I was recently introduced to the concept of “food noise” and realized it is something I have been struggling with my whole life, though I never had a name for it or thought about it.
It started with a tangential comment on this episode of the Ezra Klein Show, where he discusses Ozempic and other GLP-1s and how they reduce your desire to eat. He talked with Julia Belluz, a NY Times contributor who has done a lot of reporting on GLP-1s.
Klein said he was a fat kid, lost 50-60 pounds when he was 16, and added:
Then, ever since, I fight my food desires. If we had a bowl of Oreos on this table, 30 to 50 percent of my mental energy the whole time we were talking would be to not eat the Oreos.
And I said oh my gosh absolutely yes that is true for me. I would be spending that amount of energy thinking about the Oreos, and how many I could have, and maybe I could have just one or two more.
In my work, I go to many professional conferences around the U.S. and occasionally in Europe. Attendees at these conferences are lavishly supplied with food and snacks. Also hotels and airports are stuffed with easily available junk food. I graze the whole time. I come home having gained about a pound and a half for every two days I was out. For much of my adult life, I’ve been gaining and losing the same eight pounds.
When I mentioned the Ezra Klein show to Julie, she named the phenomenon as “food noise,” and apparently it’s a recognized clinical phenomenon.
This has been a lifelong thing with me — not the travel (although at this point I’ve been traveling for work more than half my life) but the constant awareness of food and temptation to eat.
I got very fat through middle age and lost 100 pounds 2009-2011 and have kept it off, and the way I’ve done it is to control my eating to an obsessive degree. When I’m not traveling, I rarely eat out, and I weigh and measure and log everything I eat at home, and count calories. Mostly I eat the same things at the same time every day. Because I only allow myself to make a limited range of decisions about eating, I can resist temptation, but it’s hard and it kind of sucks. I live in San Diego and I almost never partake of our delicious Mexican food and other food culture.