their bodies. But they're not really doing that yet.
And my hunch would be that they're not doing that
because maybe they haven't figured out a way for that
to serve their bottom line of making money and growing,
(53:27):
and maybe there's an opportunity just to add like for
Noon to not just give information but also offer support
as they're attempting to do right now at their newon
coaches because just as many people who have attempted a diet,
I'm guessing that's the same number of people who have
been burned by a diet and are looking for other
ways to connect with food and people who have gone
(53:50):
through similar experiences them. So perhaps it's an opportunity to
be UM kind of like a like a support network
where you could, I don't know, create a community in
his innocence UM. So it's not just information exchange, but
as connected to each other. Yeah, I think there could
be valid that's interesting. Yeah, Okay, So are there any
(54:12):
other questions or ideas or topics that we have not
touched on that you think our listeners should should know about.
The one thing that I think when I reported on
newm that stuck out to me was the sort of
tactics they were using, at least for me, felt very
triggering for someone who struggled in my adolescence and beyond
(54:35):
with an eating disorder and disordered eating. I felt a
little like, oh, it must just be me. When I
first tried the app and then I started to report
on it months later, and going through the app store
reviews and seeing so many folks echo the experience that
I felt when I tested it out, or even going
(54:55):
so far as to say like this triggered, like this
started and needing disorder. I think that those apper views
are really alarming, big red flag. I was really pleasantly
surprised to see when I went through the onboarding today
that they now screen for. They asked you if you
actively have an eating disorder. My my other idea, and
(55:17):
I think it's a quick fix, is just also screening
for anyone with a history of an eating disorder. Agreed? Okay,
So on this show, we end every every session with
a tool that we call the BS Index, and the
way it works is it goes from zero to a hundred,
(55:38):
zero being the best, zero bs on being the worst.
BS so on a scale of zero to a hundred
in terms of New really living its purpose to help
as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change.
What BS score would we give New I'll ask you
(56:03):
to go first. Yeah, oh gosh, I know I'm going
to be pretty tough on them. I would I would
give them like an um uh, just because I think
most of as we've talked about, it just sounds like
they're trying to make money, and they have not been
that creative in terms of a way to make money.
(56:23):
I mean, I give them a couple of points credit
because they do try to do it. I have an
educational component, but I just think they actually weaponize that
further into saying if you change this, then you would
just eat less. So I think they're pretty full of it. Okay, Taylor, Yeah,
I think I have to be tough to and be
(56:44):
somewhere in the nineties. I'll give them like a ninety four.
When I think about a lot with new is that
people wanting to take control of their health and wait
is not a bad thing. I think that for many
people it can improve their mental health, it can improve
their actual health like physical health. So I would never
(57:05):
fault people for using it. For certain people, it might
be delivering on the promise, which is why I would
give them a couple of points. But I think as
a company they have a lot of things to work on. Yeah,
great story, they just need to do it right and
they're not doing it yet. So I think those scores
are I mean, they're tough, but they're fair. Okay. I
(57:27):
want to thank you both for being on the show today.
This was a great conversation, thank you. Definitely alright, folks,
it's time for Noon to officially step on the BS scale.
On the one hand, they do take a more holistic
approach to weight loss that some people find genuinely helpful.
(57:50):
On the other hand, we still live in a world
that values thinness, and instead of changing that conversation, Noon
is profiting from and in some cases, exacerbating the insecurities
of the people who use it. You heard our two
panelists give new really high scores, while dr Ogden gave
it a more diplomatic forty. And there's one more opinion
(58:13):
to consider, Hi, TI. If I were reading NEWM on
the B S Scale, I'd say the food portion tracking
of the app definitely changed my relationship to food for
the worst while I was using it. But the mindfulness
and the CBT portion and the slowing down when I
(58:33):
eat and realizing why I'm eating what I'm eating if
it's because I'm stressed, I really liked. So if I
were giving them a B S score, I would give
them a sixty five because I did learn a lot
of good things on there, But ultimately it was detrimental
(58:53):
for my mental health. I was really caught off guard
by her reaction. Haileyway into this with an open mind,
but also with a healthy skepticism. We are called calling
bullshit after all, and still was profoundly impacted by going
through the new process and another factor in the final
(59:14):
BS score. In August, NEWM announced several changes. They've increased
their calorie flexibility and done away with the red food rating,
making all previously red foods orange and saying that quote
changing the color signifying high density foods to orange is
just as intuitive for our numbers, but doesn't carry the
(59:36):
same emotional or cultural influence as the color red. They've
also added a new feature that allows NEWM users to
manually change their daily calories to meet the needs of
a more diverse population, and they've become less rigid about
daily weigh ins instead encouraging more flexibility around the scale.
(59:58):
To me, all of this says that new really listens
to their customers and welcomes change, but the current experience
still focuses too much on weight and too little on
the attributes they claim to value in their purpose health,
wellness and behavior change. So I'm giving now a score
of sixty four that puts new in our red zone
(01:00:22):
on the BS index, the zone where we believe it's
already harming their reputation and will eventually harm their business.
Saves you Young and Artem Petakov. If either of you
ever want to come on the show to discuss anything
we've touched on today, please know that you both have
an open invitation. And if you're starting a purpose led
(01:00:45):
business or thinking about beginning the journey of transformation to
become one, here are three things you can take away
from today's episode. One, if you're a weight loss business,
say it, and if you don't say it, don't be it.
NOOM claims its purpose is to help as many people
as possible live healthier lives through behavior change. Great purpose,
(01:01:10):
but a massive amount of the current new experience is
devoted to weight loss. Not great. Two. Once you've decided
what your purposes, be an activist. Beyond passively changing the
app experience. There's an opportunity for Newon to lead a
huge shift in our culture by getting busy educating people
(01:01:32):
about where real health comes from. Three. Money is important.
If your company is a body, then money is like blood.
Without it, you won't make it. But when it comes
to money, be long term, greedy, trying to maximize your
profitability in the short term is a playbook long followed
(01:01:53):
by Silicon Valley vcs that we're now discovering has some
deeply toxic side effects. Noom needs to be patient and
build a real health company. As an entrepreneur, you need
to be patient too. I want to give a really
special thank you to our very own Haley Pascalites, who
(01:02:14):
was willing to thoroughly document her personal experience here. Haley,
You're a shining star and we appreciate you. If this
episode gave you a healthy appetite for detecting more bs,
subscribe to the Calling Bullshit podcast on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to people
(01:02:34):
speaking to your ears. Please take a minute to rate
us on iTunes and let us know what you think
of the show. More reviews help more people find us,
and thanks to our production team Hannah Beale, Amanda Ginsburg,
d s Moss, Hailey Pascalites, Parker Silzer, and Basil Soaper.
Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and it's hosted
(01:02:57):
by Me Time onto you. Thanks for listening.
It's Friday, June. I'm about to do my first way in. UM.
I'm a little nervous because my friend and I got
dinner last night, but it was mostly vegetables. UM, but
I did have a drink. Associate producer on the Calling
Bullshit podcast, Haley Pascal Des and I'll probably go for
(00:28):
a run this morning because they don't have any meetings.
But I usually like to wear myself after a run
if I run in the morning, because then I wait less.
But now I miss telling me I need to win
myself first thing in the morning. New is a digital
health platform. Their flagship product is an app that promises
(00:49):
a long term approach to weight loss, one based on
psychology and personalization. To help us understand if they're living
up to that promise, Haley volunteered to try it for
thirty days and document or experience. So I just got
back from my run. I am trying to run three
(01:10):
times a week and this was my third run this week,
so I'm feeling pretty good about that. And I logged
it in noon. I listened to some of the lessons
about the different foods that like. It was saying, like
a cheeseburger and arugula are a pound of arugula are
the same calorie density, and they'll both fill you up
(01:30):
the same, but you obviously won't gain as much weight
if you're eating a pound of arugula, which like, who
was eating a pound of arugula versus eating a cheeseburger.
But anyways, I'm a little nervous to start tracking my calories, Like,
I feel like this is going to be difficult, but uh,
(01:50):
let's see how it goes. Welcome to Calling Bullshit, the
podcast about purpose washing, the gap between what an organization
says they stand for and what they actually do and
what they would need to change to practice what they preach.
(02:12):
I'm your host, Time Montague, and I've spent over a
decade helping organizations define what they stand for, their purpose
and then help them to use that purpose to drive
transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of institutions today,
there's still a pretty wide gap between word and deed.
That gap has a name bullshit. But, and this is important,
(02:36):
bullshit is serious, but it's also a treatable condition. So
when our bullshit detector lights up, we're going to explore
everything the organization should do to fix it new is popular.
(02:58):
It has two fifty million downloads ads that pop up
everywhere from podcasts to the Super Bowl, an evaluation of
over three point seven billion dollars, and as they explained
in this promo video, Noon claims to have been purpose
led from the start thirteen years ago. Save Young and
(03:19):
Art and Patakov founded Noon with one mission to help
as many people as possible live healthier lives. Noon was
created because healthcare has really become sick care and inefficient
system designed to treat patients after they're already sick. Today,
Noon is a trusted, consumer led digital health platform helping
(03:41):
people around the world live healthier lives. Guided by principles
of proven behavioral science. We've discovered the right combination of psychology, technology,
and human coaching that empowers people to change their habits
and take control of their health. I can fit in
close that I've never been able to where before I
lost eighty pounds on New. There's a much bigger connection
(04:05):
with my mind and body now with New that I
didn't have before, and I think that's the biggest difference.
By pairing the power of the individual with proven science
and psychology, we're building products that change behaviors for good
and create transformational health outcomes. At Noon, we believe that
better health begins with you, and behavior change starts with
(04:25):
us co founders who spent years working towards their goal
check tackling a real problem double check. At a glance,
Noon looks fairly low BS. But digging a little deeper,
I learned that health is incredibly complex and equating weight
(04:47):
with health this puts New in murky territory where they
risk harming the very people they say they exist to help.
So have founders Artem and Saves You created an app
that truly focuses on long term health or is now
just another one size fits all diet that promises the
(05:07):
unattainable while luring users into a cycle of failure, all
in the name of wellness. Get out your BS detectors, folks,
and join me as we weigh now on the bullshit scale. Alright,
(05:27):
I see NOOM Healthy Weight Loss. It has seven hundred
thousand reviews five star reviews, so well, it has a
four point seven out of five, so it sounds great. Okay,
it's downloading. It's like a little orange glow. So it says,
(05:48):
Noon creates long term results through habit and behavior change,
not restrictive dieting. Do you have an important event coming up?
I mean one of the events is just summer, so
don't choose that. How how confident are you in reaching
one pounds by August? I'm uncertain. Why are you uncertain?
(06:11):
I haven't had success in the past. Previous plans were
too restrictive. There's a bun I'm going to say, I
haven't had success in the past, and I will try
to stick with it for a month. Noon I believe
considers itself to be a wellness app, not a diet app.
(06:32):
Why do you think our culture has moved away from
the word diet and toward wellness? I think there's two reasons.
The less cynical reason, the positive, let's be generous to
people reason is because diet is a negative thing that
(06:52):
people now think about. Diet means eating less, it's stigmatizing
people that are overweight, and it's telling you to impose unreasonable,
unhealthy restrictions on your eating behavior that aren't going to
be good for you. So we're moving away from a
diet culture because we're recognizing that dieting is problematic and
we're using another term to try and capture something which
(07:13):
is more positive and that's you know, that's a good thing. Yeah,
that sounds like it's at least the right idea. It's
the right idea behind that. Anything which is about changing
your diet or eating less in your diet to lose
weight is still really a dieting culture. My more cynical
hat says that it's actually still the same old thing,
it's just being slightly rebranded. Dr Gene Ogden is a
(07:36):
professor of health psychology at the University of Surrey in
the UK. She spent the last thirty years teaching, researching
and writing about the intersection of psychology, food and health.
Her six books include Health Psychology, The Psychology of Eating
and Fat Chance The Myth of Dieting explained. My key
(07:59):
area is to look at how psychology in terms of
the perception of hunger, the meaning of food, the lives
that we live, the childhoods that we have, the experiences
we have in the world that we live in shape
our relationship with food and make it very hard for
us to actually eat less and to stay well. So,
can you talk about some examples of unhealthy diet fads,
(08:22):
either past or current, Just to give us a little context.
I mean, there's an endless slimming products, which are just
drinks really that you have as meal substitutes. There was
the Beverly Hills diets, which said you just eat lots
and lots and lots of fruits. You have constant diarrhea,
and there was a quote from it which said something
like the more time you spend on the toilet, the better.
(08:45):
There was the cabbage soup diet, where you just drink
and eat cabbage soup, which gives you the most horrendous wind.
