Weight Loss For Millennials: Marketing Ploy or Something To It?
By: Justin Coleman
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Why is weight loss for a millennial any different than weight loss for anyone else?
Are we not just like everyone else who sees that we can make improvement in our health and wants to make a positive change in our lives?
Is there something different about us that makes one method of weight loss better than the other?
The simple fact is that being a millennial just means that you are a part of Generation Y and were born between the years of 1982 and 2000.
Another fact is that “Millennial” is a popular buzzword that advertisers like to use to get businesses to pay them advertising dollars. Despite the local radio ad that advertises “Advertise with us and your business can reach children, adults, and millennials!” we are adults, and we are people. Why should weight loss make us different than older or younger adults?
One company you may see advertising weight loss for millennials is Noom.
Noom has boomed in popularity the last several years, and enough of their users are in our millennial group that they feel the need to advertise directly to us.
So why is Noom the “New Millennial Diet” as they say in their ads, and is this claim justified?
I think it is justified, and based on 6 traits that are common amongst our generation, here is why I think their marketing is dead on.
Why Is Noom the “New Millennial Diet”?
According to The Balance Careers article The Common Characteristics of Millennial Professionals, we millennials have the following characteristics: We are tech-savvy, family-centric, achievement-oriented, team-oriented, crave attention, and are job-hoppers.
While this article seems to be shedding some negative light on some of these these characteristics, I see every single one of them as positive, and can see why Noom is justified in their marketing claim.
Let’s break down each of these characteristics to see why these traits make Noom the best weight loss plan for our generation.
Being Tech-Savvy
Having grown up around the new wave of technology, Millennials tend to be more apt to use technological solutions to solve problems, and Noom is a technological solution to weight loss.
For the same reason you use All Recipes for your cooking instead of a cookbook, Noom provides a platform that delivers weight loss education, psychology tricks to change habits, and a way to track your weight and calorie intake no matter where you go.
Noom is an app-only weight loss solution.
If you want to get onto a desktop website and read your articles or add your daily weigh in, you are out of luck. The desktop site is minimal at best, and offers none of the features that the app does. All you can do on the desktop site is change your account information.
Having your weight loss solution with you wherever you go makes you hold yourself more accountable. No excuses.
Your app will also track your steps for the day by the movement of your phone in your pocket, although smartwatches tend to be a lot more accurate and can be synced with the app.
As millennials, we are more likely to embrace this dependence on the technological aspect of Noom, since such technology is already a part of our daily lives.
Being Family-Centric
As millennials, we are more prone to want more of a work-life balance, and may even take lesser paying jobs if it means more time with our families.
This focus on family is one of the things that I love most about our generation.
It’s really not all about slaving away at a job.
It’s about finding a work-life balance that works for you and your family while helping to support them. This is true when it comes to wait loss as well.
Hitting the gym is great, but it does take a lot of time away from being with your family, or takes time away from sleep so you are more grumpy when you are around your family.
When you want to place family first, it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice working out or being healthy, and Noom helps educate you in this regard.
Through Noom you learn to love movement in general.
One of my favorite things about the program was that it lead me to want to walk around the neighborhood more with my family, walk to the park, and walk around my daughter’s track at school.
The kids loved all of these activities and would constantly ask us to go to the track or the park. That meant more steps for us! A win-win on the health and family fronts!
Being Achievement-Oriented
If being achievement-oriented and wanting to hit your goals is life is wrong, we damn sure don’t want to be right.
Millennials are a driven group of people who are often life-long learners, and as such Noom is the perfect weight loss program in this regard.
Every day you get a set of articles to read with Noom. You read the article or take the quiz and that task is checked off your daily list.
These quick little bites of information and psychology tips help make weight loss manageable while giving you powerful information every single day, and a task list to check off.
The biggest achievement you want to meet are your health goals. The best way to meet your health goals are small steps and progress in the right direction every single day.
With these daily articles and tasks your daily list of small steps in the right direction are set out for you, and you can work your new knowledge into your daily life.
Step by step you will make your way towards your goal and eventually meet your goal if you stay true to yourself and strive to accomplish what you set out to achieve.
Being Team-Oriented
If there’s one thing that Noom gives you that a lot of other weight loss programs don’t, it’s a team to help push you through your journey.
Millennials know that we need to work as a team to accomplish big goals, and weight loss is one of the biggest goals you may have to overcome in your lifetime.
