Mental Health Is Now a Marketing Tool for Weight Loss
· The Atlantic
Noom, the popular weight-loss app, prompts its users not only to log their meals and exercise but also to gaze at paintings. The “Mindful Art Break” feature includes images of such works as Claude Monet’s Woman With a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son and Franz Marc’s The Bewitched Mill, neither of which seems to have anything to do with body fat. Breath work, meditation, and lessons in cognitive-behavioral-therapy techniques are also available on the app. One user, in a testimonial the company sent me, said that Mindful Art Break helped them “contemplate something other than weight loss.”
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Why, then, would a weight-loss company offer such a program? Noom launched a stand-alone emotional-health program called Noom Mood in 2023, the same year it added GLP-1s to its offerings. Then, last year, the company integrated core Mood tools into the flagship app “after seeing major overlap with weight, stress, and self-care needs,” Emily Passer, Noom’s head of communications, told me. Other weight-loss services—especially newer ones that offer GLP-1 medications—are getting into mental health too.
Mental health and weight are, of course, intimately linked. As someone who lost almost 70 pounds by strength training and getting treatment for an eating disorder more than a decade ago, I can certainly attest to the importance of mental-health support during any sort of body change. But Noom and other weight-related companies are leaning into a common strategy to entice customers: To be palatable (and successful), a weight-loss company must now profess care for its customers’ psychological health, not just for their waistline.
Wondr Health, a weight-loss platform that partners with employers, offers information about managing stress and anxiety and says that its program begins with “behavior change.” Weight Watchers, which filed for bankruptcy last year, announced in December its “fully integrated platform for the GLP-1 era,” including features related to behavioral health and community support. Kim Boyd, the company’s chief medical officer, told me that weight loss and mental health shouldn’t be treated as separate pursuits. “It’s all happening in one person, and those things are really, really connected,” she said.
“Mental well-being is a huge trend right now, and I could see how it would be good business to capitalize on it,” A. Janet Tomiyama, the director of UCLA’s Diet, Stigma, and Health Lab, told me. Other industries have done just that in recent years—see Ulta Beauty’s “feel-good” wellness initiatives and Bumble’s “interest badges” for therapy and mindfulness. The messaging is playing to widespread sentiments. In a May 2025 survey, YouGov asked U.S. adults to rank how essential various states of being or behaviors are to overall physical health; 79 percent of respondents said that “having good mental health” is essential. When the National Academy of Sports Medicine asked personal trainers in April what their goals were for their average client, mental clarity and stress relief came in just under weight loss and well ahead of athletic performance.
And yet, mental-health support from a weight-loss company might feel incongruous, in no small part because the tools of weight loss and the drive to lose weight have historically not improved people’s mood. Tomiyama said that in a 2010 study she co-authored, the stress hormone cortisol spiked when women were randomly assigned to start a diet. Plus, Tomiyama said, because many people who diet gain the weight back, they end up feeling as if they’ve failed. “We have scientific, causal evidence that diets ruin people’s mental health,” she said. “So I’m not surprised that these companies are noticing that through their customer base and realizing they have to do something about it.”
Now more than ever, though, dramatic weight loss doesn’t have to involve dieting at all. Instead of cutting calories and fighting against related hunger, people can take a GLP-1 and feel fuller from less food. One small, non-placebo-controlled study on how a GLP-1 called liraglutide affected mood and behavior suggested that the drugs significantly improved depression symptoms. The research is complicated, though: Other studies have found no significant effect on mood, and still others suggest that, at high doses, GLP-1s are linked to depressed mood, possibly because of their dopamine-dampening effects. Anecdotally, some GLP-1 users experience anhedonia. But others feel more optimistic, perhaps because, unlike dieting, the drugs can turn down the dial on so-called food noise.
The social effects of GLP-1s are also less than straightforward. On the one hand, people who are overweight or have obesity face a lot of stigma and can be treated poorly, which is famously not ideal for your mental health. So perhaps GLP-1s can improve mood simply by being an effective way to lose weight. On the other hand, Tomiyama conducted another study that found that people who lose weight through GLP-1s are socially stigmatized even more than people who have never tried to lose weight in the first place, perhaps because of perceptions that GLP-1 users opted for the “easy way out.” People who go off GLP-1s and gain weight back are stigmatized too. Boyd, from Weight Watchers, said that the mental-health-related struggle she observes most from the company’s clients is shame around GLP-1 use being seen as a cheat code. She knows of one woman who was storing her neighbor’s GLP-1 medications in her fridge because the neighbor didn’t want her husband to know she was on them.
It’s no wonder, then, that people who take these drugs might want some extra help for their mental health. In a 2024 survey of 300 GLP-1 users, 75 percent reported that they were interested in behavioral-health support, and 63 percent believed that they would achieve better health outcomes while taking GLP-1s if they also received such support. They might be right. Spencer Nadolsky, an obesity specialist who founded an online medical-weight-management platform that offers both GLP-1s and behavioral and emotional support, told me that psychological support “doesn’t necessarily lead to a lot more weight loss in general, but it improves outcomes in other realms of the weight-loss journey,” including patients’ feelings about the process and their general quality of life.
The cynical view—one I’ve taken myself—is that any gesture toward mental health by an entity selling weight loss (or anything else) is an empty marketing-and-sales tactic. How effective these interventions are at actually supporting customers’ mental health, and whether companies will continue offering them if mental-health support exits the zeitgeist, remains to be seen. But in my experience, weight loss on its own also isn’t enough to meaningfully improve mental health. When I got treatment for my binge-eating disorder, the pounds were coming off because I was eating less and because I was exercising in a way I liked. My mindset and lifestyle seemed to be changing for good because I was talking through the anxiety and depression that drove my bingeing in the first place.
I think back to the times I sat in early-2000s Weight Watchers meetings with my mom, where conversations revolved around the scale—or when a doctor told preteen me to “eat healthier” to lose weight without asking what I even knew or thought about healthy eating, or how difficult it was for me because I had a disorder. It would have been nice to have someone even pretend to care about my feelings. Hopefully, this new concern on the part of the companies will last.