“All the money in the world can’t buy you back good health.” -Reba McEntire
In recent years, the fitness trend has really taken off but perhaps calling it a trend is unfair. Humans have always chased a healthy lifestyle, only now, we have gotten rather serious about it. Old or young, everybody now wants to live the healthiest life they possibly can. And that is the reason why every day we are using technology to make our journey to obtain healthy minds and bodies a little easier. The app market is littered with fitness and health tracking apps dedicated to helping people achieve their body goals. From activity tracking apps to nutrition and workout apps, there is no shortage of digital tools to help you get that perfect body and mindset. In today’s fast-paced world, a modern man needs all the help he can get in maintaining the balance between work and healthy life. After all, a healthy body is the greatest wealth we can ever hope to achieve. So with the help of these apps, he can enhance his workout, keep a track of the steps that he walks every day or the calories that he intakes with every meal. And one such app that is helping professionals all across the world is Noom.
What is Noom?
Noom is one of the top weight loss apps in the market right now. It has already helped millions of people around the world in shedding substantial weight. It boasts that it is the last fitness program that you will ever need. A little smug, right? Well, not according to the creators. But what gives Noom such self-confidence? It might have something to do with the unique approach that it takes to help you lose weight. The biggest slogan that Noom keeps chanting is that no food is off-limits. You can eat whatever you want. The way the app works is that instead of putting curbs on the type of food that you can eat, this app uses psychology to trick your body into building better eating habits. We will talk about how Noom works a little later in the article. For now, all you need to know is that Noom promotes eating all types of food and works on a scientifically proven theory of calorie density, which we will discuss in a jiff as well. Now before going on, let us take a beat and talk about the question that is obviously forming in the back of your heads right about now .
Does this app really work?
Yes, it does.
Who says so?
Science.
In a study conducted over 36,000 individuals, almost 80% of people reported weight loss in a median of 267 days while using Noom.
How Does Noom Work?
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As we told you earlier, Noom doesn’t refrain you from eating anything. And it is able to do it and still help you lose weight because of the underlying science of its method.When you first download the app, you have to go through a process of Q&A with it where you share your personal details, your health metrics- blood pressure, weight, etc., your lifestyle- if you cook at home or eat outside, if you have a job that requires you to move or a desk one where you sit most of the day. After you’ve been through this process, you will be given a health coach and eating recommendations. These coaches are real people, though no trained dieticians, and they help you in setting up a diet plan that might work for you, taking into factor all the things that you like to eat and then deciding how much of them you should eat.This is where the science of calorie density comes in. It is basically the number of calories present in a certain amount of food. Food with low-calorie density, or energy density, can help you in shaving off weight. Noom, using the list of foods that you intake and calorie density idea, divides food into three sections- red, yellow, and green. The app encourages you to eat food items in the yellow and green section.
Now that we have established that Noom app really works and is backed up by science, the next question that arises is-
How To Make An App Like Noom?
This question can be answered in just one word- carefully. There are a lot of apps like Noom in the market and they all boast, just like Noom, that they are the best one. So you need to come up with an idea, like “the no food is off-limits” idea was in the case of Noom, that will make all of your competitors look rather basic in front of you. So the first thing that you need, is science. You need to decide if you will go with the conventional kill-your-cravings-if-you-want-to-achieve-results ideology or Noom’s no-foods-are-off-limits idea. Once you settle on that, it is time to move onto the second step, that is detailing your app.
Top Features You Need To Have In A Weight Loss App
An weight loss app like Noom or MyFitnessPal needs some crucial things in order to make it in the market.
1. An Array Of Smartly Tailored Questions
The first thing you need is a series of questions that will help you in gathering crucial information about a user’s health. For an app like Noom to work, personal data is essential, since weight loss is a highly subjective affair. But not everybody is comfortable sharing such data. So your job is to form questions in a manner that they don’t scare off your users. And keep in mind that you need to know everything, from their dietary preferences to their blood pressure and heart rate to their current weight for this app to work properly.
2. Good UI/UX
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This is a necessity for every app. At the end of the day, your app is not for you but for the users and you need to make it as easy for them as possible to use that app. In fact, you need to make the User Experience a delightful affair so that your users will keep coming back to your app. It should be broken down into simple screens, nothing too fancy that pops out of nowhere, and there should be a smooth transitioning between these screens. Make very clever use of fun animations to keep your users engage, use images and figures to convey information as much as you can instead of dumping down textual data. Also, make sure you use calm soothing colours for your app; you have the liberty to play around a little bit with your app’s colour palette. The goal is to find the colour combination that doesn’t irritate a user’s eyes.
3. Health Analytics
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There are apps in the market whose sole job it is to track various health-related metrics, from the steps walked to the number of glasses of water drank by a user. But your app needs to have this feature as well. It doesn’t make sense to put out a half baked app because people would want to have all the tools they need in just one place instead of having two separate apps, one to lose weight and another one to track their health metrics. You need to show health graphs, goals achieved, bar graphs, progress bars, etc. so that your user can keep a better eye on his goals. Noom has all these features but they come as in-app purchases. Maybe you can one-up it by making these features available for free.
4. Personal Dieticians
Noom has got a team of health experts who help users in making a diet that works for them and then they make sure that they stay on that diet till the goal has been achieved. You can give a secure chat system in your app so that users can talk to their coach and discuss their diet plans. You can collaborate with proper dieticians to help your customers to improve the quality of diet plans that you approve.
5. Motivation, Health Tips, Reminders, and Quizzes
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Your users need motivation. It will happen very often that they fall off their diet or eat too much Red food, in those cases, you will need to, very gently, lead them back to their diets and try to undo the damage. Sending them random motivational texts can work wonders, too. Health tips and reminders are just something you send out randomly to all your users, like reminding them to drink an adequate amount of water. Random quizzes can help you in maintaining a better personal health record for your various users.
Developing an app like Noom will take efforts and funds in equal parts. While ideas are crucial, it is their execution that matters in the end and a lot can go wrong between the ideation and deployment of your final app. So it is imperative that you hire an IT firm with good reviews and a lot of experience in developing the type of app you want developed. The development of an app will cost you handsomely as well; the process can be long and can run into a multitude of problems which will tie back to no particular culprit. Some times, things just go wrong and there is no one to be blamed. So you will need a little bit of extra money and time saved away so that you can withstand these unexpected blows.
Also Read- How is IoT Revolutionizing the Healthcare Industry?
Bottom Line
Health is precious. A healthy body opens door to happiness and a healthy state of mind. People have always chased healthy bodies and minds and they will keep doing so, and right there is an opportunity for people who can enable them. Apps like Noom are a saving grace for people who have struggled with their weight for a long time and finally want to do something about it. The stats speak for themselves, according to Statista, the eHealth market is bound to be worth $200 billion by 2020. So time is now to get in on the action, help people and make money at the same time. Leverage our services and design a weight management app under your name. If you have some query or wish to get a free quote, contact us!
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