You spend a lot of your time bloated. It's very unsociable,
but friends have no friends, No one ever wants to
be near you. But eventually you lose a lot of
weight because you're just eating cabbage soup. I mean, that's
the thing, you know. If you eat cabbage soup for
(09:08):
six weeks, you're loot weight. If you have diarrhea for
six weeks, you will lose weight. And that is the
problem with the diet industry and always has been. Is
there anyone can invente anything to get you to lose weight,
but you cannot maintain that for any length of time,
So all weight pretty much goes back on again. That's
also the money making fabulousness of the diet industry is
(09:29):
it's designed to fail. So if you design a product
which fails, people keep coming back and buying more of
the product. So we're here to talk about Noon, the
weight loss app that seems to be sweeping the world,
and it's an app that promises to help as many
people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change, and
(09:49):
their flagship product, as best I can tell, is essentially
a diet and psychology app rolled into one. And I
understand that you've actually downloaded NEWM the past and and
taking a look at it. What were your initial thoughts
or impressions of new I mean, I like the idea
that they're trying to bring psychology into it. I think
(10:10):
that they're trying to take a holistic view of the individual,
which is also a really good thing. My feeling when
I've had a look at it is that it probably
hasn't got as much psychology in it as I would like,
and also it's not as careful about not doing harm
as I think it probably should be. So anybody can
go on it unless you've got to be am I
(10:31):
under eighteen point five which includes an awful lot of
people that don't need to lose weight. I would say,
if you'll be a eyes between twenty and twenty five,
don't try and lose weight. Why would you try and
lose weight, because you're fine as you are. Growing up,
Like I remember, we'd get US Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazine
(10:52):
and like just the women in there, It's like, yeah,
celebrities were just so thin. And we were obsessed with
celebrity culture when I was growing up, and I'm not
so much anymore. But we would just like inspect these
magazines and like to say, how good these women looked.
And we always talked about like we want to look
(11:12):
like them, Like how do we look like them? I
feel like the way I look is the most important thing. Sometimes.
I used to have a certain body that I don't
have anymore, and I'm always trying to get back to
that body. Like I've stayed the same way for the
(11:34):
past two years, and I've been trying to like lose
the same five pounds for that that time. But I'm
also wondering, like maybe I'm just getting older and my
metabolism slowing down, and this is just what I weigh
now and it's just what I look like now, which
I might just have to come to terms with. But um, yeah,
(11:58):
so I'd love to hear you talk about out the
connections between physical health, mental health, and emotional well being
when it comes to food. So for me, it's very
very clear that the mind and body are related, absolutely interrelated,
so that how we think, our emotions, our childhoods are
learning have a direct impact upon our physical bodies and
(12:21):
our physical health, and our physical health has a direct
relationship on how we think and how we feel and
our emotional well being. So those two things are very
clearly interrelated. Everybody has a very personal relationship with food,
a personal relationship with their physical bodies, and also a
meaning around the body size that they have. That is
(12:41):
why trying to change somebody's eating behavior is so incredibly difficult,
because food means something to each person in a very
different way. And what you need to do to get
someone to change their eating behavior is to first understand
the role that food plays in their lives and then
help them see that role of food and then help
them change that. And that's a very difficult thing to do, right,
(13:05):
So can dieting. Lest we just curse the darkness. Can
dieting ever actually benefit a person's health, Like, is there
such a thing as a beneficial diet? Absolutely? And that's
where the word diet, you know, has been kind of
I don't know, has has got so much kind of
negativity around it where it's ruined. There's nothing wrong with
(13:26):
deciding to eat more healthily, to change your diet and
to make healthier choices, and that's got to be a
good thing for you. And if that involves reducing your
calorie and take eating fewer snacks, making sure that you
have more fruit and vegetables, or that you have brown
bread rather than white bread, or that you don't deep
fry your foods, those are all dietary choices and those
(13:47):
are sustainable. And if that's called a diet, so be it.
But that's sustainabul and that can work. I started on Friday.
It's been good. I don't hit it. There's like these
little mini lessons that I have to complete every day
and it starts out like newm one oh one. So
it's kind of just trying to tell you about the
(14:08):
psychology of what you're eating. One of the first lessons
was like start eating less dense, so it categorizes like
fruits and veggies are green. It like encourages you to
eat as many fruits and veggies as you want. Then
there's like a yellow category, which are things that you
are supposed to eat moderation, and then there's an orange category,
which are things that you're not supposed to eat a
(14:30):
lot of. It hasn't been as hard as I thought
to track calories. There's a weight loss though, So if
you're in the zone, you're good. I'd love your take
on on some of the more technical aspects of the program. So,
first of all, New employs a traffic light system for
(14:52):
categorizing all foods. What is your perspective just on that
kind of categorization. I think actually that quite effective. You're
not saying these are good or bad food, so I
think sometimes that kind of dichotomized demonizing a food can
be quite problematic. But you're giving people fairly simple information
saying these are the foods to go for fill your
(15:13):
plate up with these, So it's a fairly simple way
of doing that. When you drill down into the nitty
gritty of that, it can become a little bit problematic
because things like nuts, which are good for you are
also really high fat, so you know where do they belong.
It's not like smoking, where you can say don't smoke
cigarettes are bad for you. There's very few just bad foods.
(15:35):
I'd love to get perspective on a couple of other
new strategies here. So one is to weigh yourself every day.
It's you know, theoretically it's a good motivational strategy because
you get instant feedback. So the thing about behavior change
is quite often the goals are in this short term,
but the rewards are in the long term. So you know,
(15:55):
you want to lose weight now, but the reward is
that you won't have a heart attack when you're saying
ext or that you will not get diabetes in the
future years, and that steels such a long way in
the future that people just ignore that and they really
want immediate benefits. The problem with weighing yourself every day
is a weight naturally fluctuates, and from our studies, weighing
(16:15):
yourself every day was good and reinforcing if your weight
went down. But if your weight goes up because of
whatever else is happening in your life, then that can
lead to kind of catastrophizing and thinking oh god, it's hopeless.
