Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet

Noom is built around teaching you to eat the foods you love while losing weight naturally. Low-carb takes the opposite approach — restriction in exchange for faster results. Is one genuinely better than the other, and can you follow a low-carb diet while using Noom?

What Is Noom?

Noom is a clinically studied weight-loss app delivering a personalized, 16-week lifestyle program covering food, mental health, exercise, stress, and more.

What Is the Low-Carb Diet?

A low-carb diet pushes the body from burning carbohydrates to burning fat for fuel, typically by cutting carb intake down to a small handful of daily grams while raising fat intake to sustain the shift. Various versions exist, but a common macronutrient breakdown lands around 70% fat, 25% protein, and 5% carbs.

Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet: History

Brief History of Noom

Founded in 2008 by Artem Petakov and Saeju Jeong, Noom brought in doctors, nutrition professionals, and psychologists to build a genuinely holistic approach to health and weight loss.

Brief History of the Low-Carb Diet

While Dr. Robert Atkins is the name most associated with low-carb eating, its roots go back to 1862, when William Banting, a 202-pound patient seeking help for hearing trouble, was put on a strict meat-and-vegetable diet by Dr. William Harvey. Banting lost weight, his hearing improved, and he later published his experience in the Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Over a century later, Dr. Atkins reintroduced low-carb eating with his 1970s bestseller, and the approach gained further momentum in the 1990s from figures like Barry Sears (Enter the Zone) and Dr. Michael and Mary Dan Eades (Protein Power). Low-carb eating has stayed popular ever since, evolving most notably into the stricter keto diet.

Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet: Who’s Behind the Plans?

Who Created Noom?

Petakov, drawn to coding as a child and later to the psychology of decision-making in college, partnered with Jeong, who spent six years building BuyHard Productions in Korea before eventually convincing a reluctant Petakov to leave Google and co-found Noom.

Who Created the Low-Carb Diet?

Credit generally goes to Dr. William Harvey, who applied insights from a medical conference on diet and blood sugar to develop Banting’s original protein-focused plan — notably lighter on fat than the low-carb diets that followed.

Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet: The Rules

Rules of Noom

Rather than strict rules, Noom rests on three pillars: food logging, exercise tracking, and daily lessons with quizzes.

Food Logging: Green foods (about 30% of calories) — fruits, vegetables, non-fat dairy, some grains — offer the best nutrition per calorie. Yellow foods (about 45%) cover meats, seafood, legumes, seeds, and low-fat dairy. Red foods (up to 25%) include sugary desserts, fried items, and high-fat foods.

Exercise Tracking: Burn 300 calories on a 1,500-calorie plan, and 150 (50%) gets credited back, raising your goal to 1,650 — a deliberate 50% rather than 100%, since people tend to overestimate exercise intensity.

Lessons and Quizzes: About 10 minutes a day over 16 weeks, explaining the reasoning behind each change rather than just dictating rules.

Rules of the Low-Carb Diet

Low-carb generally targets roughly 75% of calories from fat, 20% from protein, and 5% from carbs. On a 2,000-calorie plan, that translates to about 167g of fat, 100g of protein, and 25g of carbs daily — remarkably close to the classic Atkins starting point of 20g of carbs a day. That heavy fat intake is essential for maintaining ketosis, the metabolic state that drives fat-burning on this diet.

Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet: Eating Plans

The Noom Eating Plan

Built on the green/yellow/red system, Noom gradually teaches which foods fall into each category so healthy choices eventually become second nature, with a personal coach available throughout for guidance.

The Low-Carb Eating Plan

Today’s low-carb landscape is more varied than ever, partly thanks to keto’s popularity — nearly any food now has a low-carb version, though often heavily processed. A well-designed plan emphasizes healthy fats, lean proteins, and whole-food carb sources. Sample carb counts: avocado (3g per 3.5 oz), broccoli (4g per cup), hard cheese (under 1g per ounce), and most meats and eggs (essentially 0g). One caution worth noting: overeating protein on a low-carb diet can backfire, since excess amino acids convert to glucose and get stored much like carbs would.

Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet: Plan Duration

Noom’s Healthy Weight Program runs 16 weeks, with continued access afterward for weight maintenance — and pricing drops significantly with longer subscriptions, from $59.99/month down to around $17/month on a 12-month plan. Low-carb eating has no defined endpoint; the Atkins version specifically starts with a two-week Induction phase followed by an Ongoing Weight Loss phase that continues until you’re close to your goal.

Key Differences Between Noom and Low-Carb

The clearest distinction: low-carb requires restricting an entire food category, while Noom teaches how to work all foods into a sustainable, weight-loss-friendly diet.

Can You Follow a Low-Carb Diet on Noom?

Yes. While Noom doesn’t restrict food groups outright, its whole-food emphasis naturally trends lower-carb than a typical Western diet, and your coach can help tailor the plan further if lower carb intake is a specific goal.

Possible Side Effects

Noom carries no notable side effects. Low-carb diets, especially in the early ketosis-adjustment period, can cause fatigue, difficulty focusing, muscle cramps, hunger, constipation, and headaches — often eased by adding salt or salted broth during the first few weeks.

Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet: The Research

A study of more than 35,000 Noom users in Scientific Reports found over 75% reported weight loss, and research in Metabolic Syndromes and Related Disorders confirmed Noom also supports weight maintenance.

Low-carb research is genuinely more mixed than its popularity suggests. A 2018 review in the European Journal of Nutrition noted “a lack of data supporting long-term efficacy, safety and health benefits of LCHF diets,” and Obesity Reviews raised concerns that past studies often prioritized completion rates over review quality. That said, a 2019 study in PeerJ found very-low-carb eating (under 5% of calories from carbs) associated with the largest improvements in HDL (“good”) cholesterol and the biggest reductions in triglycerides.

The Bottom Line: Noom vs. Low-Carb Diet

Low-carb genuinely works for weight loss, science backs that much — but the evidence increasingly points to it being a short-term fix rather than a permanent solution. Noom’s real advantage is teaching not just what habits to adopt, but why they work, giving users the tools to sustain results long after the program ends.

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