Launched last year, the company offers a 12-month program that it says can help clients lose 10 or 15 percent of their body weight. On Tuesday, Retrofit announced that it had raised $8 million in a Series A round intended to help the company scale up and build out its product. The round was led by Draper, Fisher and Jurvetson and included new investors Correlation Ventures and Hyde Park Angels, as well as previous investors New World Ventures and I2A Fund.

For a monthly fee of $259 or $349 (the price depends on how much weight you want to lose), clients get access to a team of dieticians, exercise physiologists and behavior coaches, who communicate with them via Skype.  They also use a Wi-Fi enabled scale and wireless pedometer to monitor and share their activity with their Retrofit team. By observing clients’ activity, Retrofit’s experts can recommend the behavior modifications that can lead to lasting results, the company said.

With the rise of fitness tracking devices, like the Fitbit and Nike Fuelband, even long established programs like Weight Watchers are starting to take a more data-driven approach to weight loss. But Jeff Hyman, Retrofit’s founder and CEO, said his company offers a private program, which contrasts with Weight Watchers’ emphasis on group classes. He also said Retrofit prioritizes the behavior change aspect of weight loss.

“Half of what we do is focus on what goes on between the ears,” he said.

Retrofit says it has many hundreds of clients around the country and, to date, has raised $10.7 million in venture funding.

Image by DVARG via Shutterstock. 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

That painful truth is one of the main drivers behind Noom, a maker of Android-based fitness and health apps, and one of the reasons it’s created a success with its flagship app Noom Weight Loss Coach. The New York City-based company, which received $2 million last year led by Kleiner Perkins, doesn’t require users to enter in every meal or track every physical activity. The app assumes casual, light usage and tries to still deliver timely coaching lessons and tips that can still motivate and educate users.

“Other apps are focused on data input but the process of analyzing the data is not addressed,” said co-founder and CTO Artem Petakov, a former Googler. “We’re trying to keep you on the bandwagon. It’s not about day 1, it’s about day 3, day 10.”

A look at version 3.0 of Noom Weight Loss Coach

Weight Loss Coach lets people set their weight goals and allows people to log in their food intake and activity in a simple manner. But it can dispense advice, tasks and tips based on a few entries. Each day it gives people reminders to exercise and log meals and then throws in extra optional challenges, quizzes, suggestions and stories, based on how they’re doing. If, for example, you’re eating too much junk food, Weight Loss Coach can give you a quiz on fast food. If you tell Weight Loss Coach when you plan on going shopping, it will challenge you to take the stairs or ask you afterwards how many bags you carried.

A $10 a month premium version provides a more intense level of coaching as well as the ability to customize your coach to different styles and goals. As it learns about users and notices their progress, Weight Loss Coach tailors its tasks and suggestions to keep people moving toward their weight goals. And it can even remind people to follow through on previously scheduled activities. The app also includes a workout mode that captures activity using an accelerometer and GPS so users can log in their activity as well.

To date, Noom has had 13 million downloads of its apps, mostly split between Noom Weight Loss Coach and Cardio Trainer, a Runkeeper competitor.  Version 3.0 of Weight Loss Coach, which Noom is starting to preview, will feature a more integrated list-based dashboard that combines the app’s different features into one view and will offer better on-boarding features for new users. An iPhone app is planned though there is no set date as most of the company’s resources are still focused on its Android apps.

Saeju Jeong, Noom’s CEO and co-founder, said the key is ensuring that people don’t get bored and find reasons to drop the service. He said the goal is to go after the 85 percent of people who don’t regularly exercise and keep them engaged over long periods of time. He said 70 percent of Weight Loss Coach’s users are women.

Noom co-founders Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov

The story of how Jeong and Petakov got together is interesting in itself. Petakov, who founded the user-created Maps project for Google Maps, met Jeong at a dinner party at Princeton in 2005. Jeong was in New York, working as a producer for the international production of Bye Bye Birdie. He had previously tried running his own online shopping site in his native South Korea. The two got to talking about building a health startup and eventually they founded WorkSmart Labs, which changed its name to Noom in December. The company was initially focused on bringing innovation to the gym business but they found that dealing with hardware manufacturers was slow going. Smartphones, however, provided the perfect blend of mobile sensors and computing, Jeong said.

“We realized the smartphone has all the features you need — why buy something different?” he said.

Noom is part of a new generation of mobile health products that are designed for more casual use. Massive Health has helped to improve people’s diets with its Eatery app, which lets people take pictures of their meals and get ratings on healthiness of their diet from other users. Striiv, a smart pedometer, is going after the Zynga audience with its gamified device, which includes a Farmville like mini-game. What’s cool to see is that these products don’t simply revel in data or demand a lot of input. They work to find creative and fun ways to push people to get healthy. That’s more inviting for casual users, who want some feedback and motivation but can’t always be counted on to record a lot of information. And it’s potentially more effective over the long run, said Petakov.

