Having now had the experience of being told by two different health insurance companies that I am fat enough to qualify to participate in a free weight loss and diabetes prevention program, I thought I would share my experience with each in case anyone else is wondering if downloading these apps and participating in the programs are actually worth your time.
In early 2024, I was notified by my old insurance company Cigna that I qualified to join Omada Health. I received a free Omada branded scale in the mail, was matched with a health coach, and assigned a cohort to discuss weekly health lessons with, so I felt optimistic about my chances to finally lose the weight I had gained a few years earlier. The app interface looked very nice, with the ability to track food and exercise, with weight automatically being imported from their scale. I logged my food and activity every day and synced up with my health coach every week, and would have felt great about the experience except for this: I didn’t lose a single pound. This came down to the tracking method that Omada used for tracking meals: the user rates the meal by perceived size and nutrition. And that’s it. I could see that my “healthier” meals were all “large” and my “unhealthy” meals were all “small”, but what I couldn’t have told you was what the actual calorie count or quantifiable nutritional value of any of it was. As you can probably guess, a nutrition lesson that teaches that avocados and nuts include healthy fats but that doesn’t teach that they are also high in calories leaves out some pretty crucial information. I would message the health coach for advice but began to suspect he didn’t know much more about nutrition than I did after receiving quite a few canned chat responses. The group chats with my cohort had completely died after a couple of months, with me being the last holdout trying to keep the conversations alive. After nearly a year of feeling like I was doing everything right but seeing no change, it became clear that I had wasted my time in this program. But at least I got a free scale out of it… though I lost all of my past data as soon as my insurance changed and I lost access to the app since it was their own scale. I have since given that scale to my brother who uses it to weigh their cats.
At the beginning of 2025, my new health insurance BlueShield notified me that I qualify for my choice of one of several weight loss program options. I was feeling skeptical about trying another app based on my last experience, and this was around the same time I stumbled upon this subreddit and was beginning to learn some of these concepts on my own already, but I do love free things so I decided what did I have to lose? I selected the Transform app made by Personify Health, and honestly I mostly picked them because they would send me a free FitBit watch and FitBit brand scale. Personify offered many of the same things Omada did, including access to a health coach, weekly lessons, and a discussion space for everyone in the cohort. The app itself didn’t seem like anything to write home about, with a bit of a simplistic user interface that can frankly be quite buggy at times. I do like that it syncs directly with the FitBit app to note your activity levels, but wish it could connect to other apps like Lose It or MFP since FitBit’s food log is not my favorite. The first couple of weekly lessons felt a bit general, but what surprised me is that the lessons began to get more in depth within a few weeks, building off of past lessons in a way that didn’t feel overwhelming but which quickly surpassed what I had gotten out of Omada. The lesson on CICO actually did a really good job on explaining the topic in a way that was palatable to a beginner without shying away from the fact that it all comes down to basic math, a topic that the other app seemed to avoid entirely. Personify’s lesson on eating in a deficit while maintaining a social life or being pressured to eat more by family included examples that actually felt realistic, which made me think perhaps someone who had actually been in this sort of situation had been a part of the writing team. But what I really appreciated that I couldn’t have gotten from online research alone was access to a dedicated health coach who seemed to know what he was talking about. In addition to weekly chat check-ins, we have also have a call every month where we talk about how things are going, what questions I have on the lessons, and what changes I want to make. He always asks me how my ballet classes are going, remembers that I am a vegetarian, and he encouraged me to get back into weight lifting, which I have been keeping up consistently for the last couple of months. He sends our cohort supportive messages as well as quiz questions such as that you can’t spot reduce fat, something that I have seen so many people ask about on this subreddit that I’ve lost count. It has been nice to have someone to check in with regularly in addition to my doctor who is mostly focused on the big picture. It seems like it may be working for others using the app too because there are still a few members of my cohort who regularly engage in the group chat and talk about the exercise they have done that week or comment on that week’s lesson. And most importantly, I am actually seeing results this time. At now halfway through the program, I am still overweight but at least I am out of the obese category and steadily making further progress toward my goal. And this time around, I have a scale plus a watch that will still sync with an external app even once I have completed the program, so I’m pretty happy with the freebies.
So, are these insurance sponsored weight loss and diabetes prevention apps actually worth it, especially when most of the information they teach is so readily available online? Well, honestly it depends a lot on which one, but unfortunately you won’t really know what kind you are getting until you try it out. On the surface, the two I tried sounded nearly identical to each other, but in practice one tried to teach mindful eating without explaining calories which didn’t work out for me, whereas the other took the time to teach the science behind weight loss and was the one that really helped things to click for me. But if you are considering trying one out and it’s fully covered by your insurance, I would say, sure, give it a shot. For me personally, access to a dedicated health coach who won’t downvote you for asking stupid questions was a big draw (and trust me, I did have some really stupid questions I was too embarrassed to ask here…). And just having someone who is regularly checking in with you can make a big difference in staying accountable. Or if nothing else, you can always add to your collection of scales.
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