Hold on... is this how "normal" people feel all the time?

[Wildewheat]

I no longer think about food every minute of the day.

I eat a tiny cake then don't want any more.

I leave chocolate in the cupboard untouched for days or weeks - I don't want it.

I eat, notice I'm full then want to stop eating.

I only think about food when I'm hungry.

When I am hungry, I don't want junk food - I actually want "proper" food.

My mind is so quiet.

I've struggled with my weight since puberty. Feeling like this, I can totally see why so many people had no idea why it was so hard and why they'd say things like "just eat less and move more". They must have thought I was mad, just doing something that ruins my health for years when it's so easy not to.

This has also really annoyed me and I really wish I'd been able to experience this years ago. It also makes me wish I could explain how hard it is to people who've only felt this their whole lives.

I'm pretty hungry a lot of the time, I've just trained myself to ignore it for as long as possible.
DH used to find feeling hungry quite distressing and not something he could ignore but when he had to give up chocolate and fatty foods due to high cholesterol he had to get used to ignoring cravings and putting up with feeling a bit hungry until mealtimes. His discomfort at being hungry lessened with practice, before he could never understand how I could get by without snacking.
His snacking was a habit more than a need and he's retrained himself, fear of heart disease is a powerful motivator though!

Humans used to survive on berries, nuts and the occasional dead animal. I remind myself of that when I have the feeling I need food beyond my three squares. It’s hard because modern food is very delicious and as an adult freely available but if I ate what I fancied it wouldn’t end well!

I was slim my whole life until about 2 years ago when I got hit with a combination of depression, stress and ill health which basically meant I turned to food and gained a lot of weight very quickly. Ever since I've been in a gain/lose cycle that has ultimately ended in me gaining more weight

When I was slim yes I had a lot of food noise, but I also could tolerate it. I could tolerate being hungry in a way that I just can't now. I used to find dieting easy tbh, I'd notice I'd gained a few pounds and would just cut back for a few weeks. Mentally it's a hell of a lot easier to lose 6lbs or even a st compared to multiple sts. I used to be quite arrogant about calories in calories out tbh.

Now I find it so difficult to ignore the food noise. With everything else going on my capacity to tolerate being hungry has reduced massively. I think it's knowing you've got so long to go, I get almost a kind of grief about all the food I cant eat. I feel so incredibly out of control when I eat a takeaway for example, when I never used to get that.

I think once you've gained weight and got used to your body eating more its a button that's incredibly difficult to switch off. I've definitely given myself an addiction to food

I actually did used to have no problem leaving chocolate in my cupboards, or stopping at one small slice of cake or a small bag of crisps. I'd find that satisfying, and I think because I wasn't restricting, the desire for these foods was low. And I would have them infrequently.

Mounjaro has given me back the sense of control, it has given me a break from constantly fighting the food noise and guilt/shame I felt about my weight. Which has also given me the opportunity to focus on other areas. I've also restarted excercising and actually have the motivation to go, I feel less tired. My head is clearer.

Also another thing that has changed in my life is moving in with DH.

My family are all slim, low UPF active people. They talk about food a lot but its always healthy. Meals are big but again all homemade, lots of veg and snacks just weren't needed or talked about. I genuinely don't think they are constantly depriving themselves or constantly hungry from comments they have made. I don't think they find it difficult to make healthy food choices.

DHs family are all overweight. There's insane number of snacks, of meals out, of fast food trips. DH is very much takeaway every Friday night kind of deal, eat out at lunch constantly, snacks in front of the TV. And it's a lot harder to resist when you are surrounded by unhealthy foods and large quantities of it. Once I started eating fast food or takeaways it became harder to stop

It's not that difficult to just not order a takeaway on a Friday if no one ever suggests it, but its quite hard to constantly say no or get out of a bad routine. Or sit there and watch someone eat a kebab and chips. DH often doesn't understand my desire to take a pack lunch for example so I don't get a mcdonalds.

