Food Noise: Understanding and Managing Constant Thoughts About Eating
For some people, thinking about food doesn’t cause distress in life. They may think about food at the time when they are getting ready to eat or planning a meal. For others, food noise creates persistent and intrusive thoughts about food that dominate your mind and impact your relationship with eating.
It can be obsessing over what to eat, when to eat, or how much to eat. The thoughts are constant.
Food noise creates a mental tug-of-war that distracts you often from daily life and contributes to stress or anxiety around food choices. It is often linked to dieting culture, emotional eating, or unresolved eating habits. The never ending, internal chatter makes it difficult to listen to your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues.
Understanding food noise and learning how to quiet it is essential for fostering a healthier, more balanced approach to nourishment and self-care.
“Food noise has nothing to do with hunger or food insecurity”, says Lawrence Cheskin, a professor of nutrition and food studies at George Mason University and an adjunct professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. It’s about being preoccupied with thoughts about food.
In the 2023 issue Nutrients, researchers conceptualized food noise as “rumination and obsessive preoccupation with food” that can be elicited by internal cues such as your stomach growling with hunger or thoughts about eating or external cues such as seeing or smelling delicious foods. These cues can cause food-related thoughts to start playing on a repetitive loop.
Those Most Susceptible to Food Noise
If you struggle with food noise, you may fall into one or more of these groups who often report intrusive or obsessive thoughts about food and often share common psychological, cultural, or behavioral patterns, including:
Chronic Dieters
You frequently restrict your eating or cycle through diets that develop a heightened preoccupation with food, leading to constant mental chatter about what you "should" or "shouldn’t" eat.
People with Eating Disorders
You experience or have experienced conditions like anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder and have intense, all-consuming thoughts about food, calories, or body image.
Those Affected by Diet Culture
Your exposure to societal pressure and messages about "good" or "bad" foods make you more vulnerable to food noise, especially if you internalize these values.
Emotionally Stressed Individuals
You use food as a coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, or emotions and may find yourself constantly thinking about food as a source of comfort or control.
People with Unbalanced Eating Patterns
You engage in skipping meals, ignoring hunger cues, or eating erratically that contribute to your mind hyper-focused on food as the your body seeks balance and nourishment.
Individuals with Food Insecurity
You have limited access to sufficient or nutritious food and may experience heightened food preoccupation due to the uncertainty of when or what you will eat next.
Athletes and Fitness Enthusiasts
You are focused on optimizing performance or aesthetics through food and may have developed obsessive thoughts about macros, meal timing, or "perfect" nutrition.
How GLP-1 Medication Works to Help Reduce Food Noise
GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) receptor agonists, such as semaglutide (found in medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, or Rybelsus), have shown promise in helping reduce food noise by affecting physiological and psychological mechanisms related to appetite and eating behaviors.
Although GLP-1 medications can be a helpful tool in managing food noise by targeting appetite regulation and emotional triggers, it’s important to remember that they should be part of a comprehensive plan that includes emotional and behavioral support. As a reminder, ‘pills don’t give you skills.’
1. Regulate Appetite Signals
GLP-1 medications mimic the natural hormone GLP-1, which is involved in signaling satiety (fullness) and reducing hunger. By slowing gastric emptying and regulating appetite, these medications can reduce the constant preoccupation with food.
2. Reduce Cravings
Many people report fewer cravings for highly palatable foods (e.g., sugary or fatty foods) while on GLP-1 medications. This reduction in cravings can diminish the mental chatter about food choices and eating. Many people struggle to control their eating with sugary or fatty foods - meaning, the more they eat, the more they want. Cutting back on these foods, will help decrease your desire for these foods.
3. Stabilize Blood Sugar Levels
GLP-1 agonists help control blood glucose levels, reducing spikes and crashes that can lead to hunger and obsessive thoughts about food. More stable blood sugar levels often correlate with a more balanced approach to eating.
4. Improve Emotional Regulation
Some studies suggest that GLP-1 medications may influence the brain’s reward and stress pathways, which can help reduce emotional eating or food-related anxiety. This may alleviate food noise rooted in emotional or stress-based triggers.
5. Facilitate Mindful Eating
By naturally reducing hunger and promoting fullness, GLP-1 medications encourage smaller, more mindful meals. This shift can help break the cycle of obsessing over food or feeling out of control around it. When you are in control of your meals, you may tend to be more mindful of what you are eating, decreasing your emotional eating.
Key Considerations
Lifestyle Integration: GLP-1 medications work best when combined with healthy lifestyle changes, such as balanced eating and regular physical activity.
Emotional Work: If food noise is driven by emotional or psychological factors, therapy or counseling can provide deeper healing.
Individual Response: Not everyone experiences the same benefits from GLP-1 medications. Some people may require additional strategies to address food noise.