Within a day of starting the program, you get to meet your personal coach who helps talk you through your journey and make sure you’re staying on track with your personal goals.
If this wasn’t enough, if you make it past the 2 week trial you get to meet your group and group coach in week 3.
This is teamwork at its best.
Within the group you are put together with people at the same level of their Noom journey so you all can support each other, provide advice, and really connect on a genuine and human level.
Meeting other people in the program, experiencing wins, pushing through doubts, and sharing your experience and advice is a big part of what makes the Noom program such a success, and why it is spreading quickly across the nation, especially among millenials.
To sound totally corny, teamwork makes the dreamwork.
As millennials we know this to be true!
Craving Attention
A lot of other generations see millennials as needy and wanting to be pandered to.
I think it more of as we want better feedback than previous generations got so we can better ourselves.
We don’t want to wait around for our yearly job review to see if we are doing a good job, only to find out that our boss hasn’t liked the way we’ve been writing our reports for the last 7 months and wants to demote us.
We seek more immediate feedback, because we are always seeking to better ourselves in the shortest amount of time.
Daily if we can.
The shorter the feedback loop, the faster the improvement, and we all seek to be our best selves, so fast feedback is key.
With Noom you will be weighing yourself daily. Your weight graph will also tell you when your projected goal date is for when you will hit your goal weight.
This is a constant feedback loop that tells you if you are on the right track, and a moving target that is recalculated every day that you weigh in.
You will see upswings and plateaus in your weight loss, but as long as the general trend is weight loss, you know you are on the right track to meet your goals.
You will be counting your steps everyday with the program as well. You will start at 3000 and work your way up.
If you hit your goal, 300 more steps are added to your goal for the next day. If you miss your goal, 300 are taken away.
The goal is to hit around 10,000 steps per day eventually, but the daily feedback of hitting or missing your goal will make you strive harder to hit the goal and get the increase in steps.
You will also be given quizzes to help test your knowledge of the subject matter you are learning. Another form of immediate feedback to help you push yourself to be the best you can be.
Noom provides constant feedback.
It’s not pandering, it’s progress.
Being Job Hoppers
Millennials know how to change our circumstances to give ourselves the best opportunity for success.
We won’t stay at the same job for 40 years like our parents did to show loyalty if we know our path to promotion is blocked by internal circumstances.
No, we seek out the best opportunity that will help us better ourselves and our life situation, whether that means more money, more free-time, or a healthier work or living environment.
Noom has a $1, 2 week trial.
If you don’t start seeing results in that time, you can easily move on.
No one would blame you.
You have to do what works for you and your situation.
After the 2 week trial, there are only 14 more weeks of core content, 4 weeks of supplementary content, and then the app acts as simply a tracker with the occasional task to complete.
16 weeks and you can be done.
Take what you learn from the program and apply it to your life.
Keep the app if you want to keep tracking your progress and pay the monthly fee, but you can also move on to other endeavours to take your health to that next level.
Noom is for weight loss, so if you are looking to strength train after losing weight, you may switch to that program that will help you reach that next level. I know that I’m in the strength training mode right now while still trying to cut some fat, so I still use Noom to calorie count and relearn about weight loss.
Don’t stay stuck where you are because it’s familiar.
Move to the next place you need to be to improve.
Growth mindset.
Always.
Want to Try Noom For Yourself?
Millenials get a bad rap for bucking trends of the past. You often hear about our generation ruining entire industries because of our ways.
I say that’s fine with me, since we know what’s good for us and have a growth mindset and desire to improve ourselves and our life situation.
Because of this, I believe that Noom does live up to it’s marketing of being “The New Millennial Diet”.
If you agree and want to work on shedding some weight while learning about the mechanics behind weight loss so your changes stick, then starting with Noom’s 2 week trial may be just the thing for you.
You have to pay $1 minimum for the 2 week trial, but can pay up to $18.37 if you want to help them cover the cost of acquiring new customers.
If you want to check out how my wife and I lost 45lbs together on the Noom program, you can download our Noom Journey.
We’d love to connect with fellow Noomers so be sure to Join Our Facebook Group for added support and to chat about your experiences with Noom.
Bottom line: Don’t change who you are because people are hating on Millenials.
Own your life and make the change you need to have the life you envision for yourself!
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