And what was the hunter-gatherer life expectancy...? I don't think our ancestors are a model of perfect health and optimal wellbeing any more than we are in this modern world either. I don't think it helps us to hark back to an imagined age of humanity living in perfect harmony with our bodies. Our bodies are, and always have been, flawed. Evolution and adaptation means survival, not optimisation. We don't really know what people ate in paleolithic times - it varied the world over depending on environment. Access to food looked very different to ancient Inuit people than it did in more temperate climes. Which of our ancient predecessors were the most healthy? Were they healthier than we are now? How could we know? We'd be better looking to modern day Japan and to Mediterranean countries for examples of diets and lifestyles that appear to contribute to greater health and longevity than in looking back on a distant past we know very little about and making sweeping assumptions about it. Don't berate yourself for your appetite on the basis that maybe tens of thousands of years ago people ate what they could hunt or forage - they likely didn't make it past their thirties anyway!

My view is that obesity is a symptom not a disease. Lots of different causes can produce very similar symptoms. Each individual will have different causes.

On the whole I didn't suffer from food noise as others have described it. Yet I am morbidly obese. I'm also T2 diabetic.

Since starting on mounjaro just before Christmas I have lost 4 stone and my blood sugar is now in the healthy range. I no longer want to eat lots of carbs which I did before.

It is perfectly possible that I am a classic T2 diabetic. The type of person for whom mounjaro was invented.

You are absolutely right, and yes the examples you give are probably closer to the ideal

I am quite intrigued by the upside down eating thing where you would eat a dinner-like meal first thing. I believe they do something along those lines in some parts of Asia. I would like that I think. I love savoury food. And surely the main meal earlier in the day makes more sense than the evening?

I’m thinking about food all the time and I hate the constant struggle. I’m fit and strong but have to work so hard all the time to not stuff my face. I’m never full and hate that food occupies my mind constantly. The only reason I’m not giving in is because I don’t want to get fat and unhealthy. I would love to not care about food and eat like a normal person who gets full and satisfied.

I was 20 stone and I’m a binge eater, I think I can have an opinion on this.

I was 20 stone and I’m a binge eater so no your analogy doesn’t work. Some of us are speaking from experience.

Of course, but your opinion isn't reflective of everyone's experience - and many of us have a similar experience. The cycle of yo-yo dieting in and out of severe obesity is an exhausting and terrible one. Whether or not people 'give in' is not something you can correlate to how hard they've tried. It's particularly soul-destroying to try as hard as possible, to put in all the work and effort that you can and to still fail over and over and then to be told that because someone else succeeded that means you haven't tried hard enough or for long enough. What works for you won't work for everyone.

I think you must keep replying to the wrong person because I haven’t said anything you’ve referred to.

It was the comment about it getting easier not to give in the longer you resist food noise - glad that's been true for you; for others it just builds like a pressure cooker.

Oh I see, yeah I get that feeling too so I let myself have a blowout day once a month before it explodes by itself!
I get its not the same for everyone though. Bottom line is most of us struggle

I wonder if there are studies out there about why some people find it easy to resist food and others have to work very hard to not overeat? Could it be the gut microbiome, insulin response, psychological? A combination? I would love to know! Now I’ve just had a large, healthy lunch, no upf, protein and fibre rich with good fats. I’m still super hungry and have to fight against eating more. I eat over 2500 kcal a day so I’m not starving myself either even though it feels like it. It makes me feeling pissed off a lot of the time and it’s exhausting. I would be a happier person if I felt like I wasn’t starving and denying myself food all the time. I refuse to become fat though with all the negative health effects it comes with. Sigh I wish I could just eat what I wanted or not be hungry all the time. It does annoy me that some people complain they are fat but give in to eat shit. It’s not easy and I’m not lucky that I’ve got a healthy bmi, I have to work bloody hard eating healthy and exercising!

I am absolutely obsessed with food. I'm a size 16 but honestly it's a miracle I'm not bigger. Even to remain at a size 16 takes huge amounts of willpower. I absolutely hate that I think about food constantly...it's just a huge pain. I really don't want to be like this at all. I have been thin for quite long periods of my life but its a constant thought process...I can't turn my brain off from it.

I'd absolutely love to know why some people are like me and others are just not bothered about food so much

Anyway I've now started wli....it's so refreshing to stop thinking about food and not being that fussed about it. I've just made a huge cooked breakfast for DH and it would usually be absolute torture trying to resist picking something off his plate but I feel quite indifferent to it now.