Noom wants to be 'the Duolingo of health'

In a sea of health apps pinging you to meditate more and eat less, Noom is taking a different tack. Think streaks, badges, and bite-size wins — the kind of dopamine hits that made a green cartoon owl one of the most effective behavior-change tools on the planet.

Noom is trying to build what CEO Geoff Cook calls “the Duolingo (DUOL) of health.” And the company is doing so in an era where health doesn’t just mean kale and cardio anymore.

“Psychology has always been important to Noom,” Cook told Quartz, “but I see that increasingly coming into play in less straight-on cognitive behavioral therapy lessons and more around gamification — making it fun, easy, and rewarding to make health a habit.”

The psychology here is simple — and proven. Small, consistent rewards light up the brain’s pleasure centers, making a behavior feel satisfying.

Gamification has long been a not-so-secret sauce in consumer tech, whether it’s getting users to close their rings on an Apple (AAPL) Watch, defend their Wordle streak, or be shamed by a mascot for skipping their Spanish lessons. (Cook said his 10-year-old never skips a day on Duolingo.) The appeal is both primal and programmable: Humans like progress, hate loss, and will rearrange their lives to avoid breaking a streak.

Noom wants to harness that instinct to get you to log your lunch.

“You don’t want to necessarily treat health as a game, but I think you want to make it so that you keep coming back to the application because it doesn’t feel like work,” Cook said. “So that’s the trick, and Duolingo has, of course, famously figured it out.”

But Duolingo doesn’t prescribe weight-loss drugs. Noom does.

In mid-2023, the company launched Noom Med, a telehealth platform that connects eligible users with clinicians who can prescribe GLP-1s such as Ozempic and Wegovy (and compounded versions). The program is part of a larger shift toward an all-in-one platform that includes coaching, habit tracking, AI-powered support, and increasingly, prescriptions — an integrated approach designed to combine motivational power with medical firepower. Noom wants to get users to: “Stop dieting. Get lifelong results.”

“For us, it was always, how do you combine the medication with the lifestyle? And so we think of differentiation across three vectors, with the most important being motivation,” Cook said.

A little dopamine with your discipline

Cook, who joined Noom as CEO in early 2023 after co-founding and running The Meet Group (a portfolio of livestreaming and dating apps), took the reins as Noom was navigating a crossroads. The company had become a household name in digital wellness but was facing flattening growth and increasing competition.

Noom Med was an inflection point. It helped reverse declining growth, opened a revenue stream, and put Noom squarely in the middle of an obesity drug gold rush. Now, the company has launched its GLP-1RX program and is expanding its offerings to include other medications such as liraglutide and hormone replacement therapy, while continuing to evolve its core behavioral platform.

Noom’s approach puts it in a growing category: companies trying to pair obesity medication with lifestyle change to improve outcomes and retention. And while competitors — from Ro to Hims (HIMS) to the WeightWatchers-owned (WW) Sequence — are offering GLP-1 programs with some form of coaching or content, Noom is betting that it can turn motivation into a moat.

That’s where gamification comes in. But also social reinforcement, loss aversion, and a UI that rewards users just enough to keep logging meals and hitting goals without making them feel like they’re playing “Candy Crush: Wellness Edition.” For many users, the old-school self-discipline pitch has lost its shine. Enter an era of health, where “behavioral science” looks more like a mobile game and “willpower” gets a little pharmacological boost.

“We’re focused on microincentives,” Cook said, adding that the company has a UCLA professor on its advisory board who has “literally written a book, or at least the academic papers, on applying microincentives to health journeys.” Microincentives, Cook said, are virtual currency to drive something that is fundamentally gamified. Unlike willpower, that type of thinking — small rewards, virtual currency, and gamified nudges designed to keep users coming back — is scalable.

“We’re looking at things like streaks and loss-aversion sorts of principles,” Cook said, “but then also social pressure, like making Noom a more fundamentally social experience.”

He added that Noom was largely driven by best practices in gamification. “We think in terms of gamification to incent different habits,” he said. “But we also think in terms of social pressure — because social is another form of motivation.”

The idea is that motivation isn’t one-size-fits-all. Maybe someone does something because they want to beat their step count. Maybe they do it because their sister just logged a healthy lunch. Or maybe they do it because they want to keep up with their grandkids or travel with family.

“Social pressure is significant,” Cook said. “We’ve seen in our own data that if someone comes into Noom with a friend, they’re just dramatically more likely to hit their step goals — and then continue using Noom.”

Microincentives, macro ambitions

Noom isn’t the only company trying to gamify your body. Fitness apps have long relied on badges and challenges. Zombies, Run! turns jogging into a survival game. Charity Miles converts steps into donations. Pokémon Go got millions off the couch in pursuit of Snorlax. And Strava turned cyclists and runners into leaderboard-obsessed data junkies.

The lesson? People will move more, log more, and stick with routines longer when it feels like play — or when they can beat a stranger named Kyle in Denver on a Tuesday morning sprint segment. Noom’s twist is layering that same game logic onto not just exercise, but eating habits, medication adherence, and long-term behavior change. It’s less “gotta catch ’em all” and more “gotta log it all.”

But as GLP-1s shift from abuzzy biotech trend to mainstream medicine, the stakes have changed. These drugs can help people lose weight quickly, but they don’t teach you how to eat, move, or live differently. And that leaves a gap — a gap that Noom hopes to fill with an experience designed to be sticky, supportive, and scientifically engineered to feel less like homework and more like a game.

“Noom has some ways to go on this front, but we have some pretty big releases planned this year that are very much aligned with that,” Cook said. “By September, you’ll see a very different front door when you come into Noom. ... That’s been the main focus this year.”

Which raises the question: Can you gamify something as deeply emotional, messy, and personal as health? If Cook’s right, Noom users won’t just be earning badges for behavior change. They’ll be getting healthier — on purpose, with purpose, and maybe with a little pharmacological help.

Just don’t break the streak.