Food noise: Why some people are turning to weight-loss medications to help quiet the chatter

CNN —
Savannah Mendoza used to spend most of her paychecks on food delivery apps and at fast food drive-thrus, trying to satisfy a compulsive craving.
After she started taking a popular medication used for weight loss and diabetes, she saw it as something else: food noise.
“It’s so obsessive, and it’s not a good feeling. It’s a very ugly feeling, because you’re just locked down on that singular thought of you wanting to eat,” she said.
Food noise is incessant internal chatter about food that some people experience, which can make it hard for them to make healthy decisions about their nutrition. The conversation around it has grown, especially online, as more people taking popular weight-loss and diabetes medications realized the drugs seemed to turn off the noise.
Semaglutide and tirzepatide are both glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, known as GLP-1s, that work by telling your body that you just ate, triggering it to release more insulin and slowing the movement of food through your stomach. The medications are prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes under the brand names Ozempic and Mounjaro, and their twin versions Wegovy and Zepbound have also helped millions of people lose weight.
Mendoza, 27, started to constantly think about food when she was in her early 20s. She would claim she had to run errands but instead hit up a drive-thru and eat in the car. On some mornings, she would sneak bites of ice cream straight out of the tub while packing her daughter’s lunch.
“I just thought I was obsessed with food,” said Mendoza, who lives in Huntington Beach, California.
Now that she’s using tirzepatide, she said, she feels peace without the food noise and notes that part of what stopped it is a side effect of the medication: She physically feels “kind of always bloated and not hungry.”
Savannah Mendoza struggled with food noise for years. Courtesy Savannah Mendoza
Summer Kessel, who has been using tirzepatide for over two years, said she was a “bottomless pit” who always felt hungry.
“I would still be thinking about, planning for, trying to finagle how I could eat something else,” said Kessel, 37. “I would have breakfast at home, then breakfast at work, and then lunch at work, and then a snack before I left work, and then fast food on the way home and then dinner when I got home.”
A week after her first injection of the weight-loss medication, the Tampa, Florida, native said it was a “relief.”
“It was like, suddenly, all of that noise in my brain about ‘what can I eat, where can I eat, how much can I have, am I going to like it, how many calories is this, what’s the portion size?’ Like all of that sh*t in my head was finally quiet, and I was able to just go about my life without obsessing about food or being hungry all the time,” Kessel said.
Kessel, a registered dietitian who has worked in health care for 20 years, now also doles out nutrition advice to a sizeable social media following. Yet she says it wasn’t until she got on tirzepatide that she was able to practice what she preached and actually eat three balanced meals a day.
“I feel appropriately hungry at mealtimes. … I’m just not hungry in my head in between, and I’m not thinking about food in terms of what’s the tastiest or what do I want. It’s more like, what do I need to feel nourished and satisfied, and is going to make my body feel good,” she said.
The science behind food noise
There are varying theories about the root cause of food noise, and there isn’t a clear number of how many people experience it. But most experts believe it’s real, even if awareness of it is only recently emerging.
About 15 years ago, Dr. Michael Lowe, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia, developed a theory called hedonic hunger, which he explains as “an intense desire for food-based pleasure for reasons other than physical hunger.” Lowe said this theory and its associated Power of Food Scale are being used in clinical trials of weight-loss medications in both adults and children to measure what he describes as the “desire for delicious foods when not hungry.”
“That is, the previously established concept of hedonic hunger appears to be very similar to the concept of food noise reported by many on GLP-1 medications,” Lowe said. “I also studied appetite, or how people experience and attempt to control their appetite, my whole career. Researchers have studied our built-in system for letting us know, or giving us advance notice of, our bodies’ need to be replenished with calories. What this doesn’t take account of is why, in the past 45 years, many of us have gained weight by eating more than what our bodies need to stay healthy.”
The rumbling in your stomach near dinnertime is homeostatic or “normal” hunger — “a reminder from your body that the calories you consumed for lunch have been mostly utilized for fuel by your body,” according to Lowe.
Hedonic hunger, on the other hand, is continuing to desire and eat food beyond the calories that your body needs, even after you just finished a meal.
“I’m saying that when we eat because we need calories, pleasure ‘comes along for the ride.’ But when we still have a powerful drive to eat when we’re not physically hungry, pleasure is the ride, the actual reason we still want to eat,” he said.
Your food environment matters
Some hedonic hunger is to be expected due to America’s food culture, Lowe says. With fast-food restaurants studding every main road and a lack of supermarkets offering fresh food in some areas, “it is so easy to get food, and it’s so easy to eat too much of the wrong kind,” he said.
Jackson LeMay, who lives in Lilburn, Georgia, said his experience with food noise – “a constant, insatiable itch” – lasted over a decade and dates to high school.
Back then, food noise “was a lot of hiding food, a lot of going and taking food from the pantry or from the fridge and hiding wrappers. It was a lot of eating food when I wasn’t home or asking for extra money, saying I needed lunch money, and going to the vending machine, things of that nature.”
As an adult, he said, targeted social media ads and the constant availability of food delivery made it easy to binge and hard to stop.
The 27-year-old lost 155 pounds through diet, exercise and Mounjaro, which he continues to use to maintain his weight, and said he didn’t realize how much food noise affected him until he started the medication.
Jackson LeMay didn’t realize how much food noise affected him until he started taking medication. Courtesy Jackson LeMay