Noom - The Noom Mindset: Learn the Science, Lose the Weight

Includes a Free Trial of the Noom App!

Learn the Science, Lose the Weight

The Noom Mindset

Make Good Health a Habit

We dedicate this book to our Noom coachesyou are Nooms soul!and to our whole Noomily (thats Noom family), who relentlessly seek to expand and improve life in the Noom-iverse. But most of all, we dedicate this book to each and every Noomer who has come to us for help and found community, support, self-confidence, and better health. You are the beating heart of Noom.

H ey, Noomer!

Welcome to the very first-ever Noom book. Whether you are already a tried-and-true Noomer or just Noom-curious, we are so glad youre here.

Noom is most known for our digital health platform that has helped millions of people lose weight, gain energy, feel better, and get healthier. We constantly strive to sharedare we saylifesaving techniques, technology, resources, and information with people who could benefit from our health-changing, behavior-shifting tools. Thats because, in the Noom-iverse, were obsessed with growing, changing, and evolving to discover what works best and what helps the most people achieve their health goals. Its all integral to our mission to help people live better lives, and, in terms of our grand vision, we believe weve achieved only a fraction of whats possible. Were constantly envisioning what Noom can be and considering how many avenues we have yet to explore, how many places we want to go, and how many ideas we have about how to help people take their health into their own hands. Helping people to achieve weight-loss goals is just the beginning.

While we are always improving and developing our digital resources, we recently had a brilliant idea (if we do say so ourselves): What if, along with all our technological tools, we also went old-school and wrote a book? This book could complement the interactive and coach-supported Noom digital course by delving even deeper into the psychological concepts that are so effective, and by creating a new entry point for how to make some of our best techniques stick. It could also serve as a stand-alone guide to the psychology of weight loss and behavior change for those who arent familiar with us yet. As soon as we thought of it, we admit, we all got pretty excited.

Now, we love technology, and we know a lot of you do, too. If thats your thing, then we warmly welcome you to join us on the Noom app (head to the back of the book for information on how to get a free trial). But there are things a book can do that an app cant do, like taking more time and space to expand on the science and psychology behind the concepts that make Noom work so well for so many. The app has a lot of information about cool science, its true, but this book includes even more research (we conducted some of it ourselves!), more examples, more strategies, and more opportunities for self-experimentation. Its a peek behind the curtain. Weve also got lots of thoughts, psych tricks (our best psychology-based tips), and best practices from our incredible coaches. Everything we do in this book is based on what weve learned through our constant experimentation. Weve got quizzes for you to take, questions for you to reflect upon, and sage adviceall of which will help you understand and put into practice the psychological concepts that are the foundation upon which Noom is built.

Whether your goal has anything to do with weight loss is totally up to you. You can use the wisdom in these pages to change any habits or behaviors in your life that you want to change, in ways that can make your life better.

We will show you how to feel more empowered, how to set goals for yourself, and how to stay motivated, and well give you tools to ditch old habits and create better ones. Well also help you monitor your progress and celebrate all the victories that behavior change can bringnot just weight loss but also more self-confidence and personal autonomy, better self-awareness and intuition, more energy, less pain, a more positive mood, better fitness, and a calmer, more peaceful mind. We call these NSVs, or non-scale victories, but they apply even if your goals have nothing to do with weight loss. Whatever you want to do, this book is a place to start, or a place to dive deep, and we think both of those options are pretty awesome.

Noom is about options. You can take what you want and leave the rest, since the combination of factors that leads to success for one person will be different for another person. This book is just one more tool in the Noom toolbox, among many others that can help you achieve better health and wellness. We hope youll browse through all our offerings, but thats 100 percent up to you. For now, youre here, and we love that.

If youd rather just skip straight to the science, head to chapter 1! If you want to hear the story of Noom, read on.

How did this whole Noom thing get started in the first place? Were relatively new to the weight-loss scene, in the scheme of things (considering that the first actual book about how to lose weight was published in Italy in 1558 and other weight-loss programs have been around since the 1960s or even before), but we think that gives us an edge because we base all our material on the latest science and developments in behavioral psychology. Our jokes may be old-school at times (sorry about that in advance), but our information is best in class.

Yet Noom, as it is today, was a long time coming. Maybe you want to know more about us, since were going to be hanging out for a while. Maybe youre wondering who even thought of this whole Noom idea in the first place. Well, then, you are in luck!

Long before this book was a twinkle in Nooms (metaphorical) eyes, there were two young men on a collision course to become business partners, best friends, and founders of Noom: Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov.

Saeju was raised in a small town in the southern part of South Korea, and from a young age, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He tells us that he didnt watch cartoons as a child. He watched documentaries about entrepreneurs. Saejus father was an entrepreneurhe was the founder and CEO of a hospital, and also an extremely industrious ob-gyn who delivered four to six babies every day. He had a contagious energy and he naturally motivated everyone around him. Saeju calls him a zero-to-one-hundred kind of person. The hospital he created grew into a chain of hospitals; and even as a young child, Saeju paid attention to how his father had created a hugely successful business out of nothing.

Saeju and his father were very close. Every night after dinner, they would sit together and drink tea and talk. Saejus father watched the nationwide daily news in his big chair, and Saeju sat in what his father called the apprentice chair, right next to his father. When Saeju asked his father questions about what was happening on the news, his father would say, Lets listen first. After they listened, he put the television on mute and explained what the news story was about, and asked Saejus opinion. That made Saeju feel important and lucky to have that kind of relationship with his father.

The first sign that Saejus life was going to be different from how he had imagined was when he wasnt accepted into medical college like his father and so many other members of his family had been. Instead, he enrolled in electrical engineering college, but he quickly lost interest in his classes and eventually stopped studying. The only thing that he was really enthusiastic about was heavy metal music, so at just nineteen years old, he started a heavy-metal record label in South Korea, BuyHard Productions. It was a surprising success, but then fate dealt him another blow: Saejus father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Saejus whole world changed.