“Wellness is long-term activity, so cracking the code involves long-term stuff,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The quantified self: hacking the body for better health
• A near-term outlook for big data
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

Calorie Tracker – LIVESTRONG.COM ($2.99)

Last year I evaluated calorie counter apps for the iPad and decided Livestrong was simply the best. After a year of usage, I still think so. The program has an extensive database of every food imaginable. No matter how exotic or ethnic, it’s in there. No guessing how many calories your meal had: Livestrong knows.

Not only does the app track the calories eaten, but also has a database of exercises to take off the pounds. The app calculates the intake and expenditure of calories so you can accurately predict your weight loss.

The best feature for me was the seamless syncing of data across devices. iPhone, iPad, and website all synchronized so I simply had no excuse not to record what I ate. For me personally, simply recording what I ate made a huge difference.

Meal Snap (and previously the Camera app) ($2.99)

Before Meal Snap, I would take pictures of everything I ate. That made me accountable, keeping a visual record of what I’d eat throughout the day. The camera was also handy for those times where doing extensive calorie analysis was awkward or inappropriate; take a picture and figure out the calories later.

Once Meal Snap came along, my pictures had a whole new meaning. Not only did I know what I ate visually, but Meal Snap would guess the calories. Talk about being lazy. Snap a picture and you’re done. Later in the day when I would have time, I entered the data into the Livestrong app or website to record what I ate.

Some of the interpretations of the meals are funny, and reveal that actual human beings, likely with a cultural bias are viewing the pictures. I learned about some interesting Indian dishes along the way that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual pictures I snapped.

Bodymedia FIT Armband ($249 plus $6.95-$12.95 monthly)

Bodymedia is truly the future of technology that makes us healthier individuals. This is a monitor you wear 23 hours a day, taking it off only to recharge or when you come in contact with water.

The device monitors movement, heart rate and sweat to determine how many calories you’ve burned. I hate to throw buzzwords around, but this really is the “gamification” of weight loss. At the end of the day you can track how much you’ve walked, how much moderate and vigorous exercise you performed, and even how much you slept. The device communicates with your iPhone via Bluetooth, or via physical docking for recharging and advanced data computations. At the end of the day, you can see if you met your calorie burning goals.

What I really liked about this device, despite its high price, is that with the iPhone you get your calorie burning in real-time. And while many fitness machines will give you a count of “calories burned,” that doesn’t account for your personal metabolism. I was amazed at how off those can be. They also don’t account for potential cheating like leaning on the railing or skipping steps. The Bodymedia simply doesn’t let you cheat.

To embark on a quality workout, you can ask the Bodymedia to track your exercise by calories burned, not by time. So instead of saying “I’m going on the treadmill for 30 minutes” you can instead say “I’m going to burn 300 calories on the treadmill.”

The app has a rudimentary food diary, but it was severely lacking and pales in comparison to the Livestrong Calorie Tracker, but you can use the apps in concert with one another.

Each day I used the Bodymedia, I’d try somehow to break the previous day’s goal with one of the metrics: more sleep, more calories burned, more steps, etc. It was like a video game, but instead of points earned, it was calories burned. Win win!

When people ask me how I lost my weight, I can tell them I owe nearly 100 percent of it to my iPhone. It kept me completely accountable for my calorie intake and expenditure, and it can for you as well.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide
• Development strategies for the app-developer community

Calorie Tracker — LIVESTRONG.COM ($2.99)

This application is an iPad version of Livestrong.com, a website developed by Demand Media and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (remember those ubiquitous yellow wristbands?). The iOS app is universal, and syncs your food diary among all your iOS devices and on the web.

Of all the apps I reviewed, Livestrong had the most extensive database of food and exercise. I was simply amazed at the details it had on various ethnic dishes and esoteric foodstuffs. You have no excuse for not counting your calories with this app, except if you lack an internet connection. Like many other apps, Internet access is required in order to track calories.

The user interface of the app features the standard yellow and black of the Livestrong brand, and is lacking in terms of pizazz. Every food entry shows up as a generic apple and any exercise shows up with a dumbbell icon. Although the application was best of breed in recording food and exercise, it made poor use of the screen size and power of the iPad. Still, this is the app I settled on for my own weight loss program due to its stellar database of information.

MyNetDiary — Food and Exercise Diary for iPad ($9.99)

Unlike Livestrong, MyNetDiary is a complete rewrite of their companion iPhone App, “My NetDiary,” and is sold separately. The use of screen real estate is outstanding, and the user interface is reminiscent of the top screen tabs of “Numbers.” Not only can you see what you ate for the day, but on the same screen you can see the calories, fat, carbs and protein breakdown to more accurately plan your next eating choice.

