Ep 69- How To Stop Food Noise

June 05, 2025

Let’s dive into food noise: what it is, where it comes from, and how to turn the volume down.

Whether you call it food obsession, food addiction, or just thinking about food all the time, this is your go-to episode for quieting the mental chatter so you can finally feel free around food.

You’ll learn:

• What exactly is food noise?

• The 4 root causes of food noise

• Real examples of what food noise sounds like (so you can spot it)

• The 3-step method to reduce food noise naturally without relying on willpower or medication

• How your phone might secretly be making it worse (no one talks about this!)

TRANSCRIPT:

 All right, confident eaters. Today we are talking about a highly requested topic, which is food noise.

Food noise has become such a popular term recently, and I wanna talk to you about how you can change the food noise that you have. So, as I mentioned, food noise is this relatively new term, but this experience of food noise has been around. For people for many years. It's something that I experience in my journey a lot and in the more medical sense, we might call it a food preoccupation where you are hyper-focused on food.

In my journey, I would say things like, I just think about food all the time, or I have this food obsession. I feel addicted to food. That is how I would describe my experience of food noise, but it's all kind of the same thing. Food noise is just thoughts about food. Now, we describe it as food noise because it tends to sound noisy.

It tends to sound loud and frequent and like our brain is consumed with these thoughts about food. But it's important to know that food noise is thoughts about food. It's not just like this random phenomenon. It's not a disease, it's not a disorder. It's just having thoughts about food that feel uncomfortable and that are frequent.

Where food noise comes from is from a few places. It can start from a place of a lot of rules. So if you have had a lot of food rules over the years where you've thought, I can't have any carbs, or I can only have one piece of bread, I'm only allowed x grams of sugar a day. I am not allowed to eat past 8:00 PM All of these rules that have accumulated over the years make eating really confusing and you hear all kinds of different advice from people that starts to cloud together until you are constantly thinking about your decisions around food.

Food noise can also come from perfectionism. So if you are always expecting the highest level of perfection around food, whatever that even means, because perfectionism around food will be different to everyone. But if you have this perfect standard of how you need to eat, then you're constantly going to be thinking about how you need to live up to that perfect standard.

This can happen in other areas of life too, if you have. A perfectionist mindset around work. My guess is you're constantly thinking about work, or if you have a perfectionistic mindset around being a mom, chances are you're always thinking about parenting and how you can show up better. So anytime we have a perfectionist mindset, our brain's going to hyperfocus on it to see how we can try to get to that goal.

But of course, because it is an unrealistic, perfect goal, we will always fail it. And we keep thinking about our failures, keep thinking about how we can be better. Food noise can come from not eating enough food. This is a very well researched, well backed phenomenon that we're not gonna dive into today fully.

But if you are not eating enough food, guess what? Your brain is going to tell you to eat more food. Think about it with something like water. If we go to long without water, we're probably gonna be thinking, Hey, I'm thirsty. Hey, I'm thirsty. And then if we go even longer without water, your brain's gonna start screaming at you.

Get water. You need to drink now. Same thing with any other body signal. If you go out in the cold and the first minute you go out in the cold, it's no big deal. It's a normal sensation to feel cold when it's 20 degrees outside. But if you continue to stay outside when it's 20 degrees, your brain is going to scream louder and louder at you to go inside, go inside, get warm, because it's trying to help you survive.

So the same thing will happen is if you are not getting enough calories, if you are not getting enough nutrition, if you are not getting enough of the macronutrients that you need in your diet. Your brain will yell at you and speak to you all day long telling you to get that. And the final reason food noise can come up is because of emotional avoidance.

So sometimes food thoughts will rush in when we are avoiding a feeling or a decision we don't want to face. So these food thoughts can act as a distraction to our brain to take away from what actually needs to be handled. So it's almost like a way of procrastination. A way of giving our brain something else important to focus on so our brain can learn, Hey, if I give you a lot of food thoughts, you don't have to do your work anymore because you'll be so consumed with food.

