On why I am writing this.

Saturday night, I turned to my husband and asked if he knew about “food noise.”

He looked confused.

Earlier in the day, I’d been talking on Zoom with women who are paid subscribers to this newsletter. We’re meeting once a month to have honest conversations about our relationships with food.

I shared the scope of this project and what I’m planning on writing here for the next year. I wanted to hear their stories.

One of them, a woman I adore, named K, shared that she had started on GLP-1s earlier in the year. She looked healthy and strong, but she always had looked that way to me. She told us that she the topic of food came up in therapy, often enough that she wanted to try one of these medications to see if she could combat the food noise.

And now her mind is quiet about food all the time.

“I don’t have any food noise anymore.”

My sweet husband, kind and wise, looked at me bewildered. “What do you mean by food noise?”

Danny was a chef for more than 30 years. He feels calmest when he is standing at a counter, chopping onions and starting a long prepping session. He thinks about flavors the way I contemplate sentences. For quite a long time, we made food together every day and wrote about it for pieces on our blog, magazine articles, and cookbooks.

And yet, we realized as we unraveled this conversation, he never thought about food the way I do.

For my husband, making food is an act of creativity. It’s the process, the working-out of ideas, and the completion of a dish that compelled him to keep cooking. Now that he has left restaurants, and we stopped writing cookbooks, the need to think about food has dissipated. In fact, he rarely thinks about food anymore.

He’s a preschool teacher now. He thinks about the interactions with the kids, his colleagues, the books he is reading to them. His creative mind is occupied with his new work.

Me? Well, that’s me with writing. I think about pieces I want to write for days on end. I walk around with phrases and paragraphs singing in my head — in the shower, on the beach, or walking on a forest trail. When I finally start writing sentences, something takes over. I’m in service to that piece until it feels done. I write, edit, write some more, edit, proofread, and then hit send.

And then, I honestly don’t think about it again, after it’s gone.

But food?

Oh, I have spent a lifetime hearing the clanging, clattering noise of food.

I read bits of this Threads post to my husband.

“Watched a chat show where Ozempic and Mounjaro were being discussed and I had no idea before this that a lot of overweight people experience something called ‘ food noise One lady said that some chocolate buttons left in her car were calling her at 3 in the morning so she had to get out of bed to get them and eat them.

Mind blowing.”

Wait, my husband said. Why would she get out of bed at 3 am for chocolate?

I kept reading.

“Food noise combined with untreated ADHD is one of the weirdest things to explain. Do I constantly think about eating and snacking? Yes. Do I sometimes forget to eat or forget about snacks I’ve stashed? Also yes. Do I eat past full and make myself feel unwell because food is too good? Yes. Do I get completely overwhelmed by planning meals and cooking? Yes. I want food to just APPEAR as I want it with no effort from me.”

Hm. He said. That sounds familiar to me.

“Noise is a mild way to describe it. It’s an urge — like an itch you can’t scratch. Anyone who has had chicken pox or a nasty rash should understand. It’s in your head all the time « scratch scratch scratch » so you do, and you get momentary relief and maybe some pain. Shortly after you feel it again. Like you never scratched. Relentless.”

I felt that way with cigarettes, he told me. I always knew exactly how many minutes I had left before I could go outside of the restaurant and have a smoke.

“Sometimes it isn’t just I crave a brownie — it is an overwhelming screaming need for a particular texture or your body saying ‘you want a thing but I’m not telling you what that thing is,’ so you have to keep offering it various things until finally it shuts up.”

What does she mean by that? You mean, she’s not hungry but she keeps looking for a certain kind of food? Is that why I see you stand in front of the refrigerator or go in the pantry and look at things for a long time?

“As a sufferer I can confirm it’s definitely a thing. I do use Wegovy and it does turn off the noise. The only way I can explain it is to say it’s like being an alcoholic or a drug addict. It’s got nothing to do with hunger, or even greed necessarily, it’s a signal in the brain that demands attention and is very hard to ignore.”

Oh. Okay. I get that. That was like me with alcohol. No matter how much I drank, I always wanted more.

“I always assume food noise is similar to alcohol cravings or urges to gamble. You can finish breakfast and already be thinking about what is for lunch. It’s a never ending voice in your head telling you that you need that thing … food, alcohol, drugs, gambling. But for some reason “food” is the shameful one.”

I turned toward my husband and said, “You see, I’m starting to realize what my friend K said today, after she has been without the food noise for a few months. After taking these injections.”

She said: “I have always used food as a drug.”

My husband stopped smoking cigarettes after we met, a 2-pack-a-day habit he had endured for nearly 25 years. And 3 years later, he stopped drinking. He has now been sober for 17+ years.

I’m so damned proud of him.

And he knows now — because we have talked about it at length — that addiction is a brain illness, a bio-chemical and uncontrollable disease, which insists that the addicted person drink more and more, every day. Or gambles. Or shops. Or does harder drugs.

We’ve come to regard every one of those habits as “bad.”

There’s a distinct feeling that the people who are addicted to those experiences are terrible people.

They’re not terrible people.

Because, I agree with Gabor Maté (and plenty of other addiction experts) who believe that the propensity for addiction begins in pain.

If you’ve been through hard hard times or trauma, and no one helped you address it as a child, then it’s easy to turn to something — alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, shopping, sex, gambling, or too much time on the phone — to give you a big dopamine hit to temporarily numb out the pain and anxiety.

The problem is, that cessation of fear and intrusive thoughts is increasingly temporary, based on the neuroscience of the dopamine reward system. Drink alcohol? Get buzzed. Do it more often? The brain reads it as a problem and refuses to send dopamine out. You need more and more to get that buzz and forget your troubles for a while.

That’s how addiction is both a trauma response and a brain disease. Both.

For hundreds of years, people regarded addiction as a moral failing, due to a lack of willpower. Now we know that’s not true.

But people still say, online and in person, that someone with food noise — particularly a woman — who weighs more than this society deems acceptable has a lack of willpower, and thus is a moral failure.

What if food noise is addiction?

What if millions of women — and some men too — have used food to soothe themselves for decades, in a culture that doesn’t want us to talk about our traumas?

How do you cut an addiction to warm bread with butter and strawberry ice cream if you need food to eat?

And food is so good.

I asked my husband if he ever thought about what he would eat before he ate it, dreaming about it on a tape loop, planning out the next day’s dinner before he is done eating breakfast.

Nope.

I’ve spent my life doing that.

And when he does go for something to eat, does he think about carbs or calories or portions or ways to reward himself within the meal with a bit more cheese or maybe some extra bacon?

Nope.

What does he do?

“I realize I’m hungry. I make myself what I want to eat. When I’m close to full. I stop. I’m satisfied.

And I don’t eat again until my body says I’m hungry.”

That’s why I’m writing this series here.

I would love to find out what it feels like to enjoy every bite of food I eat and not have it take up so much room in my head.

This piece is for everyone to read.

Feel free to forward it to someone you believe might need to read it.

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