Nourya — a guide for getting started

A coach, not a calorie counter

Nourya starts with what you want to change, helps you turn that into a goal, and then helps you get there one small step at a time — you try one change, you find out whether it worked, and then you decide what to do next. You will write meals down, plan them and see your numbers, but those are there to serve the goal rather than being the point of it.

It runs in a web browser, on an iPhone or iPad, and on an Android phone. You use the same account and see the same conversation wherever you open it.

When you first sign in there are a few short questions — anything you are taking, whether you want to join the research study, and when you would like your weekly summary. You can skip them and answer later, in the chat or in Settings.

Nourya is a coach. It is not a doctor and not a dietitian. It will not diagnose you, prescribe anything, or give you advice about your medication. Anything to do with your medicines, your insulin or your doses is between you and your own doctor.

Built for life after a GLP-1

Nourya is built for people coming off medication such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro or Zepbound — the months when your appetite comes back and, for many people, so does the weight.

Tell your coach which of these you take, or the date you stopped, and it will keep coaching you as someone who is coming off one, for a full year after your last dose.

It is worth telling it even if it feels obvious. Most people on this medication describe their goal simply as losing weight, and if the medicine is not on your list, losing weight is all your coach knows about you.

Two things are different during that year:

• Your food advice changes. Your coach puts protein first, aims for enough of it to help you keep the muscle you have, and suggests meals that are easier to finish and easier on your stomach.
• Your daily calorie target changes more slowly. While the medication is holding your appetite down, the usual way of working out how much you burn is unreliable, and weight can come back quickly once you stop. So your coach waits longer before it trusts what it is seeing, and moves your target in smaller steps.

Separately: if the goal you choose is about keeping your results after coming off the medication, your coach will contact you more often than it otherwise would. That comes from the goal you set, not from the medication itself.

Your coach advises you on what you eat, how you move, how you sleep and what you drink. It never advises you about the medication. That stays with your doctor.

Your own food, instead of a replacement for it

Nourya knows eighteen cuisines, across South Asia, East and South-East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, the Mediterranean and America.

If you cook something that is not on that list, type the name of it in the chat. Your coach saves it to your profile and uses it when it plans your meals.

What matters is what your coach does with those dishes. It changes what goes into a dish you already cook, and tells you how to keep the taste:

• Half brown rice and half basmati, so it still tastes like the rice you know.
• Spices fried in oil instead of ghee, so the smell and the flavour do not change.
• Pork loin in the adobo instead of pork belly, so the sauce is exactly the same and only the cut of meat is leaner.
• A samosa baked in filo pastry instead of deep-fried.

Bigger changes are broken into steps. Your coach starts from what you cook today, suggests one change, and only suggests the next one once the first has become normal for you.

Each piece of advice comes with a short reason: what the change does for your body. It is exact about the foods it means: “vegetables that aren’t starchy, like greens or peppers”, not just “vegetables”. Ask why and your coach tells you more.

This is also how you get advice for the months after a GLP-1: protein at every meal, plenty of vegetables that aren’t starchy, and smaller, more frequent meals, all as changes to the food you already cook.

Your journey

Your journey is the goal you are working on and the steps you take to reach it. Everything else in this guide exists to support it.

Agreeing on a goal that is yours

Nourya will not hand you a target weight on your first day and tell you to aim at it. A goal that somebody else picked for you rarely survives a bad week, so you and your coach agree on one by talking it through, and a short form is how it gets written down once you have agreed.

Your coach listens first. When it thinks it understands what you want, it says it back to you and asks whether it has got it right, and you correct it if it has not. Then you work out together how you might get there. Once you agree, the goal is written down: what you want in your own words, what you will measure, the number you are starting from, the number you want to reach, and by when.

Your coach will also ask how ready you feel, on a scale of nought to ten. There is no wrong answer, and a low answer is genuinely useful: it tells your coach to slow down, spend more time on your reasons, and stop pushing you towards a plan you are not ready for.

You work on one goal at a time. That is deliberate. Working on three at once usually means none of them gets enough attention.

Trying one change at a time

Progress comes from trying small changes, not from rebuilding your life. When you decide to change something, your coach turns it into an experiment: one thing to do, for somewhere between three days and two weeks, and one thing to keep an eye on so you can tell whether it helped.

Your coach asks whether you want to try it, and you can say no.

Only one experiment runs at a time. That is what makes the answer clear: if you change three things at once and the week goes better, you cannot tell which change did it. So if you think of a second idea partway through, your coach writes it down and tells you the date the current experiment finishes, so you can start the new one then.

On that date, your coach tells you what happened to the thing you were watching. You decide whether to keep the change. If an experiment you agree to would end after your goal’s date, the goal moves to the day the experiment ends, and your coach tells you so.

