Noom vs. Keto
Let’s take a closer look at noom vs keto and what it genuinely offers. Advertisement Ever notice how a new diet often starts out strong, only to fizzle out over time until you’re back to old habits and the weight you lost? A lot of diet and weight-loss plans push fast changes without giving you […]
Let’s take a closer look at noom vs keto and what it genuinely offers.
Ever notice how a new diet often starts out strong, only to fizzle out over time until you’re back to old habits and the weight you lost? A lot of diet and weight-loss plans push fast changes without giving you time to actually adjust to a new way of eating. You might see quick results, but without the tools to make lasting changes, that’s exactly when fad diets tend to fall apart.
Let’s compare one of the newest, most advanced weight-loss programs against one of today’s most popular diets: Noom vs. Keto.
Noom Vs Keto: What Is Noom?
Noom is an app-based health program built to teach better dietary choices for overall health and weight loss, offering both a Healthy Weight Program and a Diabetes Prevention Program.
What Is Keto?
Keto is a high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carb diet designed to push the body toward burning fat for fuel by cutting out most carbohydrates. While used medically in some cases, its mainstream popularity today centers almost entirely on weight loss.
Noom vs. Keto: History
Brief History of Noom
Founded in 2008 by Artem Petakov and Saeju Jeong, Noom has secured multiple funding rounds, including backing from Samsung and Sequoia Capital, with offices in New York, Tokyo, and Seoul. It’s often described as especially popular among millennials.
Brief History of Keto
Keto’s roots go back much further than Noom’s — doctors recognized centuries ago that cutting carbs could help epilepsy patients. Dr. Robert Atkins popularized low-carb eating in the 1970s, and over time that high-fat, high-protein approach evolved into the high-fat, moderate-protein version now known as keto.
Noom vs. Keto: Who’s Behind the Plans?
Who Created Noom?
Petakov and Jeong built Noom with input from doctors, nutritionists, psychologists, and personal trainers. Petakov started as a software engineering intern at Sun Microsystems before moving to Google and later co-founding WorkSmart Labs, which led directly to Noom. Jeong spent six years running BuyHard Productions in Seoul before the two partnered up.
Who Created Keto?
Modern keto is typically credited to Dr. Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic, who developed it as an epilepsy treatment in the early 1920s. Since then it’s branched into Classic Keto, Modified Keto, and Modified Atkins variations, with Classic Keto tracing directly back to Dr. Wilder’s original work.
Noom vs. Keto: The Rules
Rules of Noom
Noom’s basics come down to tracking food, weight, and exercise, plus roughly 10 minutes a day of education and quizzes, with optional blood pressure and blood sugar tracking.
Food Logging: Noom uses calorie counting simplified into green, yellow, and red food categories, with detailed food lists to guide daily choices. Green foods (most fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins like whitefish and tofu) should make up the bulk of intake, yellow foods (lean meats, avocados, higher-carb grains) in moderation, and red foods (fried items, sweets, processed snacks) only occasionally.
Exercise Tracking: Exercise adds back 50% of burned calories to your daily total — burn 500 calories on a 1200-calorie plan, and your allowance rises to 1450.
Education and Quizzes: Daily lessons and quizzes reinforce healthier food choices, gradually reshaping how users think about eating over time.
Rules of Keto
Classic Keto typically draws 70-75% of calories from fat, with carbs capped as low as 5%. Full-salt broth is often recommended early on to ease “keto flu” symptoms as the body adjusts, and processed “frankenfoods” are discouraged in favor of whole foods, even though technically allowed. Encouraged foods include meat, fatty fish, eggs, above-ground vegetables, full-fat dairy, nuts, and some berries; discouraged foods include sugar, potatoes, pasta, bread, candy, rice, and most beer. Exercise is encouraged too, though early fatigue and headaches often call for a lighter approach — and unlike Noom, working out doesn’t earn back any extra calories or carbs.
Noom vs. Keto: Eating Plans
The Noom Eating Plan
Noom’s plan centers on whole-food nutrition and small, sustainable changes rather than restriction, covering everything from social eating and stress management to how exercise affects the body — all recognized by the CDC as a legitimate lifestyle change program.
The Keto Eating Plan
Keto is straightforwardly built around high fat intake, with some dieters cutting carbs almost entirely, at least temporarily, to jumpstart ketosis.
Noom vs. Keto: Plan Duration
Noom runs a structured 16-week program. Keto has no fixed timeline — after the initial two-week induction phase, many people stay at or below 5% carbs indefinitely, with no built-in progression toward a maintenance phase.
Key Differences Between Noom and Keto
Food intake: Noom allows all foods without restricting entire categories; keto eliminates nearly all carbs while emphasizing fat. Food restriction itself has been linked to binge eating and food preoccupation, according to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Duration and structure: Noom’s 16-week arc is built around teaching lasting habits; keto has no equivalent built-in education phase.
Cost: Noom charges a monthly fee, while keto has none directly, though some keto-approved ingredients can be pricier or harder to find.
Possible Side Effects
Noom carries essentially no side effects beyond weight loss. Keto, according to CFP-MFC, can bring constipation, bad breath, muscle cramps, headache, diarrhea, weakness, and rash.
Noom vs. Keto: The Research
Research on Noom is genuinely strong. A study of more than 35,000 users in Scientific Reports found greater weight loss among frequent trackers, and the Noom Diabetes Prevention Program showed “significant weight loss and high engagement during the maintenance phase” over a 24-week study followed by 40+ weeks of follow-up, according to JMIR. Additional research in the International Journal of Eating Disorders and MSRD supports Noom’s role in both structured eating support and weight maintenance.
Keto research is more mixed. The Indian Journal of Medical Research cautions that “while low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet does, admittedly, show dramatic improvements in the short term, these can increase morbidity and mortality in the long run and are rarely sustainable” — recommending balance across all food groups instead, closely aligned with Noom’s own philosophy. That said, other research in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found keto effective at inducing weight loss while improving certain cardiovascular risk factors.
The Bottom Line: Noom vs. Keto
Noom focuses on nutrition education, sustainable food choices, and personal accountability. Keto leans on restriction and fast initial results, though research suggests those results often don’t hold up long-term.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Overall, noom vs keto remains worth understanding before you decide.
Overall, noom vs keto remains worth understanding before you decide.
