The Noom Mindset: Learn the Science, Lose the Weight
- Description
- Product Details
- About the Author
- Read an Excerpt
-Cultivate a growth mindset
-Master the forging or deconstructing of behavior chains
-Overcome thought distortions
-Generate meaningful internal motivation for staying focused on your goals
-Create changes that stick Based on more than a decade of research and experimentation, Noom has helped millions of users succeed by employing the mindset tactics that this book teaches. Written with an emphasis on self-awareness, goal-setting, and self-experimentation, The Noom Mindset provides powerful tools to help you reach your goals, your way.
ISBN-13: 9781982194291
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: S&S/Simon Element
Publication Date: 12-27-2022
Pages: 368
Product Dimensions: 1.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)
Noom is a consumer-first digital health platform that empowers its users to achieve holistic health outcomes through behavior change. Noom was founded in 2008 with a mission to help people everywhere lead healthier lives. Fueled by a powerful combination of technology, psychology, and human coaching, Noom is backed by more than a decade of user research and product development. Today, Noom’s platform includes two core programs: Noom Weight for weight management and Noom Mood for stress management. Headquartered in New York City, Noom has been named one of Inc.’s Best Places to Work and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Technology. Learn more by visiting Noom.com.
Chapter 1: You Rule: Your Role in the Change You Want to MakeRead an Excerpt
Nothing changes if nothing changes.
—Anonymous
We suspect (since you are here) that there is something about your life that you would like to be different. Maybe you would like to get back to a healthy weight, where you felt so good in your body. Maybe you would like to get fit, or break some bad habits, or feel better, or just feel more like yourself. Maybe you know what you need to do, but you’re having trouble doing it; maybe you’re not sure where even to begin. Maybe you’ve already made some positive changes, but you want to make sure they stick.
Whatever story brought you here, you are in the right place, because Noom is all about helping people make changes. Our methods may not be like the ones you’ve tried before. We don’t throw a bunch of rules at you, control what you eat or how you work out, or even say that you need to change at all. Instead, we approach behavior change from a psychological perspective: What do you want to change about your life, and why do you want to change it? And why haven’t you changed it already?
We’re all about the why of behavior. Knowing your why is motivating. According to self-determination theory, or SDT, people are most successful at meeting goals when those goals relate to their innate psychological needs, especially autonomous motivation. Autonomous motivation is about doing something because you’ve decided to do it for yourself, and because it is consistent with your personality and values. Making that connection between why and your inner reasons for making a change—reasons that come from you, not from what someone else tells you that you should do—will, according to SDT, increase your motivation and make you more successful at achieving what you set out to achieve, whatever you decide that will be. This is what we here at Noom believe to be true based on the research we’ve done, and what we have seen in our most successful program participants. Understanding your why is an integral part of our program. In fact, “Why?” is our favorite question. Why do you make certain decisions, have certain thoughts, or form certain habits? To begin answering this question, we help you develop your self-awareness and learn how to experiment on yourself. We love experiments, as you’ll soon see! Our entire program is rooted in experimentation, and everything we implement is rigorously tested. Experimentation is key, not just to how we run our company and develop our curriculum but to how you can quickly and efficiently figure out what works for you. “We’ve purposefully optimized Noom to maximize learning speed via experimentation,” says cofounder and president Artem Petakov. “Experimentation is how I figure out what works in my personal life. It’s how we figured out what works for Noom. And it’s how you can figure out what works for you.”
But we don’t experiment just for the sake of experimenting. We base our experiments on research. We pull from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and a lot of other psychology concepts we’ll introduce you to along the way. We teach you how to identify and change destructive thought patterns that keep you from reaching your greatest goals, achieving your biggest dreams, and having the life you want for yourself, but the way we show you how to do this is always based on the evidence. We’re here to help you reach your goals your way, rather than trying to make you do things our way. There is no one right way to do anything because everyone is different, so we help you pay more attention to your own body and tune in to your psyche—because that is where all the answers lie. You just have to access them. Noom doesn’t give you a program. Noom gives you the tools to access the success “program” that’s already running in your own brain.
