How to connect Fitbit with Noom, troubleshooting advice

Noom is a popular subscription-based app for tracking a person’s food intake and exercise habits. But did you know that you can connect Fitbit with the app and have your steps automatically sync over? Here’s everything you need to know.

What is Noom?

Founded in 2008, New York City-based Noom wants to help you lead a healthier life. They launched an app eight years later that has since become one of the most dowloaded in the health and fitness category. The goal is to teach you to develop a healthier relationship to food.

But rather than simply telling you to eat less, the company has adopted a psychology-based weight loss course. You can complete the 10 part journey at your own pace. Each mini-course teaches you certain aspects and knowledge which will help change your habits and the way you think about food. There are over 1,000 different lessons you can tap into.

Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets

In order for these personalized insights to work, a user needs to log their meals and exercises. The app will then provide feedback in a number of different ways. This includes algorithmically, from a human coach, from other users, through articles, and through quizzes.

Connecting your Fitbit account to Noom

To make your life easier, you can connect the Fitbit on your wrist to Noom. This automatizes logging the exercise aspect of your Noom account. Not all metrics – just steps.

You’ll need to do the following:

• In the Noom app, go to Settings>Apps & Devices.
• Then choose Connect Additional Devices, find your fitness tracker on the list and tap on Connect.
• You will be asked to provide your Fitbit log in details. Enter this and select all checkboxes when asked. This is necessary in order to enable all permissions.
• Tap Allow.
• The last step is to go to Settings>Apps & Devices. Choose Steps Data Source and select Fitbit.

A few things to note. Don’t panic if your steps do not sync right away. It might take several hours for this to happen. It might even take a day for the initial sync.

To pull the data manually, in the Noom app:

• Go to Settings in the Noom app, Apps & Devices>Connect Additional Devices.
• Your Fitbit should show up in the list as Connected.
• Select Refresh. It should be next to Disconnect. A message will appear with the message that you are requesting a manual refresh.

Establishing a connection will not retroactively correct your step counts. So whatever you have entered as the steps value for previous days will stay as it is.

Troubleshooting advice

If you find that your data is not syncing or has stopped syncing, try the following:

• Close the Noom app.
• Open the Fitbit app.
• Sync your Fitbit to the smartphone app. Initialise this manually. It seems that syncing data manually typically helps to push everything through to Noom.
• Wait a couple of minutes and then re-open the Noom app.

One other thing you might want to check is that Noom isn’t trying to get your steps from the smartphone, as well. Make sure this is disconnected as it can cause a conflict.

If you are having problems establishing the initial connection, it has been reported that the font size on your smartphone has some importance. Apparently, decreasing the size of the font allows Noom to display all the options for other apps. Simply go to your phone settings, find the Font or display option and reduce the size. After you’ve established the link between Fitbit and Noom, you can change the font back to its original size.

Also, you could always try disconnecting your Fitbit account from Noom and reconnecting it. Basically starting from scratch.

The final word is from Fitbit. The company says that Noom is not an officially supported app. And that users have reported difficulties linking the two but it does seem to be working for many.

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