Get Healthier with a tracking app | Noom and Cronometer Review

Chronomenter – http://bit.ly/2VyjnoB

Noom – http://noom.pxf.io/JZDJ7

Video Transcript:

If you are like me, you get so good in your health, then you get in a pattern, and then it slowly deteriorates. Before you know it you’ve gained 10 pounds, your diet is just all over the place, and it’s time to start over. That is my goal for this year and I’m trying to get back on track. I am a workaholic so I tend to push away some of my health goals in order to do some of my geeky stuff. So I have chosen two apps to try out: Noom and Chronometer. I’ve been using those to help me keep track of the food I’m eating, exercise, calorie intake, and all of that good stuff for the past 2 weeks.

Noom Review

I found this app because probably like you, I have been inundated with ads from them. They were pretty much on my Facebook feed all day, all the time. I wasn’t sure if it was like a tracker app or if it was a food eating system or what it actually was. So I signed up for their two-week free trial and it is, it’s more of an app to kind of guide you through things. This app had a lot of reading in the beginning, and it did have a lot of setup, which is good because it actually is asking you questions of what level you’re at, what do you want to achieve, what are your goals, what’s your why, etc. It asks stuff that you should know that we never actually sit down and figure out. You get a coach in the program. Although, I felt like the coach was a little robotic. I’m not sure if it was an actual person or if it was just a bot with saying all that stuff. I have not gone past the two week trial yet. Once you get to the paid part, I’m wondering if that will change a little bit. I’m gonna try that a little bit later on. There is also group coaching too, which is nice. You get into a group with a bunch of other individuals that are trying to lose weight or achieve some sort of health goal. It is always great to be able to interact with people like that. They do have some recipes that you can follow. I found a lot of them I couldn’t do because of my food allergies, but a normal person probably could use them. The app does promote you to make sure that you track it. It gives you little notifications and it’ll actually text you. Your coach will text you and say, “Hey, you haven’t logged in the app lately. “You need to do that, log your food.” It is kind of nice to have that extra little push to get you motivated. It also has a psychological aspect to the app; it really gets you to figure out your why and why you’re probably failing in your diet. I knew my why and I knew why I was failing. I am not quite sure how well the app is gonna work for me because I feel like I am a little bit different than the typical person. However, we’ll see how it goes. The only thing I didn’t like about the app so far is that it asks you to weigh in every day. For me, that number is just a number. I’m more into health goals. I really don’t care to see what the actual number I weigh is, so that I thought was a little off-putting. It was also a little off-putting that a lot of my foods were not in the app. I have a specialized diet so I buy a lot of my food at health food stores and they’re not your typical shopping item. That is probably why that they’re not in there. I dared to get the option to put them in manually myself, which is good, but again, kind of a pain in the butt and I found myself not doing it because the foods weren’t in there. That’s a little bit of a downfall. The other downfall is that I didn’t like that it’s only an app. You only can use it in your phone and I am not a phone person. I cannot stand looking at that little screen all the time. I’m more of a desktop or a laptop person. It was a little off-putting to me that I couldn’t access the app via the desktop. Those are a little bit of the downfalls. The pricing on that app was $59 a month, but if you want a food plan, it was extra. There is also a free version so if you go beyond the two weeks you can. It’s very easy to cancel which I like because there are some products where you get into a subscription and you have to go through a ton of hoops to get out of that one subscription. It was nice that you just say, I want to quit. It goes, “okay, here’s the link, you’re done.” You can also still use the app in the free version where you don’t get the coach. It just basically becomes a food tracker app really. I will be continuing on the paid version and I will see what gets extra because I didn’t get into the groups yet. I wanna see what the groups look like and how it shifts from the trial to the paid version. I’ll do an update later on and there’s a link below if you wanna try it! I think it’s great for somebody who’s just starting out who doesn’t know a lot about nutrition that really needs that extra help. I think it’s a great app for that. It is a little bit pricey, but it’s not terribly expensive. If you do like their extended plans, it becomes a little bit cheaper. For four months, it is 129, so then it’s 30 some dollars a month, which is not too bad, especially if it gets you to your health goal. I think that’s amazing because we all need to be getting to the health goal so that we can live better lives and live longer.

Cronometer Review

I found Cronometer from one of my online friends mentioning it in a group I was in and I was like, huh, okay. I thought this app was awesome. There is no coaching to it. It’s just basically a food tracker app. This one is probably better for someone who understands nutrition and how to have a balanced diet. I know it, I just haven’t been doing it. This was a nice app for me because it kept track of everything. And that was something I knew I needed to start doing again. If you’re like me, you can get into patterns and you just don’t pay attention. I got into a really bad pattern and through this app I figured out how many vitamins I was missing, how many minerals I was missing, and I think that was very valuable to me. That’s the one thing I really, really love about this app, it keeps track of your intake of minerals and your vitamins. It also gives you nice charts to show you how you’re progressing. I love that about this app because at the end of the day I went, oh, I need more vitamin B. Oh, I way low on calcium today. I would go to my cabinet, to all my supplements, and just take whatever I needed to boost for that day. I liked that it tracked my supplements because that’s the one thing that Noom didn’t do. It is really nice because I take almost all young living supplements and 90% of them were already in the app. Cronometer had a lot more of my “funny food” in their app too. So far, there’s only one item in Cronometer that I had to actually enter in myself. It also has a section where you can put in a recipe; you put in everything that’s in the recipe and it’ll calculate all of the calories, intake, and vitamins. I’ve been loving the Cronometer app so far.

Therefore, I wished that the Noom app would intermix with other apps; it does with the Apple Health App. However, I’m noticing these messages saying, “we track this activity but it’s not new.” I don’t know exactly what that means so I’ll have to sit down and figure out what that means. It would be really nice if Noom could mix with some other apps more. Noom is fairly new, so it’ll be interesting to see if they actually develop a lot of that stuff later on. I am really liking Cronometer a little bit better. But I know what my health goals should be and I know what targets I want to hit. I think that is why Cronometer is better for me. If you’re just starting out, I think Noom would be better for you because of the coaching help. The coaching didn’t personally help me. If a group of people are telling me to do something, I’m like, “yeah, I’m not gonna do it unless I wanna do it.” It all depends on your personality. I wish I could have merged the two apps together because they both have great qualities. Go ahead and comment below! Are you guys using these apps? How is it working for you? Also let me know if you want to have a review later on with more in-depth reviews of Noom or Cronometer in the next couple of months. I will show you how it’s going along and more of the pros and cons of long-term use. You’ll find out if I meet the weight goal that I’m trying to do by the end of June. I am lacking in exercise, so that is definitely not helping. I put links below on both of the apps below if you wanna try them!

Chronomenter – http://bit.ly/2VyjnoB

Noom – http://noom.pxf.io/JZDJ7