All the effort I put in yesterday, why bother? And
I still didn't lose weight. So you're far better off
getting the reinforcement not on the body weight, but the
(16:38):
reinforcement on the behavior. So it's andy, do I four
and yesterday and to do? I wait in at one
one five points six, which is the lowest I've been
in time. I'm happy about it. Another thing that the
(17:02):
new map asks for actually is for you to enter
a goal weight, and in some cases with a timeline attached,
so a goal weight for an upcoming event, a wedding
or a vacation something like that. How do you feel
about that? Well, again, it's double edged. Sorry, this is
going to be my answer to everything. So the research
(17:26):
shows that it's good to plan and it's good to
set goals. So it's no good saying to yourself I
will eat well or I will lose weight. You need
to say I will eat well tomorrow, and I will
eat this, this and this, and I will lose weight
by next Saturday or lose weight by June. So goal
setting is really good if that goal setting is based around,
you know, stereotypes of having to be thin for your wedding,
(17:49):
or stereotypes of wanting to go to a party and
looking attractive by having lost a bit of weight, or
wanting to be beach ready and get onto the beach
in your bikini. That's not great because that's really forcing
the stereotypes that you know, the only way to be
attractive is to be thinner. And the other problem is
that when goals fail, we then feel worse about ourselves. Okay,
(18:11):
today with one eighteen point for which I'm a little
disappointed in um. The other day I was like one
sixteen something, So I will lock that in newm now.
And one of the things I assume you'll think this
is a good thing, but I don't know. One of
(18:32):
the other things the app asked you to do is
ten minutes of what they call CBT cognitive behavioral therapy
per day. Well, if that's kind of encouraging mindful eating,
that's probably quite a good thing. If it's encouraging being
kind to yourself, that's a good thing. And if it's
encouraging changing the way you think about food, I think
(18:53):
that's a good thing. The problem with that is that again,
all those thoughts that we have and the role of
food in our lives is so personalized. It's quite good
to have someone to help us do that really, just
to ask you how does food feature in your life
and then try and change the way that we think
about foods. So I think it's you know, it's slightly
easy just tossing that out as a kind of psychological
(19:15):
bits to do a bit of CVT, you need to
properly support and structure that process. The reason I'm making
this audio diary is because I just got a new
one on one coach and I just, what's a little
confused about what she said to me. She just sent
(19:37):
me an intro message and it says, I'm your coach, Catherine,
And she read my Big Picture survey, which is like
the big thing I want to complete at the end
of noon, And I said that I want to run
ten miles um. But she said, after reading a Big
Picture survey, it sounds like you were motivated to give
yourself what you know that you deserve, making yourself a priority.
(20:00):
It can be tough to live life to the fullest
when you do not feel comfortable in your body. What
excites you the most about the possibility of hitting those
ten miles um? I thought That was a little strange,
that message, because it starts with saying that I'm not
comfortable in my body, and that is not something I
said in my big picture. Running ten miles is a
(20:22):
fitness goal and it really has nothing to do with
how other people see me. I think it would just
make me really proud if I could do it without walking. Yeah,
I'm I'm confused about her message. So is this just
(20:45):
a bump in the road that leads to a healthier
life or is there something fundamentally flawed about noons approach
the conclusion the Hayley's Thirty Days of New and News
final BS score right after the break definitely falling behind
(21:09):
on the lessons. They're feeling a little repetitive, so it's
kind of a challenge to do them. I was frustrated
this weekend because I pizza and ice cream on Friday
and I weighed myself and I it like one up,
like two pounds, like almost back to where I started.
And it was just like frustrating and annoying because I
(21:33):
want to be able to enjoy pizza and ice cream sometimes,
but my weight is not really going down. I mean,
I guess we'll see, but it's almost three weeks. But
I do feel like healthier overall, Like I'm definitely When
I want to snack, I'm like, oh, eat a handful
of cherries instead of a handful of chips. But it
(21:56):
is getting harder to do it, Like it's getting harder
to track everything I eat. Eat and New makes you
obsessive because I constantly have to do the lessons. I
can't have to lick my food. I have to put
in my exercise like you're always in New. One of
the other things that the app asked you to do
is track all of your food and count all of
(22:18):
your calories. Well, so there's also attention. All of this
is so problematic. It's all problematic because a good thing
is to eat mindfully. It's a fine line between eating
mindfully and becoming obsessed with what you're eating. The chances
are if you're a bit that way inclined, you will
(22:39):
slip across into food obsession. And I think that's the problem.
You know, what you really want is for food to
be a bit of your life, but not everything in
your life. I got a new phone, and yeah, my
new all my new progress is gone. My one on
one coach has been super unresponsive. She only answers like
(23:00):
every three days. UM, so she really hasn't been helping
me much. And I contacted support and they said that
she's the only one that can reset my progress. So
it's been four or five days that I haven't been
able to like do my lessons, which I'm realizing our
(23:21):
big part of the motivation for me to be in
the app. I feel like I definitely had a plateau recently.
I am definitely not as good about portion sizes. I'm
definitely going back to some of the bad habits that
I had before I started. Now. I think I was
(23:44):
so excited in the beginning, and now it's just like
this is getting old? Is new? Getting it right? Would
you say? Or do they have some work to do?
I think the thing about any app, including Noom, is
that they are only as good as the people who
(24:05):
carry on using them. So you have to carry on
using an app in order for it to work. And
any app, including Noom, has got a high drop out rate.
So I think that's the first problem, is that it's
not helping as many people as it perhaps would like
to do because people are dropping out of the actual app.
I think the second thing is that it's always in
(24:27):
danger of doing harm. So that's always a problem with
weight loss. Always a problem with food is that we
can slither into doing harm very quickly. If it works,
some people feel better about themselves. If it stops working,
then people feel worse about themselves. So it's it's always
getting that balance, really, And I think the other thing
is it's dealing with people who don't necessarily need to
lose weight for their health. That's problematic. It needs to
(24:50):
target people who I would say, you know, be am
I thirty and above, maybe twenty seven and above, nobody else,
and then those people can benefit from it, but no
one else is potentially harmed from it. Hello. Today is Friday,
July twenty two, and it's been a week now since
I lost my progress um and someone at support said,
(25:14):
why don't you try deleting the app and reinstalling the app.
So I did that and now all my progresses back
to where it was. I can see my lessons, So
I'm really excited to start doing lessons again. I'm looking
at my weight graph, excited to have it back so
I can see my progress, and yeah, it looks like
(25:38):
it's mostly going down. I mean it's definitely fluctuated. A
lot um started at one one point four, then a
week later I went back up to one one eight,
then it went back up to one one seven point eight,
and now it's been declining for a couple of days.
(25:58):
And I see this little red at the one one twelve.
It looks pretty far away, but it looks like it's
trying to get me there by mid August. So maybe
I can do it. And So if says you Jong,
the co founder and CEO of the company, we're here,
what kind of advice would you give him about changes
(26:20):
that he ought to consider making to the app in
order to serve and help as many people as possible.
