Food Noise: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Food
Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.
Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.
Today’s episode begins with a simple question: How much time do you spend thinking about food? Most of us have never stopped to consider the answer. Today, I want to explore why that question matters and what it can reveal about the way food has come to occupy our attention.
This is Episode 17- Food Noise: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Food
When the Noise Got Quiet
Hello and welcome back.
In the last episode, we explored how hyper-palatable foods are engineered to capture our attention and keep us coming back for more. We discussed how the combination of sugar, fat, salt, flavor enhancers, and food technology can override the body’s natural systems of hunger and fullness. More importantly, we discussed the possibility that many of the struggles people experience around food are not evidence of weakness, but predictable responses to an environment designed to encourage consumption.
At the end of that episode, I mentioned the term food noise.
Over the last few years, that term has become increasingly common in conversations surrounding GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound. People have described an unexpected experience when first starting these medications. While the headlines focus on weight loss, many users describe a quieting of the constant mental chatter around food.
What fascinated me was not the medication itself, but the language people used. Again and again, people who had never met one another described the same experiences. They talked about food taking up less space in their minds. They described feeling relief. Some realized, for the first time, that not everyone spends as much time thinking about food as they do. Others described it as though a radio that had been playing in the background for years had suddenly had the volume turned down. I describe it as finally being able to stop thinking about the four pieces of pizza left in the box simply because I’m no longer hungry.
Listening to those stories and feeling exactly the same way is what made me think: How much time do we actually spend thinking about food? Most of us have never stopped to measure it. We simply assume it’s normal.
That raises an interesting psychological question. If millions of people are suddenly discovering that food can occupy less mental space than they thought possible, what exactly was occupying the space in the first place? What is food noise? Where does it come from? Why do some people experience it more intensely than others?
And perhaps most importantly, what if this constant preoccupation with food is not simply an individual problem to solve, but a predictable response to the world we live in?
What Is Food Noise?
Before we talk about where food noise comes from, we need to understand what it actually is. Because food noise is not the same thing as hunger, and understanding that distinction may be one of the most important parts of this conversation.
Hunger is a biological signal. It’s your body’s way of communicating that it needs energy. Hunger can build gradually over time, and for most of human history, it served a practical purpose. It motivated us to seek food, eat enough to survive, and then move on with our lives.
Food noise is something different. It’s a mental preoccupation with food that can exist whether you’re physically hungry or not. It is the running commentary in the background of your day. It is the constant awareness of food, the planning, the bargaining, the anticipation, the cravings, and sometimes, and most of the time, if you live inside my head, it’s the guilt that accompanies it.
For some, food noise shows up as thinking about lunch while they are still eating breakfast. For others, it appears as the promise that tomorrow will be different. It can look like scrolling through recipes despite having no intention of cooking, or like when I watched the Food Network on most days, thinking that I was absorbing chef skills, but really I was only indulging my food noise.
It can also look like wandering into the kitchen when you’re not hungry or feeling distracted by thoughts of food when your attention is needed elsewhere. The experience varies from person to person, but the common thread is that food occupies more mental space than seems reasonable.
What’s interesting is that many people who experience food noise don’t necessarily expect it to disappear. It becomes part of the background of daily life. That is why so many people were surprised when the noise became quieter. For the first time, they experienced a different relationship with food and realized that the noise wasn’t as inevitable as they once believed.
Psychologists have long understood that our attention is influenced by more than biological need, because humans are highly responsive to the cues in their environment. We notice things that have been associated with reward, pleasure, comfort, and survival. Many people walking past a bakery may suddenly think about an almond croissant, despite having eaten an hour ago. Some watching television may find themselves craving a product they had no interest in before the commercial appeared. Think about the millions of dollars advertisers spend on Super Bowl commercials— McDonald’s, Domino’s, Snickers— and how DoorDash can deliver it to your door in under thirty minutes. The industry knows the power of how attention, memory, emotion, and reward interact.
Food is uniquely powerful because it sits at the intersection of biology and psychology. We need it to survive, but we also attach meaning to it. Over time, our brains become very efficient at linking food to emotional experiences. The result is that food begins to occupy mental territory extending far beyond simple nourishment.
Researchers have increasingly recognized that food noise appears to operate primarily within our hedonic hunger system. It’s often less about the body’s need for calories and nutrition and more about the brain’s anticipation of a rewarding experience. That distinction matters because it shifts the conversation away from the idea that people only eat because they’re hungry.
The more we learn about eating behavior, the more difficult it becomes to reduce it to a simple matter of choice. Food noise doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It develops within a culture where food is always available, relentlessly advertised, and constantly competing for our attention. Every day we’re surrounded by cues designed to keep food on our minds, whether we’re hungry or not.
Yet despite all of that complexity, many people still treat food noise as a personal failing. They assume that their preoccupation with food means they’re flawed.
But perhaps the better question is: If so many people experience food noise, why are we treating it as an individual problem? What if it isn’t a reflection of personal weakness or poor choices? What if it is a predictable response to the environment we've created around food?