That’s how you build a life you love. We can show you how to shift painlessly into a calorie deficit that will lead to weight loss, how to have more fun moving, or how to feel calmer or more energized. Whatever your goal, we will always encourage you to ask “Why?” and we will always let you take the lead. We’re just here to hand you tools when you need them so you can set goals that are in line with who you are, and so you can stay motivated, inspired, and reassured that science is in your corner. You know yourself better than anyone else ever could, so while it’s your life, your plans, your goals, we’re in your corner. Because we trust you, and we want you to trust yourself. Because we believe in you, and we want you to believe in yourself. Because we know you can do whatever it is you decide you want to do for yourself.
Because you rule. You are the single greatest force in your health and in your life. You are the most influential, are the most powerful, and have the most control over what you will and will not do. All you have to do is understand, unlock, and harness that superpower you already have within you. Our goal—because we have goals, too—is simply to help you figure out how to do that.
If you’ve struggled in the past with how to eat healthier, exercise more effectively, lose weight you don’t want to be carrying around, or have a more comfortable relationship with food or your body, fear not. Noom has a ton of new tools. We can help you reframe how you look at food, exercise, weight, and even yourself, so you can stop fighting with food, the scale, the mirror, or your inner critic and start living in a way that can help you feel more confident and comfortable in your own skin. We like to say we are lovers, not fighters, and we want to help you put the battles aside so you can start truly enjoying your beautiful self and your beautiful life.
Here are some of the ways we do that:
This time can be different because Noom is different.
But enough about us. Let’s get back to you, and one of the most important first steps you can take when you want to change your life: believing in yourself. Why We Need Psychology More than Rules
Noom has always taken a psychological approach to behavior change rather than a rules-and-restrictions approach because what happens when you want to change something has less to do with what you do and more with how you think about what you do. That’s why, in our experience, making rules to change behavior doesn’t work very well. Rules address the what but not the why, and humans aren’t very good at following rules that go against human nature.
For example, human nature tends to cause us to act based on in-the-moment feelings, rather than on what might happen in the future. There is a really good reason for that. In-the-moment decisions (“Run now!”) and immediate rewards (“Eat that food while you know you can get it!”) in times of danger and food scarcity probably significantly determined the survival of humans, back when there were a lot fewer of us and life was a lot dicier. Thinking about and acting based on a distant future (like next week) just wasn’t as important back then, in terms of making it to tomorrow.
Also, human nature, according to researchers in psychology who study the evolutionary roots of human decision-making, tends toward these ways of thinking:
People like to do what feels best in the moment, what’s easiest, what’s most pleasurable, and what everybody else is doing. That’s all totally normal and, to some extent, is hardwired into our brains, so if we make a rule and say, “Don’t look at the squirrel” or “Don’t eat sweet things” or even “Don’t do what everybody else is doing,” what do you think most people will immediately want to do?
However, we also have fairly evolved brains here in this twenty-first century, which means we don’t always have to act on what we want now when we use our considerable intellects to determine that doing something differently could mean getting something even better later. When those delayed desires are more desirable than those immediate desires, that is when we can exercise our also very human ability to change our behavior.
But it’s difficult to override the instinct to take what you can get while you can get it, especially when acting on instinct has also become a habit. Let’s say you’re in the habit of eating a couple of chocolate chip cookies or a candy bar for your snack in the mid-afternoon on most days. You probably do that because, in the moment, those foods sound awesome. Or they used to. Now it’s just a habit and you don’t think much about it. And maybe that’s no big deal.
However, maybe you think it is a big deal. You think it’s a “bad habit.” You think sugar is bad, or cookies are bad, or whatever. Or you’re trying to get into a calorie deficit to drop some weight, and that afternoon snack has a whole lot of calories for very little nutritional payoff, so you think that changing that snack could help you reach your goal. So, you make a rule for yourself: “No more cookies or candy for a snack.”
