Have you ever experienced so much food noise, you literally had to scream? Or wanted to crawl out of your skin?
Whenever Paul (someone you will meet in my book) had cookies and chips in his house, he described CONSTANT food thoughts–that he referred to as food noise–in his head so loud he HAD to eat them. He could never keep them in the house ever again. Paul begged his partner to not bring them home anymore because they were distracting him from getting work done. From sleeping. From feeling like a normal human being. The food noise, he said, was intolerable.
Diets helped Paul….sometimes. Food rules gave him a calm feeling and quieted the food noise for a while and the bandwidth to do his job. He could take care of himself. But eventually he couldn’t keep dieting–something he blamed on himself but I believed otherwise–and the food noise dial got turned up like when I listened to Beastie Boys in high school. The mere thought of bringing certain pastries, cookies, and chips home brought fearful tears to his eyes. We started to work together because he was interested in intuitive eating. “How can I learn how to trust my Food Voice when I am terrified? It feels impossible to just eat whatever I want when I want. I know I will binge.”
I have done TikTok and podcast deep dives into the concept of food noise–it’s a newer phrase that is certainly catchy. While it is a newer phrase, it definitely describes what so many of you have told me you feel around food. In years past we probably called it something else but dang food noise fits it perfectly.
Taking the deep dive, most TT and podcast creators said the food noise experience is so new we don’t have research on it. Every time I heard it, it felt like someone abruptly stopped the CD playing Sabotage in 1994.
The experience of food noise is not new just the phrase. That food noise experience has been researched for close to 100 years.
Food noise is constant food thoughts, an obsession or compulsion to eat. Food noise may or may not be associated with physical hunger. It is pervasive and LOUD. Most of the content I reviewed considered it a modifiable behavior that you–the individual–are responsible for causing and giving into the noise would have horrible consequences. The solutions were cutting out food groups, distractions, restraint and willpower, therapy, and medications. I will go into many of these in the rest of the series but I want to focus today on restraint and willpower.
When we find ourselves feeling out of control around food like Paul and hear constant food noise, it is normal and natural to feel like you are doing it wrong. That you need to fix yourself.
But what if you aren’t doing anything wrong? What if food noise–as uncomfortable as it is at times–is a normal natural reaction to something?
I told you food noise has been researched for probably close to 100 years. Type this phrase into google scholar: food preoccupation. While you are there look into the 1940s Minnesota Starvation Experiment that captured the OG food noise commentators.
Diets distract us from many things including how diets cause our brain to focus on food. We have pathologized food noise when it is a normal and important reaction to something that is not ok in our environment: our body and mind is worried about not having enough food.
I hear you now saying that you don’t diet or you have plenty to eat–maybe even your body looks a certain way and that’s how you know. One thing I know to be true is that you can be any size and experience malnutrition and your body takes years to recover from it–no matter what size you are. Even more, after living in a world influenced by the diet industry, having access to enough food yet not having permission to eat will keep the food noise on your internal loud speakers.
This is not because you are broken. It is the opposite. Your loud speakers are like the tornado warning alarms I grew up around in Ohio–they are letting us know that the diet industry has too much power.
What if instead of chastising your food noise you consider it a message about a deeper unmet need? For you and for the planet?
In the next 2 parts of this series I will go into medications and non-diet steps. More tomorrow!
Take care,
Julie
