Food noise: What it is and why we’re told to silence it
Did I eat too much for breakfast?
Is that hunger I’m feeling, or something else?
I’m counting down the minutes until I get to eat again.
If you’ve been living on this planet for enough time, you’ve likely noticed we’re bombarded with food messaging around every corner. Commercials for fast food shout from the TV, billboards advertising chicken warn us not to drool and drive, and our loved ones ask us, “What’s for dinner?”
Food messaging is inescapable, but when does it become too much? When food chatter starts to infiltrate our inner monologue, becoming intrusive and distracting us from our normal thought patterns, clinicians label it “food noise.”
According to an article from Medscape, while “appetite and cravings may be influenced by emotions, food cues, habit, or pleasure, food noise, as patients describe it, often involves repetitive, intrusive, and distressing thoughts about food that persist beyond physical hunger.”
The term has become more popular in light of medications like GLP-1s, which claim to quiet food noise. But amid the widespread recognition of the term, it tends to be poorly misunderstood.
In this post, we’ll discover
what food noise actually is
why it shows up, especially in disordered eating
what it means (and doesn’t mean) in the recovery sense
What is food noise?
It seems fairly intuitive: food + noise = food noise. It’s the noise we hear on the subject of food. But this simple definition comes with some heavy context.
For one, it’s not abnormal to think about food. We use food for nourishment, pleasure, connection, and survival, so it’s basically wired into us to want to know where our next meal is coming from.
This is what differentiates food noise from terms like cravings.
When it becomes noise, however, this implies that the thoughts about food have no tie to survival. They’re just clanging, meaningless sounds in our heads. But, like with most words in the English langauge, there’s plenty of nuance.
Thinking about food frequently isn’t the problem. It becomes an issue when:
the thoughts shape how you feel,
the source of the thoughts is questionable, and/or
they direct you to take disordered action.
Why does food noise happen?
Food noise can happen for a number of reasons.
Diets/restriction
When we put our bodies on diets, we’re depriving ourselves of what we need to survive. This biological need for food can cause the brain to singularly focus on food, where it’s coming from, and when we’ll get to have it.
Psychological and emotional attachment
For many people, food is a complex, complicated, and sometimes emotional issue. Depending on a host of reasons (e.g., our upbringing, culture, self-esteem, etc.), food can be tied to intense emotions like shame, anxiety, guilt, and fear. If these relationships with food develop at a young age, it can be hard to untether from them, and this can translate into baseline distress over situations where food is involved.
Environment and culture
As previously mentioned, persistent exposure to diet messaging, conflicting nutritional advice, and food-centric advertising makes food an inescapable topic in daily life. Even if our physical and psychological cues aren’t activated, our immediate environment can switch on the levers for food.
Why quieting food noise isn’t always the solution
Ads for GLP-1 medications promise to quiet the food noise. When framed this way, we’re meant to believe that less food noise is better, but this isn’t always true.
When this type of messaging becomes mainstream, it can cause us to pathologize normal and natural thoughts around food.
The words inadvertently convince us our everyday inklings about what to eat and how to honor hunger are something to be fixed.
Sure, no one wants to walk around all day fighting off intrusive thoughts about food, but decreasing food noise can be achieved in other ways, one of which is by nourishing ourselves based on what our bodies need, not what we think they deserve.
When the goal of reducing food noise is restriction and weight loss, it calls for a deeper inspection into why we’re wanting to quiet the voice in the first place. It’s not always the noise that is most bothersome; it’s the cause of the noise that warrants closer attention.
Learning to listen to food noise instead of silencing it
Instead of trying to silence our food noise by taking medications or engaging in disordered behaviors, we have the option to shift our attention to understanding why the noise is there in the first place.
Food noise is typically a signal that could be calling on you because:
your body is asking for nourishment
you’ve been restricting, and your body actually needs food
you’re facing emotional or psychological needs that were once soothed by food
Honoring this signal by feeding yourself isn’t failure. It doesn’t mean you lack discipline or control. It means that your body and mind are trying to tell you something. And instead of focusing on shutting it down, we’re invited to wonder what that something is.
Pause & Prompt
When I’m experiencing food noise, I…
More posts like this:
Why food noise shows up, and what it means in eating disorder recovery.