The next day, when it comes time for a snack, suddenly you want those cookies. But you made a rule! So, you can’t have them. But as soon as you tell yourself you can’t have them, you want them more than you have ever wanted them before. So, you eat the cookies. Maybe even more cookies than you usually eat.
This is where psychology can come to your rescue. One thing you could do is to focus on mindfulness, a core concept of dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT. When it comes time for a snack, you can tune in to your body and ask yourself: “Are cookies really what I want right now? What is my body telling me? What is making me want cookies? Is it habit? Is it stress? Does something else actually sound better today?” How you really feel in the moment, physically and emotionally, might be more important than a blanket rule. If you determine you really want the cookies, then you might decide to enjoy every bite of cookie, no guilt! Or you might realize you don’t really want the cookies; what you really want is to decompress, so you go outside and sit in the sun for fifteen minutes. Or maybe, when you really think about it, what your body is actually craving is a nice, fresh, crisp, juicy apple with a dab of peanut butter, and you realize you’d rather have that than a cookie. This is psychology at work.
Or, let’s say you do want the cookies, but decide to stop before you nosh and consider the short-term and long-term ramifications of having cookies for a snack. First, you think about how those cookies usually make you feel later in the afternoon (hello, three o’clock slump), or how they might be keeping you from your much-desired longer-term goal of dropping those ten pounds you gained in the last year, pounds that make you feel uncomfortable when you zip up your jeans. Then, keeping all this in mind, you might decide that, even though you may want those cookies in the moment, what you really want is to choose a snack that will help you reach your goal. That goal might be feeling chipper at 3:00 p.m. when the people around you are all nodding off, or feeling great in your clothes, with no uncomfortable stomach feelings when you zip up.
How we think can cause us to make decisions against our own long-term best interest, but it can also be used to make decisions in our long-term best interest. This is a basic principle of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT: to examine and question ways of thinking and behaving that are unhelpful so you can change those thought patterns and behavioral habits in ways that benefit you. Immediate gratification is a powerful force. So is habit. But neither is as powerful as you and your very capable brain. If you can learn something, you can unlearn it. If you can choose to do something, you can choose to do something different instead.
When you weigh the costs and benefits, you may decide that the benefit of feeling better later will be greater than the benefit of enjoying cookies for a few seconds, when—if you are honest with yourself—you sometimes don’t even taste them because eating those cookies is just a habit.
Maybe you’ll even do a little experiment. Is it really the cookies causing that three o’clock slump? You could switch out your snack to an apple with some peanut butter for one week, and take notes about how you feel each day at 3:00 p.m. If you feel better, that may be evidence that your body responds better to the new snack, and that realization could motivate you to swap out those default cookies for that more energizing apple. And if you don’t feel any different? Maybe it’s all that coffee you’ve been drinking that’s causing you the trouble, and you could experiment by swapping some of your coffee for green tea or water.
This is just an example of some of the many wonderful ways Noom approaches behavior change. Self-Efficacy—aka Believing in Yourself
Self-efficacy is a scientific term that simply means believing in yourself. It’s like that famous old quote, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” The first step to changing something in your life is to believe you can do it. Obviously, that’s not the only step. You can’t just kick back with a pint of ice cream and think yourself into triathlon-level fitness or magically write the Great American Novel with no effort. Effort is definitely part of the equation, but self-efficacy is foundational. If you never really believe it’s going to work, then why would you put in the effort to try? But if (when) you believe, then you can move ahead with confidence, energy, and the willingness to put in the work it’s going to take to reach your goals.
