Noom Review: Is It Worth It for Women Over 40?

An honest, in-depth look at the psychology-based weight loss app that helps you understand why you eat — and how to change it for good.

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What Is Noom?

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Noom is a psychology-based weight loss app that helps you build healthy habits through daily lessons, food logging, and personal coaching. Unlike traditional diets that focus on restriction, Noom teaches you to understand your relationship with food.

The app uses a color-coded food system (green, yellow, orange) to help you make better choices without eliminating any food groups. Think of it as a personal health coach in your pocket.

For women over 40, this approach is especially powerful because it addresses the emotional and hormonal factors that make weight loss harder with age.

Pros & Cons

Is Noom Right for You?

Noom for Menopause and Perimenopause: What It Does and Does Not Do

This is the question we are asked most often about Noom, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a marketing line. Noom is not a menopause programme. It is a general behaviour-change app that happens to be used by a lot of women in their forties and fifties. That is not a criticism — it just changes what you should expect from it.

What genuinely helps in perimenopause

The psychology-first approach is a real fit for this stage of life, and here is why. In perimenopause the old feedback loop breaks: the same effort produces a smaller result, and for most women that is where the frustration — and the giving up — actually happens. An app built around noticing your eating patterns, rather than only counting them, addresses that directly.

• Logging without a rigid plan. Sleep, hot flushes and mood swings make strict meal plans collapse. A system that tolerates an imperfect week survives perimenopause better than one that does not.
• Attention to why you eat. Stress and disrupted sleep are ordinary in this stage, and both change appetite. The daily lessons are aimed exactly at that link.
• A coach who has heard it before. The single most common complaint we hear is “my doctor said it is just my age.” A coach who takes the change seriously is worth something, even if they are not a clinician.

Where it falls short for women over 40

• No strength training. This is the real gap. Muscle loss is one of the defining changes of this decade, and a calorie-and-psychology app does not address it. You need resistance training alongside, from somewhere else.
• No protein target. The colour system rates foods by calorie density, which is not the same question as whether you are eating enough protein to hold on to muscle.
• No medical layer. Noom does not assess thyroid function, iron, or whether hormone therapy is worth discussing. If your symptoms are severe, the app is the wrong first stop — see a clinician first. The National Institute on Aging has a plain-language starting point on what menopause actually is, and the Office on Women’s Health covers menopause and your health more broadly.
• Weight is not the only outcome that matters now. Bone density, muscle and sleep all shift in this decade, and none of them appear on the app’s dashboard. NIDDK’s overview of weight-management approaches is a useful reality check on what any single tool can do.

The honest summary: Noom can be a good fit for the behavioural half of the problem in perimenopause, and it does nothing for the physiological half. If you use it, pair it with strength training and a protein target. If you were hoping for a menopause-specific programme, this is not one.

Noom vs Mayo Clinic Diet: Which Suits a Woman Over 40?

These two come up together often, and they are less similar than they look. Both use a food-grouping system; only one of them is built around changing your thinking.

If your obstacle is evening eating after a hard day, Noom is aimed at that. If your obstacle is that you genuinely do not know what a balanced dinner looks like, the structure of the Mayo plan does more for you. Our full write-up is here: Mayo Clinic Diet review for women over 40.

Noom vs Reverse Health: Behaviour App or Menopause Programme?

This is the more useful comparison for this audience, because the two answer different questions. Reverse Health is built specifically around women in menopause; Noom is built around behaviour and used by everyone.

Choose on the question you actually have. If it is “I know what to do and I keep not doing it”, that is a behaviour problem and Noom is built for it. If it is “my body stopped responding and nobody explains why”, a menopause-framed programme will feel more relevant. Our detailed look: Reverse Health review for women over 40. There is also a direct Smoothie Diet vs Noom comparison if you are weighing a shorter, food-led option.

We are not paid by Noom and there is no affiliate link on this page — at the time of writing we have no commercial relationship with them. That is also why this review can say plainly where the app falls short.

Frequently Asked Questions

Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. If you sign up for Noom through our links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products we genuinely believe in. Results vary. This is not medical advice — always consult your doctor before starting any weight loss program.