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.

So everyone needs to eat, just like everyone needs to breathe. Now everyone can hold their breath for a certain amount of time and everyone can stop eating for a certain amount of time. But some people will be able to hold their breath for minutes at a time and some people will only manage a few seconds. Are you really going to blame those people who "give in" to their body's need to breath earlier than those who don't. Of course you don't. We're all wired differently and so it is with the need to eat eating.

you sound like one of those people who say ‘ADHD didn’t exist I my day, they are just naughty!’ Or ‘I could get through my period with a paracetamol so suck it up’. Just because you don’t experience do not diminish other people’s experience. I lost 4 stone with no jags and it was bloody hard, good for those who can now quiet that constant clatter in their head about food and snacks.

It’s not just food noise, since I’ve been on GLP1s I’ve stopped biting my nails, I don’t make impulse purchases any more, for the first time in my life I went to the hairdressers and didn’t have the urge to get all of my hair cut off and restyled. I’ve been thinking for a while I’d quite like a new sofa, the old me would have googled it incessantly and ordered one by now. I’ll hopefully stay on them forever, not for the weight loss but for the way they make my brain work. The cost is more than offset by all the tings I don’t buy or do because of them.

Do people really not understand that sugar is addictive, and even so it's only one small part of a massive picture? How is that even possible?

A nasty, goady post about overweight people on Mumsnet? Must be a day ending in y!

They didn’t use that term in the Minnesota Starvation Study but they did note that becoming obsessively interested in food was an effect of putting the body into calorie deficit.

That study was run during WW2, with volunteers who were conscientious objectors but nonetheless wanted to contribute to ameliorate the suffering of war, and voluntarily underwent starvation. It remains one of the most informative sources on the effects of calorie restriction.

It’s rare to find someone who is obese who hasn’t dieted, and some of what is now described as food noise could be a direct effect of that.

It’s possible you also have ADHD and the WLIs are having an effect on the reward centre of your brain 😄 (my experience too!)

If I had a fiver for every post whining about stuff like this I could fund wegovy for years without worrying

Seriously, why does it matter to you that someone says "food noise" instead of "constantly thinking about food or snacking, always feeling hungry, worse when bored or upset"? Do you think us fat people will lose the weight faster by using more words to describe things?

I'm not an alcoholic so I can't really understand how that feels.

If you haven't suffered the torture of food noise/food addiction then you could just say that, rather than being judgey.

Maybe we’ll burn more calories!

How else would you describe it?

I'm type 2 diabetic, and managed to keep my blood sugars well under control for around 10 years until turning 50. Then it all went to shit and I was stuck in a vicious cycle of craving high fat high carb foods that I'd managed to eat for years. I had to go onto a lower carb/zero sugar diet, and it was a revelation. Once I'd been on it for about 2 months, I realised that I didn't crave anything anymore... If I have a treat meal ie something carb dense, I feel absolutely vile to the extent that I don't really bother anymore as it's not worth it.

Food manufacture these days hooks people onto high fat, high carb and high sugar foods. The more you eat of them, the more you want. It's an addiction - that's what I'd describe as food noise. Eating clean is the only way to fix it, not injecting lord knows what into you.

It's complex und definitely a thing. To me it's another way to describe addiction.

Many years ago when I got rid of most UPF's in my diet by going cold turkey, I experienced food noise . It's hard to ignore if all you can think of is how to get a packt of sweets or crisis or whatever. I do believe in the addiction nature of certain high fat, high sugar (& sweetners) plus colour und presevatives that is part of our UPF diet.
It's hard to come off these foods and even harter to stay off them as they are everywhere.

Think a lot of 'food noise' is sugar and white carb craving tbh. If you snack little and often, giving your body little spikes of glucose continually, the cravings seem to get worse. I'm not having a 'go' at anyone; I've experienced it myself and found that two decent sized meals eaten at the same time every day helps reduce it.

I don't think it is but i don't have it. But I think the challenge is that people think it's like having a craving rather than an all consuming thing and so they think just ignore it, and people who have food noise are saying i can't ignore it. I think that a label must be so helpful to some people rather than just thinking it's fancying a cake now and then.

I've just realised aged 54, that the reason I have poor spatial awareness, depth perception and could never catch is because of an eye condition I've had since birth - which my parents knew about but it didn't stop them being furious and berating me for not being able to catch, making me spend hours practicing catching - shouting keep your eye on the ball - all to no avail of course. So whilst knowing it doesn't make me able to catch or able to park a big car, what it has done is stop me thinking I'm just shit at stuff. I can only relate the food noise being acknowldged as a thing being similar to that. I feel vindicated!

Well food noise is definitely a thing when you have an eating disorder. It's the most serious and most fatal mental health condition. So no it's not a made up term and no they can't just ignore it. 🙄

George Orwell was writing about the effects of sugar 80 years ago and how people in the UK people, especially at that point the working class, used it to mitigate the grimness of poverty food. It doesn't take a genius to trace the path of that use of sugar. It's not an exaggeration to call it a drug.

When i try and get to sleep at night I have quite a bit of ‘noise’ so snippets of conversations, maybe films or tv shows, music and songs. This make it harder for me to get to sleep as i struggle to stop the noise

since going in the jabs I have been able to get to sleep immediately, to me it makes sense that if the jabs can stop that ‘noise’ it must be able to stop ‘food noise’ as well

i am coming off the jabs gradually and i am beginning to struggle to sleep again, its not too bad at the moment but I will increase my dose if necessary

The way Oprah described it made me stop and think. She said it was constantly thinking about food in terms of - how much exercise do I have to do to work of this sandwich. It made me realise it wasn't what I assumed - which is what you think it is. It was much more involved. An obsessive thinking around food and calories. I imagine you could be slim and have food noise. Probably something to do with our culture

That's interesting, that the jabs have stopped hypnopompic hallucinations! These seem to be the brain's random firings, but it makes sense that anything that turns off food noise and helps with ADHD would also quieten these.

The term food noise goes through me and I say that as a fatty

As someone who hasn't eaten sugar and white carbs more than a handful of times over18 months, I don't think this is the case.

Cravings, sugar & processed carb blood spikes etc are all very real and create problems for sure, but its not the same as food noise.

Food noise is much more intense, relentless, feels very uncontrolable and overpowering.

I've had other times over the eyars when I've stopped sugar/processed carbs and felt great but I've still struggled with "food noise" the entire time. a poor diet high processed carb/sugar, low fiber, high fat etc might exacerbate food noise, but I've had food noise while eating super super healthy/unprocessed/high veg /sugar free etc diet.

When in therapy for binge eating, one of the most valuable things I learnt was to distinguish between physical hunger and head hunger, and then how to satisfy head hunger. Because pretending your inner voice isn't screaming for chocolate or whatever doesn't work.

However, I don't think that weight loss injections or weight loss surgery are the right mechanisms to deal with food noise or head hunger because they won't remove it forever, and you'll be right back at square one.

I'm with you. I have anxiety and continued to have it through my time on Mounjaro but now I've tapered off my OCD symptoms have come roaring back. I didn't even realise how suppressed they had been for the last year or so. I've given myself toothache with compulsively checking them and poking at them and examining them in the last week. It's just the same with food (although I've kept that more or less in check so far but I've learned that's luck, it's how my life lies at any given moment, how my brain is firing). Literally obsessive, literally compulsive. People think it's just like the devil on your shoulder saying oh I fancy that cake and the angel saying no you don't and it's so far off the mark it's laughable.

What’s it to you? You don’t experience it therefore it doesn’t exist? Why imply there is some sort of a moral code to this? Just nasty.