When your goal is due

When you reach your target, or its date arrives, your coach tells you where you stand and asks what you want: more time, a different target, or to finish it. Finishing a goal does not end the conversation. Your coach asks how it went and what you want now: to keep up what you built, to work on something new, or a break. A next goal is set only when you choose one.

Suggestions you can accept or refuse

Sometimes your coach will have an idea of its own: a change to your plan, a change to what you are aiming for, or something it has noticed about your week. Every suggestion comes with the reason behind it, and you have three answers. You can accept it, change it into something you would actually do, or turn it down.

Nothing happens until you answer. If you ignore a suggestion it disappears after two weeks, and your coach does not keep asking.

When something gets in your way

Plans stop fitting real life. Your hours change, the school holidays start, you are travelling, money is short, your back hurts. Nourya treats this as normal, not as you giving up.

Before it changes anything, your coach asks what has actually become difficult, and listens for what kind of problem it is: your time, your energy, the people around you, where you are, your health, or how you are feeling. Where it can, it suggests changing your surroundings rather than asking you to try harder — moving something, buying something, or taking the tempting food out of the house.

If you feel torn about something, your coach repeats both sides back to you and asks about the conflict itself, rather than telling you which side should win. And if you tell it you are having a hard time, that becomes the subject. It answers what you actually said instead of steering you back to your food.

A coach that works while you are away

Every night your coach reads your last few days and decides whether there is anything worth telling you: something that went well, a question about something that has slipped, or an idea worth trying. It sends this to you the next morning, at a time you choose, or waits until you next open the app.

Often there is nothing to say, and it says nothing. It still records that it looked, so you can see it was paying attention instead of having to wonder. You decide how often it is allowed to contact you, and you can tell it to stop. These nightly checks are part of the Coach plan.

Finishing a goal and starting the next one

Goals end in different ways. You reach one. You lose interest in one. Your life changes and one stops making sense. One turns into something for your doctor instead. Whichever happens, you tell your coach how it ended, and the record stays in your account. What you tried and what came of it is still there when you start your next goal, so you begin with what you have learned instead of from nothing. You can also pause a goal and pick it up later.

You can reword a goal while you are working on it, as often as you like, and it costs you nothing: as you get clearer about what you want, just say it differently. Two things cannot change — what you are measuring, and the number you started from — because every figure your coach shows you is worked out from them. So if what you want to measure genuinely changes, that is a new goal rather than an edit. You finish this one and start the next.

Habits that outlast the goal

Some goals are about a number on a scale. Others are about something you do, such as cooking at home two more evenings a week or eating more protein. For those, your coach asks what you already manage now, so your progress is measured from where you actually are rather than from zero. Progress on something you do each day or week counts the days or weeks since you started that reached your aim. The app shows your progress once you have done something toward the goal; a figure still at nothing, or one that has slipped, is not put on your screen on its own, and your coach talks it through with you instead.

The changes it suggests come from published research on changing habits. It will suggest things like planning ahead for the moment in the day you know is hardest, putting a reminder where you will actually see it, serving out your portion before you get hungry, and keeping the food you find hard to resist out of the house.

The everyday things that support it

Writing down what you eat

There are three ways to write down a meal, and you can mix them. Describe it in ordinary words, take a photo of it, or scan the barcode on the packet. A photo is the fastest, but it is an estimate, so the calorie figure comes with a range around it, and the first time you use a photo your coach shows you how sure it is about each ingredient so you can correct anything that looks wrong.

Nothing is fixed once you have saved it. You can change an ingredient or a portion size, delete a meal, copy a meal you eat often to another day, or look back over any period. You can also just ask — “how much protein did I get last week?” works.

Meal plans

Tell your coach once about the food you like and the food you cannot eat: your cuisines, your allergies and intolerances, the diet you follow, and any health condition you are managing. Every plan it writes will respect all of it. Allergies are handled strictly, including the less obvious foods an allergen can be hidden in.

Ask for a plan covering however many days you want, and you get the dishes, the ingredients and how to cook them. From there you can get a shopping list, swap out a dish you do not fancy, adjust one, ask for more variety, or ask for a plan that balances out a day when you ate more than usual.

Your daily numbers

From your height, weight, age and how active you are, Nourya works out how many calories to aim for each day, and how those should be split between carbohydrate, protein and fat. Over the following weeks it watches how your body responds to what you actually eat, and adjusts the target to suit you rather than a textbook. It moves in small steps.

Your daily target, whether it is worked out from your height, weight, age and activity or adjusted from your weigh-ins, is never set below 1,200 calories for a woman

or 1,500 calories for a man, or for anyone who has not told us their sex.

These are the lowest daily intakes advised without a health professional’s supervision, and they stay the same at any age. The gap between what you burn and what you are asked to eat is at most a quarter of what you burn,

at most 11 calories for each kilogram you weigh,

and never more than 1,000 calories a day.

