to think “food noise” is becoming one of those phrases people hide behind rather than actually dealing with their eating habits?

[foodywoody]

I keep hearing people say they have “food noise” and that’s why they’re constantly thinking about food or snacking, but isn’t that just hunger, boredom, habit, or emotional eating dressed up in a nicer label? I’m not saying it’s not real for some people, especially where there are medical issues involved, but the way it’s thrown around now makes it sound like no one has any control over it at all.

It just feels like another way to remove any personal responsibility. Not everything needs a label. Sometimes it’s just about eating properly and getting enough protein and actually addressing emotional eating.

Food noise and hunger aren’t the same thing.

I get hungry on WLI. I’ll suddenly think ‘ooh, I’m peckish, time to eat something’, and I’ll have a sandwich, and then I’ll get on with my day not thinking about food until the next time I feel hungry, at which point I will eat something else. In between those meals, when I’m not hungry, I don’t think about food.

Food noise for me was consistently obsessing over food (what was available, when I would have it, whether there was enough, whether I had earned it, what snacks were around, how many brownies I could have) whether I was hungry or not. Even if I had just eaten, even while I was eating.

Why are you convinced I haven’t done any reading or research? Because I disagree with you? 🤣

I also haven’t once named any of my ailments so I’m not sure what you’re talking about with that one 🙄

GLP1s aren’t “appetite suppressants”. Appetite suppressants don’t fix your blood sugar levels or reduce inflammation. GLP1s address a hormone imbalance. One outcome is that your body rediscovers its natural hunger/saiety signals. This then leads to your appetite reducing to the level your body needs, not wants.

So yes, your appetite is suppressed, but as a consequence of the other things the drug is fixing in your body. I still experience hunger, but I want to eat food that my body needs (lean proteins and plenty of veg and salad mostly) and I enjoy eating them. The drive to then top up with yet more food after I’ve had enough has reduced massively.

‘I guess I just find it disturbing that people seem to want to medicate their way through life.’

You’d have loved living in the 1500s. A blissful, medication-free life of positive mental attituding your way through dental abscesses and gangrene until an infected blister took you out at the ripe old age of 45.

Afraid not. They are two very different things. Emotional eating depends on circumstances. Food noise is there from the minute you wake up until the minute you go to sleep. The first day I realised I wasn’t thinking about food in that moment, I had tears in my eyes. The relief from the pressure was immense.

Yes, because that’s exactly the same 🙄

I don’t experience food noise and I find it a useful expression to understand others’ experience.

I count myself really lucky not to struggle with obesity. As I understand it, your metabolism and hormone signals are dysfunctional - so despite consuming enough calories your body continues to send your brain starvation signals. You overeat but constantly feel hungry.

It sounds horrific and I wish people had more understanding and empathy for this.

Well then, tell me how it’s different. Tell me on what basis you (presumably a doctor?) have decided WLI aren’t an acceptable medication to be on, when others are? How do you differentiate between medicines that are ok and medicines that aren’t?

Because until very recently most humans didn't have access to as much food as they wanted throughout their entire lives. We evolved to live with the ever present threat of scarcity, which no longer exists. So our current situation is not, in fact, something we've always experienced. It's extremely new.

There is no reason to suppose that humans are capable of living in abundance and societies not becoming increasingly overweight without lots of us being on an appetite suppressant, be that nicotine or WLIs. Some people just like the idea, that's all.

That’s exactly it. My body would tell me constantly to eat. “EAT! For the apocalypse is coming and we must lay down stores of fat to survive. EAT. EAT NOW. EAT EVERYTHING”. Honestly, how I managed to keep to BMI 33 and not higher is astonishing really. No opportunity to eat was ever passed up.

Now, my body is all “no thanks, all good” if I pop into Costa for a coffee and look at the cakes.

As for the wanting to medicate or way through life - I’m sure insulin dependent diabetics would rather they didn’t have the faff of medication every day. Nor sufferers of chronic pain, or asthma or schizophrenia. I’d rather I didn’t have to take HRT to manage my osteoporosis risk and vaginal atrophy. But I do and I get on with my day.