Self-efficacy isn’t a quality that is set in stone. It’s not genetic, like your eye color or whether you think cilantro tastes like soap. It comes from what has happened to you so far in life. If you have had a lot of experience succeeding at things (lucky you), then you may have a lot of self-efficacy. If you have experienced a lot of challenges or haven’t always met your goals, you may have lower self-efficacy, and this can make it really difficult to visualize success. It’s hard to have high self-efficacy when most of your attempts at, for example, weight loss have not worked out. You have already learned from past experiences that you “can’t” lose weight, so this becomes your belief.
But you can cultivate self-efficacy, and that’s one of the things Noom helps you do because (at the risk of immediately launching into a cheer-squad moment): You can do this, whatever it is you have decided you want to do, even if you haven’t really believed you could do it before. Even if you tried to do it before and didn’t succeed. Every time something doesn’t work, you learn what doesn’t work. The lesson isn’t that it’s not possible. You are smart (you read books!), you are flexible (even if you can’t touch your toes), and you know that doing something one way doesn’t mean you can’t do it another way going forward. That’s another big Noom principle: This time is different, because Noom is different. And you’re different, too, because with every new lesson, every new experience, you become someone smarter and more experienced.
NOOM IN ACTION: ASSESS YOUR SELF-EFFICACY
Psychologists have various ways they help people to measure their self-efficacy, so let’s start out by measuring yours. Answer each of the following questions, giving yourself one point for every “strongly agree,” two points for every “agree,” etc., all the way down to five points for every “strongly disagree.” Don’t worry if the questions seem similar. Just answer each one as well as you can. And remember, even if your self-efficacy seems low right now, this is something you can definitely improve.
Now, tally up your answers. Total points: __________
If you scored between seven and fifteen, you have excellent self-efficacy. You are confident that you can achieve goals and are good at being your own best cheerleader. We’ll chime in: Give us a Y, give us an O, give us a U! Now, the next step will be to start figuring out what goals you want to tackle next and making a game plan to achieve them. You already know you can do it, so let’s go for it!
If you scored between sixteen and twenty-six, you have pretty good self-efficacy, but you could gain even more self-confidence about your ability to achieve your goals. You already achieve goals every day. Do you brush your teeth? Do you eat breakfast? Do you sometimes give junk food a pass? Are you polite to others, even when they aren’t so polite to you? Every one of those things is a success, a goal achieved, a win. If you can brush your teeth every day, you can do anything every day. Throughout this book, we’ll help you prove it to yourself, one day at a time.
If you scored between twenty-seven and thirty-five, you may not be super-confident about achieving your goals, perhaps because you haven’t always met the goals you were going for in the past, like trying to lose weight or starting to exercise or cutting back on sugar. No worries! We’ve got great psych tools to help you change that, and we’re going to give you an exercise right now that will immediately build your confidence in your abilities.
Right here, as you read this, think of one small thing you can do right now that is good for you. Just one small thing. Can you go eat some fruit? Can you do ten jumping jacks? Can you sit with your eyes closed and breathe deeply for one minute? Whatever it is, stop reading and do it right now. We’ll wait. Okay, go!
Are you done? How was that? Not so hard, right? And guess what? You just achieved a goal. And if you can achieve that goal, you can achieve one that’s just a tiny bit more challenging. And then you can go from there. Awesome job, you!
The good news about self-efficacy is that there are some great tools anybody can use to start building it in themselves.
One tool is to find proof that you can achieve things that are meaningful. Transfer your thoughts about those experiences onto the thing you are trying to do now. Think: “I did this, so I can do that.” Another strategy is to break your goal down into smaller goals. Big goals are exciting at first but can soon become overwhelming. Instead of saying “I’m going to run a marathon!” or “I’m going to lose seventy-five pounds,” which can seem unlikely or impossible when you begin to hit roadblocks, ground your self-efficacy in smaller victories rather than the end goal.
