Google the term “food noise,” and you may well end up at foodnoise.com, a domain owned by a prescription weight-loss medicine called Contrave. According to Contrave, food noise (or FOOD NOISE™, its branded boogeyman) is “more than just your hunger talking—it’s constant, intrusive thoughts about food. It can be disruptive to daily life and makes sticking to a healthy diet difficult.” On the site’s landing page, a woman—presumably on Contrave—stands behind a kitchen counter, confident that she won’t touch the bag of cookies labeled “Comfort” in front of her.
When I think about food noise, I’m flung back to the height of my eating disorder, when I was paralyzed by the thought of eating anything at all. I ruminated constantly over off-limit foods, and my hunger always won as I binged, then purged.
When the roar of physiological hunger is ignored, the body becomes desperate, untrusting that it will ever eat again. Caloric and nutritional deficits can lead us to experience brain fog, irritability, and fatigue, our minds turning towards obsession, irritability, anxiety, and aggression. Anything to get us to listen. Focused on deprivation, our bodies push us towards food.
Even if food noise presents as an isolated battle within each of our psyches and pantries, it has found mass resonance within the American consciousness. In 2021, 10 years after I initiated the work of eating-disorder recovery, the FDA’s approval of the semaglutide Wegovy for weight loss led to dramatic results for scores of patients; users paid up to $1,350 for the privilege of proclaiming their food noise gone. When, that same year, the UN voted to declare food a human right, only two countries voted against that resolution: the US and Israel.
Maybe the denial of food as a human right makes sense in America, where so many of us do not know nourishment, only convenience. Items subsidized by our government—such as those made from soy, corn, and sugar—keep us hungry, even as our national body mass index rises.
Regardless of the number on our scales, or of our individual eating-disorder histories, thinking about food isn’t a pathology—it’s a normal hunger signal. Instead of acknowledging rumination and obsession as symptoms of disorder, we feed denial, telling ourselves that if we can just overcome and control the chatter in our brains that makes us desire food, we’ll have “cured” ourselves. But of what?