Noone ever says I could do away with my glasses if only I squinted a bit harder…

No, not at all. I’m convinced the opposite, but I fear you haven’t been reading the right things, or you just do not understand what you have read. I would be concerned if you were to turn around and say you are some sort of health care professional. You frequently refer to “the human condition” and overuse of medicating things that are supposedly part of said human condition, but fail to consider or show you have considered that the human body is capable of abnormalities within the usual spectrum of function-which is why things like anxiety have been studied, and theorised since the dawn of medicine and especially psychology. You then use “cravings” and food noise interchangeably throughout your replies, alluding to the simple fact you haven’t done your research on that particular subject properly or don’t understand it because you aren’t using them in the proper context. It’s been scientifically proven that food noise, and cravings are two different things as I said (based again on research not just my personal opinion), and it’s driven by different centres in the brain-if you had done your research then you wouldn’t be wrong in that conjecture. It’s not about me disagreeing with you on a personal level, I’m disagreeing with your points, and using evidential reasoning to support that, as anyone would in a discussion. I’m also pointing out that many a time, we are bias, which is again evident to me in your replies-that’s not a personal attack. Everyone is bias, myself included, but it’s our individual responsibility to examine that and understand the pathway that it’s entered from. My point about your personal aliments… you literally said to someone else “On the contrary, I have multiple conditions that need medicating and that will need medicating for the rest of my life”… I’m pretty sure that was you. Hence sparking my point about the bias in the first place, which you then proceeded to call me boring 🥱 🤣 Again, what I think it boring is how we’re allowing ourselves to not engage fully. And by the way, a little food for thought (pun intended 🤣), if you have a problem with over pathologising and things like women taking potential weight medication, it’s worth checking in with yourself about internalised misogyny too.

People are just ignorant and assume their own experience is the same. Ie they have a bit of a belly, consciously cut down on snacks and assume everyone can do the same.

I think it’s much more nuanced than that, there are levels of it. The normal healthy level finds it really hard to cut out junk food or extra calories but can do it when motivated enough and not too wiped out with other demands on their time and brain. The more extreme level can’t do it. It’s like adhd- dc are diagnosed, my sibling is diagnosed, I’m scatty and disorganised and have 150 tabs open on my laptop and 500 on my phone (that’s the max it can have so I’m mostly stuck there) ,would stay up all night before exams to learn the materials and leave things to the last minute and find it really hard to be on time for things. But I have my life together, a good job, and I’m not diagnosis level. I expect food noise is the same.

WLI are a miracle for many. They are not a quick fix, it takes work and dedication, it’s a crutch to support weight loss. If they help 1000’s of people then I don’t understand the criticism towards them. The food industry has done a lot of damage, thankfully there is hope for many.
The nicotine vape had the same hype about it and helped 100,000’s of people who couldn’t quit smoking eventually stop.
vapes like WLI get abused by people who don’t need them causing some stigma but that shouldn’t change the advantages it gives to people who need it.

I think sometimes people struggle to separate their own feelings of alarm/unhappiness about something with whether it's true.

But there are lots of things about the human body that might be considered objectionable! It's perfectly ok to dislike the idea that lots of humans will need to be medicated for long periods in order not to become obese once they live in a rich enough society. As long as you don't try and elevate your feelings to fact level.

I first read the term on here in relation to someone explaining why the Keto/low carb diet worked for them and it seemed a perfect description for the mental space taken up by eating too much carb. I don’t think it’s emotional (for me), but I do think it’s a habit as sugar/carbs are highly addictive if you don’t balance them well with good fat and protein and bulk.

we are programmed to seek out sugar for survival. Breast milk is sweeter than cows milk.

in nature we wouldn’t have easy access to this much food so very many of us are fighting something entirely natural.

it’s worth noting that the diabetes epidemic correlates with the rise of cereal farming and processed food and the adoption by western health depts of the ‘healthy plate’ which is very carb heavy.

of you’ve ever worn a CGM on your arm to track blood sugar movement it’s quite shocking to see how much so called healthy choices like brown bread and brown rice cause a sugar spike. Yes they are still better than the over processed version but it’s the portion size that’s the issue.
so yes it’s a useful label which can help point people to better eating habits and hopefully improve their health.

