The Last Ten Pounds

It is summer of 2021. Kathryn and I avoid crowds more than before Covid, and eat mostly our own cooking. I watch more television than I think is good for me. There is an ad blitz for an app called Noom, which claims to offer personalized, psychology-based weight loss. My daily morning weigh-ins have crept slowly upward, and my wife and I agree I should lose a few pounds. The Noom blitz makes me curious about their approach, since I consider myself an expert on weight loss, at least my own weight loss. I have been through it a few times, the last time has stuck for over ten years, and I really don’t need to lose that much weight. So I decide to get the app and use Noom as my vehicle this time around.

I remember thinking I was too heavy at 155 pounds at age 25. I remember “graduating” Weight Watchers at 170 pounds, down from 190, in my mid-thirties. I remember getting down to 170 again for my fortieth birthday. My heaviest ever weight was about 210 pounds at age 52, for a BMI of 33.9, which is well into the obesity range. Then I started eating whole food, plant-based, and taking a new attitude toward weight loss.

I did not count calories, carbs, or units of any kind. I tested the theory that I could lose weight while eating unlimited amounts of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans, so long as I avoided nuts, avocados, coconut, olives, and processed foods such as added oils and sugars. There were plateaus along the way, some for as long as eight weeks with no significant weight change. After about a year, I weighed around 165. A year after that, I had leveled out at 156. In the years between 2011 and 2021, my weight varied between 151 (after being hospitalized) and 162 (where we started this post).

So I started Noom thinking that I already knew how to lose weight, that I could lose weight whenever I wanted to badly enough, and because I was curious. Among people trying to lose weight on any kind of diet, losing “the last ten pounds” is the hardest. It is a common experience. Once one’s body uses up its reserves, it starts trying to retain more of what one gives it. One’s metabolism changes so the amount of energy needed to maintain the current weight goes down. Noom says it is important to make lifestyle changes, not just reduce eating for a short-term weight loss. This seems to conflict with Noom’s insistence on calorie counting, but the principle is consistent with a whole foods, plant-based approach, which is about lifestyle, not short-term diet.

Noom started by asking me to set a goal weight. I said 153 pounds. They adjusted that downward to 151.6, without explanation. They promised they could get me there by a fixed date, 8 weeks in the future. I found that promise quite encouraging, thinking I could do any reasonable program for eight weeks.

Noom assigned me a calorie budget of 1400 calories a day. They provide a food diary tool to check how you do against the budget. They also set a daily steps goal and encouraged me to be more active and log daily exercise in the app. They assigned me a coach and made me a member of a group of users. They sent daily lessons with quizzes intended to educate me on nutrition, various dietary styles, critical thinking, sleep, stress, and other weight loss and lifestyle topics. Evidently, “scale anxiety” is a problem for some people.

I had no use for the coach or the user group, but I suppose for many people, they might help, and I participated with good will towards my fellow members. I was already reading the daily lessons critically, and found they were generally things I already knew, or they were oversimplified or just plain wrong in my opinion. The writing style couched the “Noom nerds” as experts, and referred to the user as “grasshopper,” a pop culture reference I understood and did not appreciate, and I wondered if their younger users knew what it meant. The elaborate system of “achievements” seemed targeted to a generation raised on video games.

I felt I was active enough and did not try hard to exercise more. In my previous experience, diet plays a much bigger role than exercise in weight loss. Exercise certainly can improve health, including appetite regulation and sleep. But going from no exercise to a moderate amount suffices. The benefits of exercising to extremes diminish, and entail unnecessary risks.

Noom nutritional advice is terrible for someone eating whole food, plant-based coming in. For the average person seeking to lose weight, I suppose it would represent an improvement over what they had been doing. It seemed to think Greek yogurt and skinless chicken breasts were healthy options; to me, they are not. Noom uses a traffic light system to designate foods as green for eat all you want because it’s a healthy, low calorie density choice, red for limit your intake, and yellow for in-between—eat with caution. Superficially, this resembles systems promoted by some of my heroes like Dr. John McDougall and Dr. Michael Greger. But Noom’s assignment of certain foods definitely disagreed with those two. And Noom actually requires its users to eat small amounts of red light foods, apparently so they won’t feel deprived and give up on the whole program. It takes a neutral stance on veganism (and does not mention whole food, plant-based at all), saying each user should pick whatever dietary style they like, so long as they stay within the calorie budget and traffic light limits.

I thought the calorie budget of 1400 per day was too restrictive. A guy of my size should need 2000-2500 calories per day to maintain his weight, so I reasoned I should be able to lose weight on 1800 calories per day. In fact, I doubted I could feel satiated on only 1400 calories. But after two weeks and no significant weight reduction, I decided to stop trying to outsmart the program and give it a fair shot. I stayed within or very close to the calorie budget from then on, and I started losing weight.

I learned that I could be satisfied with only 200 calories of brown rice with my vegetable stir fry, instead of the 400 I was used to. I could use 3.75 oz of tofu rather than 7.5. I could split a can of beans into two meals. I could get by for six weeks with just one square of ultra-dark chocolate each evening. All in all, I could feel satisfied on 1400 calories per day for the duration.

By the target date, I had passed my target weight and reached 150 pounds. Nine months later, my weight still hovers within a pound or two of that. I’m sure my calorie intake has crept back up, and I am not logging meals or counting calories any more. But I’m sticking to the reduced amount of rice with my veggies. Hopefully, I am at a new “set point,” and my body’s homeostasis mechanisms are now keeping me at a weight I like, provided I don’t push them too hard. This morning’s weight puts me at a BMI of 24.3, in the “normal” range.

Advocates of whole food, plant-based eating like to assert that it enables you to reach a healthy weight without counting calories. I have said that, and it is true and useful if you are starting out obese. For the last ten pounds, I had to consciously reduce my intake. Once those ten pounds are off, keep them off by paying attention and acting before they come fully back.