What I would say is that it's about building in
as many short term rewards as possible really into the system,
and you should always focus on the behavior and the
feeling and not the weight. The problem is is that
(26:43):
this goes back to our initial discussion about whether it's
a diet app or a well being app. We still
live in a dieting world, and a dieting world is
people who want to lose weight. So you need to
find a way of saying will make you happy, we
will help you develop healthier habits and have a good
relationship with food and being more active and then and
by the way, you might also lose some weight, but
(27:04):
you take weight out of the picture really right, exactly,
I mean the focus of the app. It puts weight
right at the center, and that does feel like the
emphasis is wrong. If they truly believe in helping people
live healthier lives, so the ideal app would actually not
address food at all in a way and make it
(27:24):
or or at least try to de emphasize it. It
would emphasize weight. I would de emphasize weight. I think right, Hello,
it's Saturday, July four, Um, I think for my thirty
days is tomorrow, and I am being less restrictive than
(27:46):
I was at the beginning of this, and my weight
is not my weight is kind of plate towing because
of it. Just thinking about what I was about being
less restrictive with my diet, I think, I'm I'm pretty
proud of the way I've lost and I worked out
(28:10):
four times this week, and um, I also feeling good
about the way I've been eating, um and hoping to
continue to all this weight, but but pretty happy with
the with the results so far. So you know with
(28:34):
an app like noomor with Noom, you're going to set
a goal. If you meet it, you feel great. If
you fail, you feel like you've failed. If you lose weight,
you feel great. If you haven't lost weight, then you
feel rubbish about yourself. And so it only works for
those people that it works for, and then it could
possibly do harmful all the people that it doesn't work for,
which is why they drop out. Today I weighed myself
(28:57):
and I weighed one one eight point four, just the
same weight when I started new and I don't know
what happened. I feel very frustrated. I'm just I feel
like I put a lot of effort into it. I
put a lot of time into it. I really wanted
to be I've been like steadily at and I wanted
to end this on that note like, oh I had
(29:19):
lost three pounds, like I did it um, but no.
One of my big goals was to just work out more.
I basically have been running three times a week for
the past month, which I feel so good about. And
I can just tell that I'm getting stronger, so I
(29:44):
am really proud of that. I just find like the
scale very confusing because I like literally just jumped from
one seven yesterday and then I jumped again today. So
I'm like, did I actually lose three pounds? I don't
think I did. I think this is just like the
way I am, and I'm just I'm just thinking that
(30:08):
I really don't know what way it means. And I
don't want to put so much pressure on losing five
pounds because there are some good habits I've learned from Noon,
and yeah, and I want I want to take that away. Okay,
this is my last question for you, Jane. We have
(30:32):
something on this show we call the BS scale, and
it goes from zero to one. On our scale, zero
is the best I eat zero BS and a hundred
is the worst total BS. So, given that Noon's mission
is to help as many people as possible live healthier
lives through behavior change, what score would you give New
(30:57):
And I'm allowed to justify this on tie of course
you are yes, very interesting and why well, okay, I
would give them probably a forty I think zero. Okay,
So I admire some of what they're trying to do.
(31:18):
I admire that they are making it more psychological, admire
that they are bringing in goals. I admire that they
are trying to get people to do a bit of CBT,
and I admire their their big picture thinking. I mean,
how wonderful to change as many people as possibles relationship
with food and well being and health and and all
of that. I think that's fabulous. At the same time,
I think they're setting their sites far too high. I
(31:40):
think they're underestimating the possibility of doing harm to those
people that they include in it. And I think they're
including too many people. I think they need to be
more selective in who they collect in their little group
so that they can minimize how much harm they do.
But I mean, as a marketing strategy, fabulous. I mean,
let's have world health and peace and the rest of it.
That's as goal, isn't it, which you know isn't going
(32:07):
to be met. Yeah, Jane, thank you. I've so enjoyed
talking to you today. Thank you for coming on the show.
You're very welcome. You're very welcome. Everybody has a complex
relationship with food, and helping users to understand this relationship
and ultimately make choices that will serve their health is
(32:28):
a massive goal for any company, and a noble one
to so. In some ways, I understand newmes approach here.
We do need to have some way of measuring health,
but his body weight or body size the right metric.
Newmes stated purpose is to help as many people as
possible live healthier lives through behavior change, and there's no
(32:52):
doubt that the app has helped tens of thousands of people.
But as Jane points out, they've set their sights too high.
After following Haley's journey, I will say that Noon certainly
seems to be pulling off the behavior change part of
their purpose, but their end goal of health is at
odds with some of their tactics. Overall, I have to
(33:15):
say my PS detector is pegged higher than Jayne's Noons
approach to eating and health is definitely more similar to
the diets that preceded than it is different. But Noons
position certainly doesn't feel hopeless. We'll be back right after
the break to talk through some concrete ways that Noon
can close the gap between word and deed. Okay, I
(33:54):
am very excited to get into today's panel. I want
to ask you both to first introduce yourselves and tell
us a little bit about your work. Let's start with you. Sure, um, Hi, everyone,
my name is Ealings. Hi. I'm a registered dietitian based
in Brooklyn, New York, and I currently provide nutrition counseling
(34:15):
through a private practice. UM. I have a special interest
in supporting those with eating disorders or anywhere along the
spectrum of disordered eating, as well as those with endocrine
related conditions like diabetes. I practice nutrition through the lens
of weight inclusivity, and I do my work informed by
the theories of intuitive eating, mindful eating, health at every size,
(34:37):
and other non diet approaches to nutrition. M love that.
Thank you. UM Okay, Taylor your turn. Hi. Everyone, I'm
Taylor Madjuski. I am a journalist based in San Francisco, California.
I started my career writing about technology, but over the
past couple of years have really started to cover health
(34:58):
and science more in a out of my work touches
on those topics through a gender lens. And I'm so
excited to be here. Awesome, let's jump right in. Each
one of you has come prepared with an idea to
help new better live up to their mission, which is
just to remind folks to help as many people as
possible live healthier lives through behavior change. Taylor I'm gonna
(35:21):
let you go first, this time in two minutes or less.
What's the one thing that you would change about now? Sure?
So last year I wrote an article on newon. I
investigated them for a couple of months, and I think
that the biggest thing that stands out for me is
that new claims that it's grounded in evidence based science,
(35:42):
and to their credit, they have published a number of scientific,
peer reviewed articles, but I think that none of these
studies support its central marketing claim, which is that it
will help you lose weight and keep it off for life.