To answer those questions, we need to look at how food became more than food and how an entire industry learned to compete for one of the most valuable resources we have: our attention.
The Food Industry Didn’t Sell Food
If food noise is partly a product of the environment around us, then it's worth asking how that environment came to be.
Most of us think of food as something simple. We think of food as nourishment, fuel, or pleasure. We assume that food companies are primarily in the business of selling products people want to eat.
But over the last several decades, something changed.
Beginning in the 1980s, tobacco companies began purchasing food companies. Philip Morris acquired General Foods, and later Kraft, while R.J. Reynolds acquired Nabisco. These were not random acquisitions.
The goal was not only to sell food but to sell products people would continue to buy. The tobacco industry had already invested enormous resources in understanding what captured attention, created desire, and encouraged repeat behavior. Those same principles proved incredibly valuable in the food industry.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because we touched on it in the last episode when we discussed hyper-palatable foods and how they can override many of the body’s natural signals of hunger and fullness.
What these companies understood was that attention drives behavior. The longer a product occupies space in your mind, the more likely you are to buy it. The more often you buy it, the more profitable their product becomes. Food companies weren’t just competing for shelf space in grocery stores. They were competing for space in your mind.
For most of human history, obtaining food required effort. Growing it, hunting it, gathering it, preserving it, preparing it— food demanded time and energy. The flip side of that thought is that resisting food often requires effort today. That’s a remarkable shift.
Think about how food appears in modern life. It’s on television, social media, billboards, podcasts, streaming services, sporting events, and even the apps on our phones. A few taps on the app, and the food can be delivered to our doorsteps in less time than it takes to watch an episode of a TV show.
That helps explain why food noise is not simply an individual experience. It exists within an environment specifically designed to keep food visible, accessible, and competing for our attention.
There is a predictable outcome when an entire system becomes exceptionally skilled at driving consumption. Rising rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic illness did not emerge by accident. And as those conditions became more common, another industry was preparing to profit from the consequences.
The Business of Appetite
As food became increasingly profitable, so did many of the health conditions associated with overconsumption. Obesity rates climbed, Type 2 diabetes became more common, and metabolic dysfunction became increasingly widespread.
Of course, no single food company caused these outcomes, and no single factor explains them. Human health is always more complicated than that— genetics, stress, sleep, socioeconomic factors, and lifestyle matter. When I look at my own family, I see all of those influences at work. Heart disease and Type 2 diabetes affected generation after generation, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to create this series in the first place.
But it would also be difficult to ignore the role of an environment that encourages people to think about purchasing and consuming more food than at any other point in human history.
The pharmaceutical industry did not create food noise or hyper-palatable foods, but it found itself in a position to treat many of the consequences associated with them. Medications for high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, and weight loss, plus an ever-growing list of treatments, became part of the modern healthcare landscape.
Then came GLP-1 medications.
While these drugs were originally developed for Type 2 diabetes, they quickly became part of a much larger conversation about weight, appetite, and food. What made them particularly interesting was not simply their effect on body weight but their effect on attention.
Again and again, people described a quieting of food noise. They talked about feeling less preoccupied with food. Less distracted by cravings. Less consumed by the constant mental negotiation around eating.
If you have food noise and you have never tried a GLP-1 medication, I would like to tell you about my experience.
For nearly four decades, I was a sheep, blindly following diet culture’s herd mentality. I counted points, logged calories in apps, and readied my restaurant menu order, even before walking through the doors. I clung to the hope that the next diet would finally unlock lasting health and happiness, and I tried to control my body by controlling food.
Over time, points, calories, and “good” and “bad” foods became a constant tug-of-war between control and chaos. I told myself it was discipline, but really it was just mental noise. I’ve been overweight for a long time. The weight didn’t come on from a hard year or a loss; it accumulated through seasons of stress, boredom, and the relentless background chatter in my brain. Thinking about food, planning it, avoiding it, and negotiating with it built into a cacophony that never seemed to quiet. For years, that was simply my normal.
That cycle defined me. But then I learned everything I have been telling you in the last two episodes. I had to look honestly at the ultra-processed foods I was eating, the poor sleep I was normalizing, and the chronic inflammation I was living with. The real epiphany came when I understood that stress elevates cortisol, increasing cravings and fat storage, and I finally realized that my body wasn’t broken but adaptive.
Then a prescription for a GLP-1 entered my world, and the background chatter of food noise stopped. It felt like winning the lottery or discovering a cure. If that sounds hyperbolic, trust me: when you’ve lived with constant food noise for decades, its silence feels miraculous, spacious, and calm. I felt “normal,” whatever that means.
And for many people, it was the first time they experienced the kind of freedom they had hoped for most of their lives. The constant mental chatter around food became quiet. Cravings no longer demanded the same attention. The negotiating, the planning, and the guilt began to loosen their grip. For me, it felt as though a chokehold I had lived with for decades had finally been released. I could breathe easily. It was life-changing.