You can determine where to start by asking yourself: “Do I believe I can run ten miles? Do I believe I can lose fifty pounds?” If the answer is no, lower the number. “Do I believe I can run five miles? Do I believe I can lose twenty-five pounds?” No, based on past experience? How about “Do I believe I can walk for one and a half miles and run for half a mile?” or “Do I believe I can lose five pounds?” Once you get to a yes, you’ve found the perfect goal for now, even if you know in the back of your mind that you would eventually like to run much farther or lose more weight than that.
When you’ve accomplished that, no matter how long it takes, celebrate that Big Win! Then ask yourself again: “Do I believe I can lose five more pounds? Do I believe I can run half a mile?” Now you know you did it once, so you can do it again. So do it again! Once that starts to feel easier, ask yourself if you believe you can lose ten pounds, or run a mile and a half, or however it makes sense for you to progress toward your ultimate goal.
This is how you can look at the small picture to build self-efficacy. Every small goal you achieve will reinforce your brain’s belief in your ability to do what you set out to do. Every small success pings your brain, and it begins to adjust its perspective—and that’s how you make progress. Cultivating a Growth Mindset
Do you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset? These are psychology terms related to self-efficacy that have to do with whether or not you think you can change. Having a growth mindset, according to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her team, means believing that your effort will increase your abilities, whereas a fixed mindset means believing that your abilities are fixed, no matter what effort you might make. Someone with a growth mindset might say, “Math is hard. I need to practice more.” Someone with a fixed mindset might say, “I guess I’m bad at math.”
Do you have an “I can learn to run five miles if I put my mind to it” or “I will always be this out of shape so I guess I could try but the odds are not in my favor” kind of attitude? Dr. Dweck explains, in her book Mindset, that people with a fixed mindset believe their intelligence, personality, and talents are set in stone. They don’t think they can change, so they focus on doing what is familiar and easy for them, and they avoid doing what is challenging. They also tend to be less resilient when they think they have failed. They let it discourage them from trying.
On the other hand, people with a growth mindset believe they can change their intelligence and their personality with effort, so they are more resilient when they fail. They think they just have to keep trying, so in the end they are more likely to succeed.
You may already have a sense of what kind of mindset you tend to favor based on the self-efficacy quiz you just took, but let’s go a little deeper. Maybe you want to achieve something—run a 5K or eat more vegetables or start meditating for ten minutes a day. If you have a fixed mindset, you likely see all the obstacles standing between you and your goal and then struggle to see a path around them. If you have a growth mindset, you’ll recognize that there are some obstacles, but you’ll also believe that you can figure them out. You know that the power to achieve your goal comes from you, not from somebody else.
But other people are influential, make no mistake! It’s important to practice telling yourself that nobody is forcing you to behave one way or another. Nobody is forbidding you from getting in some exercise or meditation, although they may be trying to distract you or make you what seems like a better offer, like girls’ night out or a Monday Night Football watch party. And you can always do those social things if you want to do them. Always! But you are empowered to make choices about what is in your own best interest and what you really want to do, both in the moment and for your future. You are your own person.
That doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help. If it’s hard to do alone, enlist a friend. Talk to a counselor. Having a growth mindset doesn’t mean you can do everything by yourself. We are social animals, and we all tend to do better when we work together.
An environment change can also be a great supporter of a growth mindset: Surrounding yourself with people who are supportive of your goals or have similar goals can be influential and powerful in shaping what you choose to do. Our resident chief of psychology, Dr. Andreas Michaelides, told us a story about how he used to smoke when he lived overseas, where everybody smoked. When he came to the United States for graduate school, he had a much easier time quitting because he was in an environment where smoking was not normalized. He says, “Changing the people you’re with can rewrite the script on your environment that maintains the habits you’re wanting to change or you’re wanting to emulate. Being around other people who act a certain way that you would like to act will motivate you and help you act the way you want to act.” Let’s say you have a family with some less than desirable eating habits. You’re surrounded by people who maintain and reinforce eating habits you wish you didn’t have. But surrounding yourself with other people who have eating habits you do wish you had can help you adopt some of those behaviors.