Such a sensible response.

Does one have to feel positively about WLI? Of course not. Anyone is at liberty to think they’re awful things that they would never use.

Does that mean WLI are objectively a bad thing? A form of cheating, a lack of accountability, a problematic quick fix to something that’s not a real problem? Of course not! A person’s views on WLI are utterly irrelevant to their objective benefits and functions.

The problem is that so many people seem to think ‘because I don’t like WLI, YOU shouldn’t be using them.’

Oh, really? Yale and Harvard Medical Schools and numerous scientific publications would disagree.

Just a basic google search returns:

"GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 drugs) strongly suppress appetite and are primarily used to manage hunger and promote weight loss. They work by mimicking a natural hormone in the body that signals to the brain that you are full and by slowing down the rate at which food leaves the stomach."

I’m really sorry but there is no “scientifically proven difference between simple craving and food noise”.

@Aluna , how do you know that? What is your definition of "simple craving" and what is your definition of "food noise"?

I don't believe that we are programmed to seek out sugar for survival. Some people say they have a sweet tooth but if you put a bowl of sugar lumps in front of them they're not going to want to eat them all.

The problem is that so many foods today are a mixture of sugar and fat. Sugar, fat and salt together seem particularly alluring to humans. Or it could be that we don't taste all of the sugar when it's mixed with fat and we don't taste all of the fat when it's mixed with sugar.

The sugar fat combination isn't found in nature. That's why the keto/low carb diet works. Because you can't have sucrose/glucose/fructose on that diet there's only so much fat that we want to eat.

Having said that I think that a lot of people think that they are on a low carb diet but in fact they're eating lots of carbs just the worst sort. I had a bag of shitake mushrooms yesterday believing they were a healthy snack, they taste like crisps, but reading the ingredients they contain 'vegan maltose'.

People think sausages are meat but most contain very little meat and a lot of rubbish carbohydrate.

Before agriculture people ate lots of carbohydrate. Starchy roots are something most foraging people rely on. There are healthy carbohydrates, low-GI starches in combination with oils and some protein seem a good way to go.

It’s not true though. Medication doesn’t address the root cause as evidenced by the people who gain weight when they stop taking them, if they haven’t reformed their eating habits. I’ve seen posters on here saying they will have to take them for the rest of their life.

Other types of addicts such as alcohol, drug or gambling tend to find when they kick one type of addiction they develop another - thus focus on finding a positive addiction like running, cycling, dog walking etc.

Because there’s no scientific definition of either so the difference would be impossible to prove scientifically.

This is like saying there is no scientifically proven difference between a simple headache and chronic pain. You’ve got the testimony of a large number of people on this thread along describing their own debilitating experiences and the consequent implications for their health and bodies. That alone is evidence that some people are dealing with more than the odd ‘simple craving’.

And, more fundamentally yet, so what? So what if the thing that I’m fixing is what you would call ‘a simple craving’? In what way does naming the problem that way change anything? It’s still a problem for me, something that has negatively affected my whole life, and which I am now solving with a medication which entirely mitigates the issue.

Truly, is there any point at all in arguing over whether something is ‘food noise’ or ‘a simple craving’ when it doesn’t make the smallest difference to the solution?

Obesity is a chronic condition, so it is possible that some people may need to medicate for life. Or perhaps we will get some better insights as time goes by into what drives people to consume too much food. I think the reasons are complex and multi-causal. If the solution were easy, we wouldn't have a worldwide obesity epidemic.

If you google "science of food noise" @Aluna you will find there is significant scientific research being conducted. If you are unable to define your terminology, how can you make such a bold statement that there is no scientific difference between "simple craving" and "food noise"?