From the age of 65

that gap is at most 500 calories a day, whatever your weight,

and your coach tells you to keep your protein up, stay active and involve your doctor. If the lowest safe intake leaves you no real gap to lose fat from, your coach says so: the number is shown as a level to maintain your weight, not as a fat-loss target.

Those adjustments are based on your weight, so when your goal is measured by what you weigh, your coach needs a new reading from you from time to time.

A goal only moves if something keeps happening, and nothing else in the app will ask you for it. So once you have agreed a goal, your coach works out with you what you want to be prompted about and when, then sets it as an ordinary reminder. You settle that in conversation, the same way you settled the goal, so it can be whatever suits you: only on Mondays, twice a day, at sunrise, stopping on a date. It then sits in your reminder list with everything else, to change or delete whenever you like.

When a reminder asks you for a number, you can just tell your coach in the chat. Say it in whatever unit you think in — a glass and a half of water, not 375 milliliters — and that is the unit you will be answered in.

Keeping track of something

Tell your coach what you would like kept track of and it starts counting: water, how you slept out of five, minutes walked, whether you took something today. There is no list to pick from. You say what it is and what it is counted in, in your own words, and that word is the one you read back.

Each thing you track appears under Tracking, with where it stands, how long ago you last gave a reading, and roughly which way it is going. From there you can record a reading — for today, or for an earlier day you missed — and see every reading you have given, newest first, ten at a time.

You can add a reminder to record it — your coach asks when — or remove the one you have.

You can also ask your coach for a break from something you track. A break keeps everything you have recorded and switches off its reminder until you pick it back up; the day and time you had settled are still there when you do.

For something you count, readings of the same day add up: a glass of water now and two later make three. For something you measure, such as your weight or your waist, the day’s latest reading is where you stand. For a score out of five, the day reads as the middle of what you gave. If you correct yourself — “actually, only two today” — your correction replaces what you gave for that day.

You can ask your coach about your readings whenever you like: how much water you drank last week, or on how many days you went over or under your target.

What your coach notices

Looking at the last few weeks of what you have written down, your coach watches for a few common habits: days that go over your target, dinners getting later and later, drinking alcohol on the days you write your food down, or one very large meal making up most of the day. It only mentions one when it is genuinely working against your goal and is big enough to matter. You will not be handed a list of everything that was imperfect about your week.

Your written summary

As often as you choose, Nourya writes you a short summary: something that went well, one thing to work on, where your numbers stand, anything it noticed, and what it decided on the nights it checked on you. You pick the day and the time, and whether it arrives in the app, as a notification, by email, or all three. Old summaries stay readable, and you can turn them off. If your goal is to mend a difficult relationship with food, the summary leaves out how close you came to your targets, and your coach does not bring it up.

Using the app day to day

You can type to your coach or talk to it, and it can read its answers out loud. When it needs something specific from you, a small form or a set of buttons appears inside the conversation, so you do not have to go looking through menus.

If you switch to another app for a moment, the conversation carries on where it stopped when you come back, and your coach does not ask again for anything you already answered. Come back after a few hours and your coach reminds you in a sentence what you were talking about and offers to carry on or talk about something else. Come back the next day and it greets you and mentions what you talked about last time. A form you left half-filled, such as a goal, a meal or a meal plan, is still there waiting for you, whenever you come back. A quick question with a few buttons is put away instead; answer it in the chat.

The home screen shows how you are doing and gives you a way straight back into the things you use most: your goal, your food diary, meal plans and nutrition advice. Your Journey is the one to know. It opens beside the chat and shows where you stand today, anything waiting for your answer, and the story of this goal so far. Tracking appears beside the chat once your coach starts counting something for you, and holds everything you are counting. You can set your own reminders by asking for them in the chat, and you can ask for the meal prep course, which keeps track of which lessons you have finished. Notifications arrive on your phone, and anything you have not read is kept in the app.

Your account and your plan

Settings holds your measurements, your activity level, your food preferences, your medications, your summary schedule, how often your coach may contact you between conversations, and preferences such as units and appearance. You can also delete your personal data or close your account. Deleting your personal data removes everything you have saved, your conversation with the coach included. What stays is your account, your app settings — how the app looks and sounds, the units you read in, your summary schedule, how often your coach may contact you — and any support ticket you opened, which keeps the email address you gave for it. Both ask you to confirm first, and neither can be undone.

There are two plans, Essential and Coach, and you can pay monthly or yearly.

Every new account starts with a free 30-day trial of Coach, and moves to Essential when the trial ends.

Coach adds the nightly checks and the suggestions your coach makes on its own. You can change plan, change how you pay, or cancel at any time in the app.

To get help, choose “Get help” from the information menu. You can follow anything you report, add to it, close it or reopen it.

If anything you write suggests you are in real distress, your coach stops coaching and shows you where to get proper help straight away. That matters more than any goal.