Or if you have all these food thoughts, you won't have to make the important decision about your marriage, whatever it is, they will come up to help pull you away from something else that you're avoiding or don't want to feel. So if we dive into a bit more specifically what food noise sounds like at first, people tend to think, I just wanna get rid of my food noise.

But what I wanna offer you is that the content of your food noise itself is what will help you stop binge eating. It is actually giving you a lot of really valuable insights through these food thoughts, right? Remember, food noise is just thoughts about food. So I want you to ask yourself, what are my specific thoughts about food?

And some examples based on all of my old food noise I will go through right now. I'm sure you can relate to some of these, so make sure if you are wanting the recap of this episode, you go to the show notes and I'm going to have the worksheet in my podcast worksheet bundle. It's totally free, but it's gonna help recap and I'll probably add all of these thoughts in here just so you can look at them and you can decide which thoughts are coming up for you.

So the first thing that came up for me was a lot of questions going through my mind. That was the food noise of when am I going to eat again? What did I eat yesterday? Did I eat too much? What's for lunch today is having a cup of rice. Too much. Isn't nut butter too high in calories? Should I buy the sugar-free maple syrup or the normal one?

Do bananas have too much sugar? Am I restricting if I leave food behind or I don't have a snack today? Is snacking bad? What restaurant? Are we going to dinner tomorrow? What will I order? What if I overeat? How will I be good on our vacation coming up? What rules can I make to keep myself on track? So there was a lot of questions running through my brain that were unanswered.

A lot of the times if I had binge the night before, I would be beating myself up in my head all day. So my food noise then sounded like, why can't I stop this? I hate myself. I can't believe I did this again. I have to do better today. How can I do better today? Let me make a plan of all of the things I'm going to eat to be good.

Not in like a helpful sense of making a plan. My plan was very strict of how I was gonna get back on track. Then if I was in the middle of a strong craving or what I call an urge, my food noise sounded much louder. It sounded like someone yelling at me. The voice got more frantic. It was almost like an angry gremlin in my mind.

So these food noise thoughts sounded like, eat it now, or you might not get it again. We will have to be good tomorrow. So let's be bad now. Just binge one last time. I can't handle this urge. It's too hard. If there was a certain food that I really wanted, maybe brownies, I would be thinking about. There's brownies downstairs in the cabinet and I'd start visualizing eating them.

So if you've ever wondered what I do in coaching, this is it. I hope you look at all of these thoughts and urges around food, which are the root cause of your binge eating. You can probably already start to see, oh my gosh, yes, I have all these thoughts, and that's what's leading me to think about food all day.

And in coaching, we make changing them easy through a variety of techniques based in neuroscience and psychology. Now a big mistake I'll see people making is just trying to push these thoughts away, and when you try to push these thoughts away, they just get stronger. Just like any of our emotions, the harder we push them down, the bigger they'll come up like a beach ball.

So if we're trying to push these thoughts away, they're just gonna come back because our brain's trying to communicate to us something in that moment, trying to help us figure out how to eat. It's trying to get us to eat food if we are restricting it, is trying to make sure we have enough. It is trying to ignore an emotion that we don't want to feel, but we want to listen to these thoughts and what they are saying because they're gonna give us that intel.

On how to start changing our food noise and ultimately how to stop binge eating, which is what we all want here. So this is how you are going to stop your food noise naturally without ozempic, without a GLP one, how you can change your brain and rewire it to have less food noise. So the first thing you're gonna do is identify your food thoughts, right?

So just as all of those example thoughts I listed out I want you to find for yourself. What specifically are my food thoughts? Maybe you keep a piece of paper by you throughout the day, or you open up your notes app on your phone, and when you start to feel like I'm getting a lot of food noise right now, I want you to write down what are the thoughts that are contained within that bubble of food noise.

Two, we need to change the quality of your food thoughts. Yes, I understand that you wanna think about food less, but for most people I work with, you'll start to realize that if you just had more positive thoughts around food, it wouldn't bother you so much. A lot of the reason we wanna get rid of the food noise is because these thoughts around food are so stressful.