And that's sort of the ultimate claim in the diet
weight loss world. And the study that they cite to
support this was published in and that tract users for
(36:06):
seventy two weeks. And so I think that my suggestion
is quite simple, and it's simply to conduct a longer
and more robust scientific study because they need academic research
on long term behavior change to support their claims. Great idea,
and that makes a ton of sense, right, If you're
going to say it, you've got to be able to
back it up. Thank you, link. I'm gonna ask you
(36:27):
to go, now, what's the one thing that you would
do to help newm better do their story. Yeah, I
mean I have so many issues just with the mission
statement just starting there. You know, in my opinion, it's
pretty steeped in health is um, which is this idea
that health is a within someone's control and their responsibility
is something that they have a moral obligation to fulfill.
(36:49):
You know, the fact that they focus just on behavior
change really leaves out some of the structural systems that
can really impact someone's health, like economic status, housing status,
employment rachel by us in the healthcare SISM. I could
go on, and so I think the mission statement itself
is already pretty faulty logic. I think once we get
into the meat of the product, it's a weight loss tool,
(37:10):
and we also know that there's a lot of physical
and mental emotional harm that comes with intentional weight loss
and weight cycling. So my suggestion for new to better
improve their company and just do better in general, is
to scrub all of the diet and weight related messaging
from their platform. I know it sounds extreme, but the
(37:32):
way they're currently conducting business is perpetuating a lot of harm,
particularly for people who have vulnerable relationships with food and
their body. To be in with so I would invite
them to untie the cognitive behavioral therapy part from the
promise of weight loss and improved health. Maybe maintain a
platform that's educational and allows people to learn about how
(37:54):
they each have developed their own relationship with food and body,
but not make this promise that by acknowledging some of
the psychological components of eating that you'll automatically lose weight
and become a healthier person. That's a very valid idea.
My fear has always been that we're all going to
come up with the same ideas, but I think we
(38:14):
have slightly different takes on this. So um, I'm very
curious to know what the experts think. I I submit
this humbly because I know very little about this, but
it's fair to say that there are a lot of
folks in the medical community who seem to believe that
the measurement that matters more to health is your body
mass index. And the other relevant fact to my idea
(38:37):
is that we have an obesity crisis in the US,
and all the science agrees that obesity causes a bunch
of health problems. So here's my idea. If Newon really
is a health and wellness app, then it should be
guiding us to a place where getting your b m
I into the healthy range is the goal. So for reference,
a healthy b m I is supposedly between eighteen point
(39:00):
five and about twenty five. So if you're already in
the healthy range, let's say up to five, it should
discourage you from even setting a weight loss goal and
discourage you from counting calories, and maybe that functionality is
actually turned off in the app below a b m
I of to really discourage it, because the current apps
(39:20):
obsession with weight goals and calorie counting feels so much
more like a diet app than a health app. So
that's my idea. I would guess that they've emphasized dieting
because it's the ultimate sort of business model, right. It's
super hard to lose weight and keep weight off, so
they know you're going to fail and you keep paying,
(39:41):
and that's kind of the special sauce. I mean, the
diet industry has thrived for years on that dynamic. So
I guess my question is do we think that there
is a viable business model that isn't about losing weight?
I would argue there is because people do have a
desire to learn and have insight about their relationship with
(40:03):
their body and food, But the only way we've ever
talked about that is in relation to weight, and so
I think neutral information would then help people make informed
decisions about how they would like to eat and maybe
even connecting that to how they feel when they eat
different foods. So I don't think we're losing an opportunity
(40:23):
to have people engage with the company if we were
to eliminate weight loss as the goal. Yeah, that makes sense, Taylor.
Do you have any any thoughts about that? Yeah, so
many thoughts, Like there's two things happening here. It's a
business that's targeting your health, and I think that those
things often are just in conflict with each other. You
(40:45):
kind of maybe get roped into that education piece of Okay,
I want to kind of start to learn, like how
the things that I eat affect me or whatever. But
then what they're capitalizing and it is all of the
different signals that are all around us all the time
that are saying beef in lose weight. At the end
of the day, their business, they're trying to make money,
(41:07):
so they're trying to sell you something. When I reported
on them, the sort of growth at all costs mentality
came up all the time. And I think this is
a larger problem with like health tech in general, which
is that, like these are businesses, they have to grow
at all costs. There is venture capital dollars behind them,
(41:28):
and so they have pressure to do so. And I
think that we need to be very wary of that
when it comes to like actually using these products to
address health concerns that we might have, Because wanting to
lose weight or wanting to take some control over your
health is a perfectly valid thing to want to experience,
(41:49):
Like we all care about our bodies. It's our vessel
for living. It's so hard because health and capitalism aren't
conflict with each other on a fundamental level. Yeah, I
very much agree that this sort of the big like
health and tech and and and capitalism, how do they
work together? So newm is making money off of people
(42:10):
being promised to lose weight, not necessarily if they are
you know, um, sustainably. I think that goes back to
what Taylor said about getting a study going. We just
don't have the evidence, necessarily, num or otherwise that weight
loss can be sustained. But I did want to address
this thought about um tie your idea of b m I.
That's what That's what I was going to bring up,
(42:32):
is that is that a valid measure? Yeah, I don't
fault you at all for thinking b m I first, Right,
my backgrounds in public health, so all of the research
we had to read use b m I as a
way to categorize people and then learn about different outcomes.
But actually there's been a lot of dialogue recently, and
not not just recently, but I think it's gaining steam
(42:53):
that really can see all of the many faults within
the b m I too. So just to clarify what
it is, it is just a mathematic, full equation of
height and weight that was developed by an astronomer a
long time ago, UM to just generally understand the average
man and also Caucasian man. Right. It's also very it's
(43:16):
a very non inclusive measure exactly, That's exactly right. And
so the b m I does not do a good
job of giving us any indication of somebody's health. The
truth is that in my experience counseling people in lots
of different settings, is that people can uh work through
ways of changing parts of their behavior to better manage
(43:38):
a medical condition. It doesn't mean the lose weight or
that their b m I will change, but indicators of
health like their blood pressure, or like their cholesterol, or
like their feelings of well being, our stamina and all
those things can still be improved. So I would invite
us to just think more broadly about what other ways
we can define health and make sure people are defining
(43:58):
that for themselves. Some thoughts on that, and I think
this also comes back to health tech. Health apps like
new who promise personalization because health is personal when you
sign up for an app, how much can a questionnaire
really gather about your health when it's trying to appeal
to that large of an audience. I think actually being
(44:21):
honest about the limitations of your technology and what you
can deliver to improve people's health can help to earn trust,
to be like, you know, we can't offer this right now,
but we're working on it. Or take this information, bring
it to your doctor. There are companies that do that
sort of thing, and I think it really from a
marketing perspective at least, like really helps to build that trust.