GLP-1s have improved health markers, reduced disease risk, and, in some cases, even reduced interest in behaviors such as smoking, alcohol use, and gambling. Researchers are still learning exactly why this happens, but it appears these medications influence some of the same reward pathways involved in craving and anticipation. For many people, the result is a quieter relationship not only with food, but with reward itself.
The popularity of these medications has revealed that the conversation about obesity has never been only about weight. It’s also about appetite, attention, reward, environment, and the stories we tell ourselves about self-control.
Perhaps the most interesting thing GLP-1 medications have done is force us to recognize the nature of the problem itself.
If millions of people have suddenly discovered that the noise has quieted, then maybe the question we should ask is: why was the noise so loud to begin with?
The Question Nobody Is Asking
For decades, the conversation about weight has revolved around a single question: How do I lose it?
Entire industries have been built around answering that question. Diet books, fitness programs, apps, influencers, and even healthcare providers have focused on helping people reduce a number on a scale.
Success is often measured in pounds lost, calories counted, clothing sizes, and before-and-after photos. Yet after everything we've discussed in this series, I can't help but wonder if we've been asking the wrong question all along.
What if the most important question isn't how much weight you want to lose? What if the more meaningful question is what kind of relationship you want to have with food? Those are not the same things. One focuses on an outcome, while the other focuses on an experience. One is concerned with changing a body, while the other is concerned with changing the way we live inside that body every day.
When we talk about food noise, we rarely describe a desire to become obsessed with nutrition, calories, or weight loss. What we describe is the feeling of carrying an extra mental burden. It’s the realization that an extraordinary amount of attention has been devoted to food, weight, dieting, and body image for years, sometimes decades.
That’s what makes food noise such an important concept. It shifts the conversation away from weight and toward attention. The real cost of food noise is not simply what it may do to our waistline or our health markers, but to the amount of mental space it occupies. Over time, that mental occupation becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it, even as it crowds out other things that matter just as much, if not more.
One of the most interesting things people describe when food noise becomes quieter is not simply eating less, but they realize they have more room. More room to focus on work, relationships, hobbies, goals, and experiences that have nothing to do with food. Many describe feeling present in a way they haven't felt for years.
Perhaps that is why this conversation matters. Food noise isn't only about food. It's about attention, and wherever our attention goes, a piece of our life goes with it. We become what we repeatedly attend to.
Before the Rules
I've learned that awareness rarely changes our lives in a single dramatic moment. More often, it changes the questions we ask.
For years, many of us have approached food as a problem to solve. We searched for the right diet, the right plan, the right amount of willpower, believing that if we could just find the missing piece, everything would finally fall into place. But food noise invites a different conversation.
Instead of asking how to control food, we might begin by asking what role we want food to play in our lives. Instead of viewing every craving as a failure and every indulgence as a setback, we can become curious about the forces that influence our choices. Curiosity often takes us farther than criticism ever will.
Once we recognize the systems, environments, habits, and patterns shaping our relationship with food, we are no longer operating entirely on autopilot. We may not control every influence around us, but we can begin making decisions with a clearer understanding of what we're responding to and why.
We stop asking, "What's wrong with me?" and start asking better questions. Questions rooted in understanding rather than shame.
And that shift in questioning brings me back to where this series began.
Before the points, the calories, the apps, the diets, and the endless advice about what we should and shouldn't eat, eating was much simpler. There was hunger. There was fullness. There was pleasure. There was nourishment.
Over time, many of us stopped trusting those signals. Food became tangled up with stress, comfort, identity, reward, expectations, and rules. Somewhere along the way, eating became far more complicated, and we became disconnected from ourselves.
What I hope you take from this episode, and from this series so far, is not a new set of rules. The world has plenty of rules about food. What it often lacks is understanding. Understanding that many of the struggles we carry around food are not signs of weakness, but human responses to complex influences that most of us rarely stop to examine.
Awareness doesn't solve every problem. It doesn't magically remove cravings, erase habits, or make healthy choices effortless. What it does provide is perspective. And perspective has a way of changing the conversation we have with ourselves.
There was a version of you — before the noise, before the rules, before food became something to negotiate with every single day — who knew how to eat. Who trusted hunger and recognized fullness and didn't spend cognitive energy bargaining with oneself over dinner.
That person isn't gone. They’ve just had a lot of noise layered over them.
And understanding — real understanding, not another rule — is how we begin to find our way back.
Close
In the next episode, we're going to move from the outside in. If the system was built to hijack your appetite, what does that actually look like inside your brain? Episode 18 looks at the neuroscience of why you eat. We will take a deeper dive into dopamine, stress chemistry, and the real emotional grip that willpower has on us.
That’s next on The Original Self Podcast.
Thank you for spending this time with me. If you’d like to learn more about working with me, you’ll find information in the episode notes.
Until next time, take good care of yourself.