The other tabs in the app include “Plan,” in which you set your goals and calculate your Body Mass Index and your Basal Metabolic rate: two key factors in determining your weight loss strategy. “Exercise” is tracked in a separate tab and leaves rooms for notes so you can track how winded or refreshed you were after the workout.

Included with the app is a great little library of weight loss topics such as “the dreaded weight Plateaus” and “vegetarian diets.” Similar to Livestrong, the MyNetDiary website database requires internet access and syncs your data among your devices. MyNetDiary is an excellent use of the iPad features and is a great choice if you’d prefer a more feature-rich app, though with a slightly smaller food information database.

Calorie Counter by FatSecret for iPad (Free)

If you want most of the features of Livestrong and MyNetDiary, but don’t want to shell out the money, then FatSecret is the app for you. Fat Secret supports syncing to a website and other iOS devices and is ad-supported. This iPad-only app is very similar to its separate FatSecret iPhone counterpart, but uses the larger iPad screen to ease navigation and display more nutritional data.

Unique to FatSecret is the ability to scan or enter the barcode of the item you are eating and receive nutrition information if you’re connected to the internet. If you want to start tracking what you eat, but also want to save a few bucks, and don’t mind ads and a more limited food and exercise database, then this app is a great value.
GoMeals HD (Free)

For people who only want to track what they eat and have no desire to sync their food diary with other devices or a website, GoMeals HD might be the app for you. Unlike the previously mentioned apps, the database is accessible offline, making this app ideal for those calorie counters who don’t always have internet access.

The application is supported by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, but doesn’t have any direct ads. When the iPad is connected to the Internet, the map function will look up restaurants nearby so you can make healthy eating choices. This is a great free app for those needing basic calorie counting.

FoodTrackerPro – Daily Eating Log ($1.99)

If calorie counting isn’t your goal, and all you want is to be aware of what you eat, this universal app keeps things simple. Just click on the picture of the food group you ate from, mark the number of servings and you’re good to go. I’m not sure “sweets” count as a food group, but they’re included in FoodTracker.

This app contains no database and no syncing — just some pictures. The app might be good for those for whom literacy is a barrier to their calorie counting, and pictorial representations serve as a simple way to provide rudimentary tracking.

iFoodDiary($2.99)

For free-form entry of calories consumed, iFood Diary is a great app. Unlike Foodtracker, this is all about words. Write down what you ate, where you ate it, and any notes you want to add. Although the app doesn’t support syncing, it does allow you to email your diary to yourself and your nutritionist.

There you have it! Of course, none of these will actually remind you to log what you eat, but they should at least provide a helping hand on the path to weight loss.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Why Apple Hasn’t Sewn Up the Tablet Market — Yet

Nick Desai, CEO of Global Fitness Media (founded by celebrity trainer Jake Steinfeld and backed by Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway) walked me through the FitOrbit site to show how it works. FitOrbit reminds me of a fitness version of Facebook, which makes it easy for social network users to navigate. Users have their own profiles where they can track their weight-loss performance, send messages to their trainer, and invite friends to their support network. Comment boxes let people write their thoughts about assigned exercises and meal plans.

FitOrbit is different from other nutrition and weight-loss applications I’ve seen on iTunes because it connects users with an actual personal trainer who tracks their progress and modifies their fitness and nutrition plan as needed. Most applications act more like a food and activity log, providing little feedback. A FitOrbit membership costs $9.99 a week. That’s a small price to grow a business on, but Desai said the cost will increase in the long-term “given the value” FitOrbit provides.

There are currently 270 different trainers to choose from on FitOrbit. Users can fill out a questionnaire that pairs them with their best trainer matches. When finding a match, users select what body part they’d like to work on most, their favorite exercise activities, what type of equipment they have, and the type of person they’d like to work with. I liked that users can evaluate trainers’ personalities — I know I’m more motivated to work out when my trainer is encouraging me rather than barking orders. Desai told me trainers can only have 20 clients at a time.

FitOrbit’s nutrition program adjusts to impulsive behavior, something many calorie counting applications don’t. If you grab a burrito for lunch, the program automatically adjusts your dinner to accommodate for it, and your trainer may add more ab exercises or cardio for you to do the next day so you don’t get off-track.

I was initially skeptical about a trainer putting together a fitness program over the web, because it’s hard to try out new exercises without someone there to guide you. But with FitOrbit, you can watch videos that demonstrate how to do each exercise assigned, so you’re less prone to doing it wrong. And since the personal trainers work with whatever equipment you have, you won’t have to join a gym.

I haven’t had the chance to try out FitOrbit myself since the web service and the application aren’t out yet. If you try it this week, please share your experience in the comments section.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The 2013 task management tools market
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration