Is Food Noise Just Hunger We’ve Been Conditioned Not to Trust? A RDs Honest - Yet Controversial Take

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: In today’s episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, we’re taking a deep dive into “food noise” and whether we’re starting to pathologize normal hunger, cravings, and thoughts about food. We unpack the many factors that can drive food preoccupation, from appetite and reward pathways to genetics, restriction, rigid food rules, and eating disorders, plus why GLP-1 medications may quiet food noise for very different reasons. Most importantly, I’m sharing seven questions to help you understand where your own food noise may be coming from and whether quieting it is actually improving your relationship with food—or simply making it easier to eat less. #foodnoise #GLP1 #Ozempic #dietculture #intuitiveeating #eatingdisorder #nutrition 👩🏼‍💻 RESEARCH LINKS: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41387-025-00382-x.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01941-w https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15930436/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39649010/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eat.70090 — DISCLAIMER:The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. — 📚 GRAB MY BOOK: The Hunger Crushing Combo Method ⤵️ Learn how to reach your healthiest weight without dieting using evidence based nutrition strategies. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306836793?tag=hacboogrosit-20 More purchase options: https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo/ 🎙 LISTEN TO BITE BACK WITH ABBEY SHARP ⤵️ Real conversations about nutrition, wellness, diet culture, parenting, and the biggest food debates. https://lnk.to/Bite-Back?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=social ⭐ Enjoying the podcast? Follow Bite Back on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're enjoying the show, leaving a rating or review really helps support it! ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER https://abbeyskitchen.myflodesk.com/kd6ijl0y3e 🥞 FREE Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo/ 💪 FREE Protein 101 Guide https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/protein-intake-recommendations/ 📖 MY FIRST COOKBOOK: The Mindful Glow Cookbook Amazon: https://amzn.to/2nev0lf 👩🏼‍💻 COACHING: 🍽️ Feeding Kids Without Diet Culture Webinar Raise confident eaters without food battles, guilt, or diet culture. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 📈 Business Coaching Build and grow your online brand with proven social media and business strategies. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 🤝 Personalized One-on-One Coaching Tailored support for content creation, business growth, podcasting, AI, brand partnerships, and more. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 📱 FOLLOW ME @AbbeysKitchen Instagram: www.instagram.com/AbbeysKitchen TikTok: www.tiktok.com/AbbeysKitchen Facebook: www.facebook.com/AbbeysKitchen Pinterest: https://ca.pinterest.com/AbbeysKitchen 🌐 VISIT MY WEBSITE Healthy recipes, nutrition resources, parenting advice, and evidence based articles. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com 💬 If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a comment below with your thoughts and let me know what you'd like to see next! With Science & Sass, Xoxo Abbey 🌸 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Abbey Sharp?

  Your body might not be broken, it just might be grossly underfed.

• 0:40Abbey Sharp?

  Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning this pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Today, we are talking about food noise, a now widely recognized phrase that I have some very complicated feelings about. Because on the one hand, it has given people language for something that is genuinely so exhausting. So the constant mental chatter about food, cravings, rules, guilt, and what you are going to eat next. And that validation is critical for evidence-based obesity care. But not unlike a lot of other well-intentioned concepts,

• 1:25Abbey Sharp?

  it has very quickly been co-opted by diet culture and the wellness industry to make normal appetite, hunger, cravings, and even pleasure sound like psychological symptoms that need to be snuffed out. In today's solo episode, we're going to be interrogating this new mainstream phase food noise. And instead of simply asking, "How do we eradicate or fix it?", we're going to ask, "How much of it actually needs fixing? And how much of it is simply a critical survival tool that we've been socialized to distrust?" Okay, friend, I also want to remind you that if you are not already, I would really appreciate if you would hit that follow button so you get notifications

• 2:09Abbey Sharp?

  whenever I release a new episode. And if you want more visual diet culture discussions, check out my social platforms @Abby'sKitchen. All right, friend, let's get into it. Okay, so I usually like to set the stage in these conversations with some clear definitions. But according to our 2025 paper in the International Journal of Obesity, it isn't so cut and dry here as our scientific definition of food noise hasn't yet caught up to its cultural use. But generally, when people say "food noise", they are usually talking about the persistent, intrusive, unwanted, or hard-to-ignore thoughts about food. That can include cravings, urges to eat,

• 2:54Abbey Sharp?

  preoccupation with what you're going to eat next, difficulty feeling satisfied, or the feeling that food is taking up more mental real estate than you would like it to. And while we're still very early in scientific discussions around food noise explicitly, the GLP-1 receptor agonist boom has stimulated a lot of interest in its pathology. So let's talk about the biological side of food noise. So the appetite, satiety, reward, and cue reactivity pathways that GLP-1 medications seem to influence. So right now, we know that GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic induce weight loss by reducing energy intake, partially by slowing gastric emptying,

• 3:39Abbey Sharp?

  partially by improving glucose regulation, and, most important to this conversation, by acting on brain reward circuits like the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and the mesolimbic dopamine system. So one of the results here is that food cues, which are a key driver of food noise, just feel less urgent and less magnetic. Now, a lot of research in this area has been on animal models, but we actually did just get an early human study on folks with severe obesity and binge eating type symptoms, where they used implanted brain electrodes to track the reward center activities. The researchers found

• 4:23Abbey Sharp?

  that severe food preoccupation was associated with low-frequency activity in the nucleus accumbens, and that the GLP-1 tier zepatide at least temporarily helped to suppress it. And while we're a long way from explicitly testing everyone's nucleus accumbens for abnormal activity, we are slowly inching towards establishing kind of food noise genes that seem to play a role in taste perception, appetite and satiety, emotional eating, disinhibition, snacking, craving, and binge eating. Some of our best research so far has been on the genes that affect the leptin-melanocortin pathway,

• 5:07Abbey Sharp?

  like variants of the MC4R gene, which has been associated with emotional eating, food cravings, binge eating, and hedonic eating. FTO is another famous obesity-associated gene related to satiety responsiveness and preference for energy-dense foods. Now, we're still a long way from establishing an explicit "food noise phenotype", but there is a lot of interest in using gene mapping to help determine who may be the most likely to benefit from GLP-1s based on their biology. But not all food noise can be pinned on a pathological reward circuit disruption. This is where we need to address

• 5:51Abbey Sharp?

  the well-established role of restriction in amplifying food noise. One of the earliest and most famous studies to explain the impact of deprivation on food preoccupation was the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. In this arguably unethical study, 36 healthy men were put through a period of severe caloric restriction. So I'm talking like half their calorie needs plus 22 miles of walking per week. And again, these were healthy men in healthy baseline body weights with no histories of disordered eating. Within weeks, they became deeply obsessed with food. So they collected recipes and cookbooks,

• 6:34Abbey Sharp?

  they talked compulsively about their favorite meals, they developed rigid and strange food rituals and habits like hoarding, stealing, and sneaking food. And when they did get access to food during the refeeding phase, they binged to the point of making themselves sick. And perhaps most shockingly, the food noise didn't just disappear the moment that they were re-fed. For some men, appetite dysregulation, obsessive food thoughts, and binge-like urges persisted years into recovery, helping researchers understand that the psychological effects of restriction can well outlast the restriction itself. And this is why I think the Minnesota study

• 7:19Abbey Sharp?

  is still so relevant to the food noise conversation today. Because it shows that food preoccupation can be generated by deprivation. It can be a response to scarcity. It can be the brain basically doing exactly what it's supposed to do when it thinks that food access is threatened. So before we can call every intrusive food thought a pathology, we really have to ask, "Has this person's body, brain, or food environment been giving them a reason to feel deeply deprived?". And here's the ugly truth that modern wellness culture doesn't like to address. You don't need to be physically starving for food to become very loud.

• 8:04Abbey Sharp?

  Psychological restriction is basically what happens when a food is technically available but emotionally forbidden. So you can eat the cookie, but only if it's gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, seed oil-free, and fortified with organic protein and fiber. And what the restraint literature suggests is that rigid food rules, even when they don't result in severe caloric restriction, often result in hyperfixation, obsession, and eventually, a binge. And this is a really important part of the conversation that people love to ignore because we might be able to recognize food noise when it sounds like,

• 8:43Speaker 02

  "I'm hungry all the time, and I can't stop thinking about chips."

• 8:46Abbey Sharp?

  But culturally, we might normalize or even morally celebrate food noise when it sounds like,

• 8:54Speaker 02

  "I can't stop thinking about whether these chips were fried in canola oil instead of coconut."

• 8:59Abbey Sharp?

  And we do this even when the follow-up thoughts are massively distressing. So we may think, "Well, what does it say about me if I eat the processed chips? Will I lose control if I eat the chips? Maybe I should just give my friends a lecture about why seed oils are so bad? Oh, never mind, I already had two. I guess the day is completely ruined. I might as well eat like three bags." This is a pattern that we often see in eating disorders like orthorexia, where the original goal might be less about caloric control and more about perceived diet quality control, but the volume of the food noise might be equally as loud.

• 9:39Abbey Sharp?

  So if food noise can stem from deprivation, from forbidden foods, from rigid food rules, from the anxiety of trying to eat "perfectly", and from clinical eating disorders, then the solution cannot be to just simply turn appetite off. And to be clear, this does not mean that GLP-1s could never have a role in someone with binge eating disorder, or binge restrict cycling, or severe reward-driven food preoccupation. I mean, this is actually an emerging area of research. And for some people, reducing the intensity of urges may create space for healing. But in eating disorder care, context is everything. And for a lot of folks with eating disorder tendencies

• 10:24Abbey Sharp?

  or eating disorders, simply turning appetite off could be devastatingly dangerous. Under normal, non-medicated circumstances, under eating often triggers critical body data that something is not right. So you might feel irritable, or ravenous, foggy, have a preoccupation with food, or feel that you are consumed by cravings. And as uncomfortable as those symptoms may be, they're also really good information, right? They tell us that the body is fighting back. But if you pharmacologically suppress appetite and food preoccupation, someone might think, "Oh, I'm finally recovered.

• 11:09Abbey Sharp?

  I'm finally in control." When, in reality, their brain might just not be getting the message that it's time to fight. It's like taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm while the house is still on fire. Like, if survival is the goal, that's not what you want. And unfortunately, widespread access makes all of this a lot more scary. You know, a lot of folks taking GLP-1s are not being carefully screened and followed by an eating disorder-informed medical team. They might just be filling out a brief online form and getting the medication delivered to their door. And because eating disorders are already illnesses of concealment and deception,

• 11:51Abbey Sharp?

  it is not hard for someone who is actively struggling to minimize their symptoms, manipulate a screener, or present restriction as health goals. You know, in pro-ANA and disordered eating online spaces, people are openly discussing Ozempic, Wegovy, Mongero, and compound and semaglutide as tools to suppress hunger, and eat less, and fake eligibility, and just make restriction a hell of a lot easier. Now, that does not mean that every person using a GLP-1 is misusing it, but it does mean that the same drug that can relieve one person's debilitating food preoccupation can become a symptom-enabling tool for another.

• 12:35Abbey Sharp?

  And to make all of this even more complicated to figure out a method of safe, responsible prescription and use, we also have to acknowledge that for a lot of people, food noise isn't just the result of reward signal dysfunction or diet culture, but often, it's the intersection of the two at once. So people who may be genetically more prone to stronger hunger, lower satiety, higher food reward, bigger cravings, and more food cue reactivity are often the very people who were told from childhood that their appetite was too much, that their body was too big, that their hunger needed to be controlled.

• 13:18Abbey Sharp?

  So they spent years engaging in disordered eating behaviors while trying to out-discipline an appetite system that may already be more sensitive. And over time, that just creates this impossible loop, right? So the biological predisposition makes food louder, the person restricts to manage it, the restriction makes food noise even louder, and then the increased food noise gets interpreted as proof that they cannot be trusted around food. And that means that screening can't just be like, "What's your BMI? Have you ever been diagnosed with anorexia? Are you trying to lose weight?"

• 13:59Abbey Sharp?

  Like, it needs to be asking about things like weight cycling, binge-restrict patterns, fasting, purging, laxative or diuretic use, compulsive exercise, fear of weight gain, body checking, safe foods, social avoidance, guilt after eating, orthorexic rules, and whether the person is hoping the medication will help them nourish themselves more consistently or simply help them eat as little as possible. Because two people can both say, "I want less food noise", and mean completely different things. So in my professional opinion, if we want these drugs to be used safely, we need to shift the goal from simply eliminating food noise to creating enough mental space

• 14:44Abbey Sharp?

  for nourishment, flexibility, body trust, and a more peaceful relationship with food. And that brings me to what I want to leave you with. Because if you're watching or listening right now, you probably have or have had a complicated relationship with food. And until we have more sophisticated testing, screening, and best-practice guidance, we are basically at best just making an estimated guess about whether a medication like Ozempic is the right antidote to your food noise. But I want to leave you with some questions to ask yourself to try to tease apart your food noise origin story before you jump into a GLP-1. First, when is food noise the loudest?

• 15:29Abbey Sharp?

  Is it super loud when you skip breakfast, delay lunch, cut carbs, eat "clean", track your calories, or make your favorite foods off limits? If your answer is yes, your food noise may be less about a broken reward circuit and more about the fact that your body or brain does not feel fed safe or permitted. Second, what does the food noise actually sound like? Is it saying, "I want that food, but if I eat it, I failed"? Or is it more like an intrusive, compulsive pull towards a food that persists even when you are adequately fed and not restricting? Because those are very different kinds of noise

• 16:13Abbey Sharp?

  that likely need very different kinds of care. Third, does eating enough make the food noise better or worse? If consistent meals with adequate fat, protein, carbs, total energy, and satisfaction starts to quiet the noise, it suggests that the antidote may not be appetite suppression, but appetite permission. And if the noise persists even when you are regularly fed, physically satisfied, and not living under rigid food rules, then maybe there's something else to explore here, whether that be ADHD, trauma, stress, sleep, metabolic health, medication effects, or reward sensitivity.

• 16:56Abbey Sharp?

  Fourth, what are you hoping the medication will do? Are you hoping that it will reduce the chaos enough that you can eat more consistently, binge less, care for your health, and make a more peaceful relationship with food? Or are you hoping that it will help you want less, need less, eat less, weigh less, and finally become the kind of person who doesn't have to think about nourishment at all? Because those might sound similar on the surface, but psychologically, they are very different goals. Fifth, would you still want help for your food noise even if weight loss was not part of the outcome? If you genuinely want more peace,

• 17:38Abbey Sharp?

  less compulsion, less distress, more flexibility, and a life that is not organized around food, I would say that pharmacological options are definitely worth exploring with your doctor. But if the main appeal is that the medication may make restriction easier, or weight loss a lot faster, then we may just want to dive a little bit deeper and be honest about whether or not this is actually about healing food noise. Yes, a weight loss goal on its own may be absolutely warranted, depending on all of the other factors, but it might also just be diet culture or disordered eating looking for a stronger tool. And that's worth exploring. Sixth, is your life expanding or shrinking? Since trying to manage your food noise,

• 18:23Abbey Sharp?

  whether through dieting, rules, tracking, supplements, or medication, are you eating with more flexibility, improved consistency, less guilt, and feeling more present in your body and your life? Or are you avoiding more foods and socializing less, becoming more rigid, body checking more, fearing hunger more, or feeling proud of how little you can get by on? Because recovery should make your life bigger, not smaller. And finally, if the food noise got quiet, what would you do to fill that space? Would you use it to build trust with your body, practice eating enough, reintroduce fear foods, reduce shame, and create a more stable relationship with nourishment?

• 19:08Abbey Sharp?

  Or would you capitalize on the quiet to restrict further, eat less, and shrink as quickly and dramatically as possible? As someone who has been a loud supporter of these medications for the right people, I believe that the goal should not be to simply shut your body up, but to better understand the messages your body has been trying to give you. And if a medication helps turn the volume down enough for you to listen with more compassion, support, and clarity, that may be a really meaningful tool. But if it turns the volume down so you can ignore your body even more efficiently, that is not food freedom. That, my friends, is just a quieter cage.

• 19:51Abbey Sharp?

  And on that note, that is all for today's episode of Bite Back. If this resonated with you, I would love if you would send this to someone who has ever thought their appetite was their enemy. And if you want more evidence-based anti-diet conversations that still let us be critical, curious, and occasionally a little petty about wellness culture, definitely make sure that you're subscribed. But signing off with Science and SaaS, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening. And here's the legal language here, folks. But everything that you saw or heard in this episode is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is never a replacement for medical advice. So I always recommend working one-on-one with a healthcare provider for your unique needs.