(44:45):
That's another thing is if if their body language as
an app was we're constantly learning, We're trying to improve
all the time. And so, for instance, to your your idea, Taylor,
of them fielding a study to get at a better
grip on you know, what works and what doesn't in
weight loss, that could be an ongoing thing. In other words,
(45:07):
there could be a drop down that says, these are
the ten studies that we have going right now, would
you like to participate in any of them as a user?
And you know, maybe they pay you to participate, or
maybe the app is free if you participate in studies,
or and so that the relationship that you forge with
people is you're both learning together as opposed to we
(45:31):
are the people who know everything and you are just
going to count your calories and and lose four pounds, right,
mm hmm exactly. I think I would like that app better.
Maybe I think I would to. I also think it
would be so interesting in such an opportunity for a
company to talk about health in terms that are not
(45:52):
so so quantitative. It's not necessarily something that can be
boiled down to one number. But for example, maybe there
could be encouraging someone to go to the doctor and
make all their fallow up appointments I think it'd be
interesting to think about actual actions that people could take
that just connect them to their health without saying and
then now you're also going to be rated or even
(46:14):
pitted against yourself. Here's where you were last year, look
at where you are now. That type of thing. Yeah,
I think it comes down to the value system that
they're enacting. Kind of as it stands right now, there's
a lot of value on Thinness because, for example, again
even going through that onboarding today, they were asking questions
(46:35):
that I had seen before around you know, do you
want to lose weight for an upcoming event like a
vacation or a wedding. That's not weight neutral. That's valuing Thinness.
And to be fair, they are trying the cognitive behavior
therapy functionality in there that that's maybe a place where
(46:56):
I'd give them credit is like they are trying to
differentiate themselves as a company by saying we're not just
wait last you know, you're you're gaining insight into yourself,
but we we shouldn't be equating those two that gaining
and say into yourself means you need to lose weight
and will right, Taylor, just I want to delve into
(47:17):
for a moment. The comment that you made about growth,
that impulse seems to be a very common impulse in
let's call it Silicon Valley startups. There is a culture
of rapid growth. So what would you do to address that? Yeah,
(47:38):
so it's tricky because it's systemic. Silicon Valley is often
funded by venture capital dollars, and that's where the growth
had all costs come from. Because again, these are businesses.
You know, it's very common within a tech company to
also call people who use your product users, like that's
(47:59):
just the thing. And so I think that also, like
us reducing us reducing people at the end of the
line to users also serves to abstract that there's a
harsh reality to the kind of end experience of these products.
Makes sense. Healing a question for you. I'd love to
(48:19):
hear you just talk a little bit more about how
class income play into health issues. For instance, it feels
like inherently there may be an unmet opportunity for new
to reach out to a more diverse set of people
to begin with, if they, you know, really want to
build a healthier world for everybody. Yeah, I mean, what
(48:42):
does strike me about news branding is it it's extremely whitewash,
and you can see just from the onboarding the graphics
they use that it's meant for a very narrow demographic
and that really is in conflict with their mission of
a healthier world or as many people as possible, you know.
But you know, in my experience it's just working in
a couple of different settings all around New York, we
(49:04):
ignore so many of the systems that impact people's health
and just keep laying it back on to the individual
and saying you're just not eating well enough, when really
we're leaving out sort of just to name a few,
you know, employment status, how many people are you feeding
off of your paycheck? How are you getting to work?
And the other thing that comes to mind for me
(49:25):
is just how much bias exists in the medical community.
I'm including the dietetics field, the field that I work in.
If someone is coming in in a larger body, there's
an automatic assumption that they're not healthy before a provider
can even check a single vital and so you know,
this is it's all wrapped up, and I think when
we talk about health, we really really have to be
(49:47):
including that, including racial bias too, in terms of how
much we believe people are in pain when they say
they are, or how much do we believe them when
they say they eat vegetables. I think there's just a
lot of bias that gets integrated into the healthcare process
um that we have to be really honest about. That
brings up another thing for me, which I'd love to
(50:09):
hear either of you have an opinion about. You know,
it's a really hard thing as I think about it,
but I was watching Bill Maher talk about it the
other day. There's the body positivity movement, which seems like
a really good thing, just helping people feel better about
where they're at physically. At the same time, there are
(50:30):
real implications, like health implications for obesity, and we also
have created a a system where if you are lower income,
it is much harder to find and be able to
afford healthy food. And so it's like there's this vortex
(50:51):
of forces all in opposition to one another, Like where
does body positivity meet the medical need to a void obesity?
You know what I mean? How do you how do
you adjudicate that? You know, the obesity crisis. It sounds
scary when you talk about it, but really what we
know through the research is that we actually cannot draw
(51:12):
a causal relationship between weight status and health outcomes. Things
are correlated, I'm not saying they aren't. In the research,
we're always looking at correlation verse causation, because that's really
where we can understand true relationships and how to improve
the health outcome. And so when we talk about the
obesity epidemic, it continues to perpetuate this idea that it's
(51:35):
about losing weight when we really want to acknowledge that
there's no single disease that someone in a larger body
gets that someone in a smaller body doesn't get. People
in smaller bodies get high blood pressure, they get cancer,
they have strokes. This so absolutely exactly, So I really
feel it's important like to pull back on that, but don't. Yeah,
(51:58):
and if forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but
maybe I've been brainwashed, Like I have the strong impression
that people who are to use the term obese are
at higher risk for some of those things like diabetes.
Is that not true or is that true? What we
do know is that they can manage their diabetes and
they can improve um the way there condition shows up
(52:21):
in their body in ways that don't necessarily lead to
the weight loss that they're told they need to achieve.
You know, we could be talking about gentle movement, we
could be talking about stress reduction, medication management, and eating.
But if we were to frame it like if you
just were to lose twenty pounds, I'm pretty sure your
blood suckers would even out. This is not helpful language
(52:43):
to the person who's trying to manage their condition, and
it doesn't really give them the tangible information to take
control or feel empowered. As I think about that, it
maybe it's about essentially the value exchange between them and
its customers that feels off. It's like Noon could be
doing more to add value for people beyond just helping
(53:06):
them count calories and lose a few pounds, right, They
really could transform the relationship that people have with food
and with their bodies. But they're not really doing that yet.