They bring up so much anxiety, they're so distracting because there's such negative thoughts around food, right? And they have so much confusion around them. So if instead you thought different thoughts about food, you might realize that it doesn't even bother you to think about food. It just bothered you the way you were thinking about food.

I still think about food today. Natural eaters still think about food. It is not like I go through my day and it is like the only thought I have about food is 10 seconds before I feel hungry. I think, okay, I'm hungry. I eat and then I'm done. It's simpler thoughts around food and I definitely have less thoughts about food now, but.

We still are gonna think about food just like we sometimes think about water. You might have to plan out, when am I gonna have water today? Oh, I'm thirsty. When can I go get water? I'm drinking water. I'm enjoying this. Right? So there's still gonna be some thoughts around food, but we're just gonna change what they are like, and over time they are going to lessen.

So what if you had the answer to all of your questions around food? What if you thought there are no morally good or bad foods? What if you thought I know how to learn from my slipups? I've got this. I can handle my urges. They're no big deal. Then you probably wouldn't mind the thoughts about food so much because they would be encouraging, they'd be motivating, they'd be helping you get to where you want to be.

Okay? So the second step to kind of recap that is to make sure that once you have identified your food thoughts, that you are going to be shifting them to something that is more positive. And then finally, the third step is to change the quantity of the foods thoughts. So this is where we're gonna start to think about food less now.

This can happen over many, many months. It can take a while to start to decrease how often our food thoughts are coming up. A lot of times we have to create enough safety for our brain, because right now, if it's scared that you're gonna restrict again, if it's scared that you're gonna diet again, if it's scared of giving up, binge eating.

It's nervous to let that go. It's not going to decrease your food thoughts. So this is, again, something we do in coaching is we work on creating a psychological safety in your brain based on your unique history with food. And when we do that, your brain feels comfortable letting go of these food thoughts.

Now, there is a really interesting consideration here that I thought of, which I have never heard anyone talk about, which is how our phone technology and social media impacts our food noise. When you are on your phone all day long, scrolling on Instagram, on Facebook, listening to podcasts on TikTok, reading an article, your brain is being flooded with so much information and ideas from so many different sources.

And I know this can feel helpful at first because it can feel like you're learning, but a lot of times people just come to me so confused because they haven't decided what approach they wanna take. And so they keep hearing all of this different information on how to eat, and it feels so confusing to them.

So part of food noise happens because that noise is other people's voices. It's all of the influencers and people you're seeing and hearing online that are telling you how to eat, how much to eat, what to eat, and this has all led you to becoming more disconnected with your own body and your wisdom is not going to be there, especially when you are not already grounded in your own values and body signals.

It's much easier to be swayed than when other people's opinions come into your feed. When you don't have your own opinions about what you want for your body and how you want to eat, not to mention this disconnection often creates a really vicious cycle because the more confused and overwhelmed you feel, the more you search for answers and the louder the food noise becomes.

So I really recommend going on social media less in your phone in general, which I know can be a difficult task. And you can go check out, I have an episode. On the podcast on six lessons on moderation. For more information on how you can cut back your phone time, I'll put the link to that in the show notes.

I want you to choose a handful of like two to three people. That you want to follow Max to listen to for advice and information that you fully trust in that empower you to make your own decision. If you are following someone who tells you they have the solution of how much and what your unique body needs run away, because no one could ever know exactly what your unique body needs.

And so you need to learn instead the skills of how you can trust your own body and instead make your own decisions. That's what you want to be taught. So find someone who teaches you to tune into your own wisdom so you can rebuild that trust and stop feeling confused and help us all the time. Okay? And if that is what you're wanting, that is what I do with my clients.

I help you relearn your own body signals, your hunger and fullness. So you don't need me forever. I want you to learn how to trust your own body so you can go out into the world and live your best life as a natural, normal eater. So that is what I have for you today on how to Stop the Food Noise. Again, go check out the podcast Worksheet bundle in the show notes to dive deeper with this episode.

And if you want more support, you can also go to the show notes to find out how you can work with me to stop the food noise for good.