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Julie: Hey there, welcome to episode 362 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I am your host, Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietitian, and I am so glad you are here. Have you ever experienced so much food noise, you’re like, what the fuck is happening? You literally wanna scream or you wanna crawl out of your skin.

Julie: Paul is someone I write about in my book, Find Your Food Voice. And he told me whenever he had cookies and chips in the house, he described constant loud food thoughts. He referred to them as food noise. And it was in his head so loud that he had to eat them. He could never keep the food in the house. And that felt like a good enough solution for a long time. But when he moved in with his partner, his partner would bring these foods around. And so Paul would beg his partner, to just 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. So 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 style 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. I remember him saying, how can I learn how to trust my food voice when I’m 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. It’s certainly catchy. While it’s 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 TikTok and podcast creators said that food noise experience is so new, we don’t have research on it.

Julie: Every time I heard that, it felt like someone abruptly stopped the CD playing Sabotage in 1994. I say this because the experience of food noise is not new. It’s just the phrase is new. That experience of food noise has been researched for close to 100 years. Food noise is constant food thoughts and obsession or compulsion to eat. It may or may not be associated with physical hunger. It’s pervasive and loud.

Julie: Most of the content I viewed considered it 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, willpower, therapy, medications. I will go into many of these and the rest of this series on food noise, but I want to focus today on restraint and willpower.

Julie: When we find ourselves feeling out of control around food, like Paul, and hear constant food noise, it’s normal and natural to feel like you’re 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 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.

Julie: While you’re there, look into the 1940s Minnesota starvation experiment that captured the OG food noise commenters. Diets distract us from many things, including how diets cause our brain to focus on food. We have pathologized food noise, which is really food preoccupation. When it’s normal and important reaction to something that is not okay in our environment, our body and mind is worried about not having enough food.

Julie: I hear you saying now that you don’t diet or you have plenty to eat, maybe even saying 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 malnourished 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 loudspeakers. This isn’t because you’re broken, it’s the opposite. Your loudspeakers are like the tornado warnings I grew up around in Ohio. They went off every month on Monday and they were letting us know that something could possibly happen. Your warning systems are letting us know that the diet industry has too much power. Your food noise are those alarm systems.

Julie: 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 two parts of the series, I’ll go into medications and non -diet steps forward. Follow along for more. I look forward to checking in with you next time on the Find Your Food Voice podcast. And again, part two will be dropping shortly.