And my hunch would be that they're not doing that
because maybe they haven't figured out a way for that
to serve their bottom line of making money and growing,
(53:27):
and maybe there's an opportunity just to add like for
Noon to not just give information but also offer support
as they're attempting to do right now at their newon
coaches because just as many people who have attempted a diet,
I'm guessing that's the same number of people who have
been burned by a diet and are looking for other
ways to connect with food and people who have gone
(53:50):
through similar experiences them. So perhaps it's an opportunity to
be UM kind of like a like a support network
where you could, I don't know, create a community in
his innocence UM. So it's not just information exchange, but
as connected to each other. Yeah, I think there could
be valid that's interesting. Yeah, Okay, So are there any
(54:12):
other questions or ideas or topics that we have not
touched on that you think our listeners should should know about.
The one thing that I think when I reported on
newm that stuck out to me was the sort of
tactics they were using, at least for me, felt very
triggering for someone who struggled in my adolescence and beyond
(54:35):
with an eating disorder and disordered eating. I felt a
little like, oh, it must just be me. When I
first tried the app and then I started to report
on it months later, and going through the app store
reviews and seeing so many folks echo the experience that
I felt when I tested it out, or even going
(54:55):
so far as to say like this triggered, like this
started and needing disorder. I think that those apper views
are really alarming, big red flag. I was really pleasantly
surprised to see when I went through the onboarding today
that they now screen for. They asked you if you
actively have an eating disorder. My my other idea, and
(55:17):
I think it's a quick fix, is just also screening
for anyone with a history of an eating disorder. Agreed? Okay,
So on this show, we end every every session with
a tool that we call the BS Index, and the
way it works is it goes from zero to a hundred,
(55:38):
zero being the best, zero bs on being the worst.
BS so on a scale of zero to a hundred
in terms of New really living its purpose to help
as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change.
What BS score would we give New I'll ask you
(56:03):
to go first. Yeah, oh gosh, I know I'm going
to be pretty tough on them. I would I would
give them like an um uh, just because I think
most of as we've talked about, it just sounds like
they're trying to make money, and they have not been
that creative in terms of a way to make money.
(56:23):
I mean, I give them a couple of points credit
because they do try to do it. I have an
educational component, but I just think they actually weaponize that
further into saying if you change this, then you would
just eat less. So I think they're pretty full of it. Okay, Taylor, Yeah,
I think I have to be tough to and be
(56:44):
somewhere in the nineties. I'll give them like a ninety four.
When I think about a lot with new is that
people wanting to take control of their health and wait
is not a bad thing. I think that for many
people it can improve their mental health, it can improve
their actual health like physical health. So I would never
(57:05):
fault people for using it. For certain people, it might
be delivering on the promise, which is why I would
give them a couple of points. But I think as
a company they have a lot of things to work on. Yeah,
great story, they just need to do it right and
they're not doing it yet. So I think those scores
are I mean, they're tough, but they're fair. Okay. I
(57:27):
want to thank you both for being on the show today.
This was a great conversation, thank you. Definitely alright, folks,
it's time for Noon to officially step on the BS scale.
On the one hand, they do take a more holistic
approach to weight loss that some people find genuinely helpful.
(57:50):
On the other hand, we still live in a world
that values thinness, and instead of changing that conversation, Noon
is profiting from and in some cases, exacerbating the insecurities
of the people who use it. You heard our two
panelists give new really high scores, while dr Ogden gave
it a more diplomatic forty. And there's one more opinion
(58:13):
to consider, Hi, TI. If I were reading NEWM on
the B S Scale, I'd say the food portion tracking
of the app definitely changed my relationship to food for
the worst while I was using it. But the mindfulness
and the CBT portion and the slowing down when I
(58:33):
eat and realizing why I'm eating what I'm eating if
it's because I'm stressed, I really liked. So if I
were giving them a B S score, I would give
them a sixty five because I did learn a lot
of good things on there, But ultimately it was detrimental
(58:53):
for my mental health. I was really caught off guard
by her reaction. Haileyway into this with an open mind,
but also with a healthy skepticism. We are called calling
bullshit after all, and still was profoundly impacted by going
through the new process and another factor in the final
(59:14):
BS score. In August, NEWM announced several changes. They've increased
their calorie flexibility and done away with the red food rating,
making all previously red foods orange and saying that quote
changing the color signifying high density foods to orange is
just as intuitive for our numbers, but doesn't carry the
(59:36):
same emotional or cultural influence as the color red. They've
also added a new feature that allows NEWM users to
manually change their daily calories to meet the needs of
a more diverse population, and they've become less rigid about
daily weigh ins instead encouraging more flexibility around the scale.
(59:58):
To me, all of this says that new really listens
to their customers and welcomes change, but the current experience
still focuses too much on weight and too little on
the attributes they claim to value in their purpose health,
wellness and behavior change. So I'm giving now a score
of sixty four that puts new in our red zone
(01:00:22):
on the BS index, the zone where we believe it's
already harming their reputation and will eventually harm their business.
Saves you Young and Artem Petakov. If either of you
ever want to come on the show to discuss anything
we've touched on today, please know that you both have
an open invitation. And if you're starting a purpose led
(01:00:45):
business or thinking about beginning the journey of transformation to
become one, here are three things you can take away
from today's episode. One, if you're a weight loss business,
say it, and if you don't say it, don't be it.
NOOM claims its purpose is to help as many people
as possible live healthier lives through behavior change. Great purpose,
(01:01:10):
but a massive amount of the current new experience is
devoted to weight loss. Not great. Two. Once you've decided
what your purposes, be an activist. Beyond passively changing the
app experience. There's an opportunity for Newon to lead a
huge shift in our culture by getting busy educating people
(01:01:32):
about where real health comes from. Three. Money is important.
If your company is a body, then money is like blood.
Without it, you won't make it. But when it comes
to money, be long term, greedy, trying to maximize your
profitability in the short term is a playbook long followed
(01:01:53):
by Silicon Valley vcs that we're now discovering has some
deeply toxic side effects. Noom needs to be patient and
build a real health company. As an entrepreneur, you need
to be patient too. I want to give a really
special thank you to our very own Haley Pascalites, who
(01:02:14):
was willing to thoroughly document her personal experience here. Haley,
You're a shining star and we appreciate you. If this
episode gave you a healthy appetite for detecting more bs,
subscribe to the Calling Bullshit podcast on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to people
(01:02:34):
speaking to your ears. Please take a minute to rate
us on iTunes and let us know what you think
of the show. More reviews help more people find us,
and thanks to our production team Hannah Beale, Amanda Ginsburg,
d s Moss, Hailey Pascalites, Parker Silzer, and Basil Soaper.
Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and it's hosted
(01:02:57):
by Me Time onto you. Thanks for listening.
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