At that time in my life, I felt obsessed with food. If I wasn’t eating, I was thinking about what I was going to eat, when I’d eat it, or how I’d overeaten previously and how to best compensate for that. I’d notice snacks on the table during TV shows and empty chocolate wrappers on the ground in the street. I’d wonder how other people would nonchalantly eat a doughnut on a Tuesday morning, not daring a life where I could do the same.

I was midway through my 4-year stint at bodybuilding (having fallen into it as a means of glorifying my prior disordered eating), working full time as a University Lecturer and building my own Consultancy business. I didn’t have time to waste on overthinking food, but I couldn’t help it.

For as long as I could remember, food had played a dominant role in my life. Since hitting puberty, food had provided a means of controlling my body, escaping my emotions and garnering attention. I was either restricting, binge eating, tightly counting or controlling, whilst having all of this live rent free (and loudly) in my head.

The rise of food noise

Since the rise in popularity of weight-loss medications, discourse around the concept of food noise has simultaneously heightened. Only recently has scientific conversation begun to define and discuss food noise as a concept (related constructs such as food preoccupation, attentional bias and food cue reactivity have long been studied).

Oprah Winfrey famously shared of her experience with weight loss medications, that the “the first time [she] took a GLP-1, she realised that all these years she thought thin people had more willpower”, realising instead that they ‘just weren’t constantly thinking about food’.

Why do I think about food all the time?

Most of us think about food, some of the time. Planning family meals, the hour before lunch when hunger kicks in, occasionally remembering the leftover birthday cake you’ve got for dessert, these are all perfectly normal, often mundane thoughts that arise day-to-day.

But what happens when those thoughts become pervasive? Unable to be silenced? Result in rumination and often, undesirable or maladaptive food choices?

Food noise

“persistent thoughts about food that are perceived by the individual as being unwanted and/or dysphoric and may cause harm, including social, mental, or physical problems; distinguished from routine food-related thoughts by its intensity and intrusiveness, resembling rumination”

Food noise goes beyond the day-to-day thoughts about food. It’s not just mental chatter pushing you towards foods you crave, but encompasses incessant mental chatter around eating the ‘right’ foods in the ‘right’ amounts, like ‘am I eating enough protein?’, or ‘should I be having fewer calories?’.

The burden of such noise is huge, whilst cognitive models suggest that we have limited attentional bandwidth. The more energy consumed by food noise, the less available for other, likely more pleasurable or healthful areas of our lives. Food noise can also coincide with dysphoria (a sense of unease or anxiety, with the potential of negatively impacting relationships, productivity and other aspects of life).

It’s not a choice. No one chooses to feel incessantly burdened by thoughts of food.

It’s not all personal responsibility

There’s a common narrative around the fitness space at the moment that food noise is caused by restriction and a poor relationship with food.

Whilst removing food rules, practicing unconditional permission to eat and avoiding dietary restriction and/or restraint may support reductions in what people describe as food noise, it’s not always the case. In fact, in the early stages of eating more intuitively, food related thoughts may increase temporarily.

Intuitive eating, which encompasses these behaviours is associated with improved psychological wellbeing and reduced markers of disordered eating, yet hasn’t been directly linked with reductions in food noise. That said, food-related preoccupation is a core feature of eating pathology and cognitive restraint has been linked to intrusive food-related thoughts. So it’s fair to suggest that reducing rigid food rules may help reduce the mental load around food for some people.

However the picture is more complex. Some research does suggest that for some, calorie restriction can reduce markers of food noiselike cravings for specific foods. This highlights that food-related thoughts, urges and attention are influenced by multiple mechanisms, not dietary restraint alone.

In other words, nutritional strategies are unlikely to fully explain or resolve food noise for everyone.

There are myriad contributors to food noise: food environment; genetics; differences in reactivity to food cues; differences in appetite regulation; body fat levels; food security; family dynamics; emotional regulation; reasons for restriction. Telling someone in a larger body, particularly where genetic and biological factors may contribute to heightened food-related drive, to “just stop dieting” in order to resolve food noise is overly simplistic.

The impact of weight loss medications

One of the most impactful outcomes prescribed to weight loss medications is this reduction in food noise, offering respite from something that may have felt deafening for decades. This isn’t just because of reductions in hunger. It’s proposed that GLP-1 medications may influence reward-related brain pathways, which could contribute to reductions in food-related thoughts beyond changes in hunger alone.

This is huge, for some people naturally have greater reward responses to food than others, and we see alterations in reward processing in those with obesity and more consistent evidence of heightened responsiveness in binge eating disorder, for example. Weight loss medications can provide a hugely impactful respite.

The solution to food noise

To combat food noise, a holistic approach is needed, with consideration and respect of person-to-person variation (which should be the case for any professional supporting someone with their relationship with food, given the myriad physiological and psychological factors impacting food behaviours that are driven by factors outside of personal control).

Much like any relationship with food work, it’s helpful to ensure nutritional regulation before considering other reasons for thoughts and behaviours. This will likely look like eating regularly and sufficiently and identifying and challenging food rules and unhelpful behaviours.

Beyond this, tools grounded in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and internal family systems (IFS) may shed some light onto your thoughts and behaviours and begin to challenge food noise.

Given my role as a Registered Nutritionist, I pull from these domains to support people to reduce food noise where accessible, alongside nutritional support (whilst referring to psychological professionals where appropriate).