Beyond Medication: Steps to Overcome Food Noise
Addressing food noise often involves identifying its root cause, building awareness, and fostering a healthy relationship with food through mindful practices and self-compassion. Taking an approach that addresses both the physical and emotional factors, can help you quiet your food noise and build a healthier relationship with food.
And by addressing the underlying causes of food noise and replacing negative patterns with mindful and balanced habits, you can reduce its impact and create a healthier, more peaceful relationship with food.
Here are a few ways to get started:
1. Practice Mindful Eating
Slow down during meals, savor each bite, and pay attention to your body’s hunger and fullness cues. This helps reframe food as nourishment rather than a source of stress or obsession. One way to slow down, is to read while you are eating not scrolling or watching tv.
2. Challenge Diet Culture
Let go of rigid food rules or the concept of "good" vs. "bad" foods. Adopting an intuitive eating approach allows you to eat without guilt, reducing preoccupation with food choices. Read articles that help provide a balanced way of living - not just for the moment, but for a lifestyle.
3. Address Emotional Eating
Identify triggers for emotional eating (e.g., stress, boredom, or sadness) and develop alternative coping mechanisms like taking a walk, changing your ‘state’ and going to a different place physically, journaling, meditation, reading, or talking to a trusted friend. Ask yourself, ‘what am I feeling right now?” The other part of managing emotional eating is to not only be able to identify the feeling, but having a plan to manage it instead of trying to figure it out (and not eat) in the moment. That rarely, if ever, works.
4. Create a Balanced Eating Routine
Eating consistently throughout the day stabilizes blood sugar levels and prevents the intense hunger that can amplify food noise. Aim for balanced meals with protein, healthy fats, and fiber. Often, if you have a menu that you design for yourself, helps. Some people will eat the same thing for a period of time, to help them get in the habit of eating on a regular basis. You might also think about adding notifications to your phone as reminders to eat, take a break, and check in with yourself.
5. Engage in Therapy
Therapy approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) can help you reframe unhelpful food-related thoughts and develop healthier habits.
CBT helps reframe unhelpful food-related thoughts by identifying and challenging distorted beliefs, such as "I must avoid all carbs to be healthy" or "I failed my diet, so I might as well give up." You can learn to replace these all-or-nothing patterns with balanced, realistic thoughts, such as "I can enjoy a variety of foods in moderation and still be healthy." This shift reduces guilt and anxiety around food, allowing you to develop healthier eating habits rooted in self-compassion and long-term well-being.
DBT help reframe unhelpful food-related thoughts through the skill of distress tolerance. For example, if you feel overwhelmed by cravings or guilt after eating, it teaches techniques like grounding exercises or self-soothing to manage these emotions without judgment. By learning to tolerate discomfort and observe your thoughts without acting impulsively, you can develop healthier habits, such as eating mindfully and responding to your needs with balance rather than emotional reactions. This approach helps break cycles of guilt and stress, fostering a more positive relationship with food.
6. Focus on Non-Food Goals
Redirect your mental energy to non-food-related goals or hobbies, such as fitness, art, or volunteering. This creates a sense of purpose and reduces the tendency to hyper-focus on food. This is not being used a distraction, but a choice to move your energy from food to something else.
7. Cultivate Self-Compassion
Acknowledge that overcoming food noise is a process, and it’s okay to have setbacks. Treat yourself with kindness rather than criticism. Learning how to be kind to yourself as you make small and sustainable changes, goes a long way. I often say treat yourself as you would a friend. Self-compassion and grace goes a long way.
8. Limit Exposure to Triggering Content
Unfollow social media accounts or avoid media that promotes extreme dieting or unrealistic body standards. Curate a positive, body-neutral online environment. Spending time on social media like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook can and often does have negative effects.
9. Practice Stress Management
Activities like yoga, deep breathing, or mindfulness meditation can reduce overall stress, which often fuels food preoccupation. Have different tools in your toolbox to manage your stress outside of food. This will help you un-condition yourself to ‘stress eat’ and use food to decompress.
10. Find Support
Join a support group or connect with others who are working to overcome food-related struggles. Sharing experiences can reduce isolation and provide encouragement. Often when you talk with others who are struggling with the same issues, it makes you feel less alone and isolated. We can all learn from one another.
Final Thoughts
Overcoming food noise is a journey of reclaiming peace and balance in your relationship with food. It requires a compassionate and multifaceted approach, addressing both the physical and emotional factors that drive constant preoccupation.
Taking this approach to reducing food noise and reclaiming your control over your relationship with food is key to making sustainable changes.
By practicing mindful eating, challenging unhelpful food rules, managing stress, and focusing on self-care, you can reduce the mental chatter and regain control over your thoughts. Remember, healing takes time, and setbacks are part of the process. Expect that you will experience ups and downs in the beginning. After all, food is all around you, so making small and sustainable changes can occur.
With patience and consistent effort, you can quiet the noise and create a healthier, more fulfilling connection with your body and your choices.
Struggling with food noise or emotional eating? Let’s chat! Just complete the contact form here.
