Creating Lasting Change: Understanding Hunger, Habits, and Food Noise

You are destined to become the person you decide to be. Make yourself a priority.

Set a goal. Maybe it is an overall personal goal, a health goal, or perhaps a weight-loss goal. Focus on creating a nurturing mindset. Lasting change does not come from doing things more quickly. Rather, change comes from doing something consistently over a period of time until it becomes a habit.

Your identity shapes your habits, but most of the time, we act based on what we see in the mirror or what we see on the scale. Stop seeing and telling yourself that you are on a diet. Stop denying yourself the positive reinforcement you need by also looking at non-scale victories.

If you tell yourself you are on a diet, you will always be on a diet. See yourself as someone who honors your body, practices self-care, and leads a healthy lifestyle. Treat your body like a temple.

Ask yourself why and how you eat. Do you eat because you need to eat or because you want to eat? Monitor food noise. Food noise refers to persistent, intrusive, and often unwanted thoughts about food, cravings for certain types of food, and thoughts about when to eat next. This mental chatter is characterized by relentless mental preoccupation with eating, even when you are not physically hungry. It can lead to guilt, shame, obsessions, addictions, and emotional eating. It is like a tug-of-war in your brain.

Food noise can have many triggers, including boredom, sadness, low self-esteem, fatigue, food visuals (either real or in advertisements), food smells, stress, anxiety, hormone shifts, and more. Food noise is real and can convince someone to eat when they are not hungry.

Work on how to monitor your inner voice. Pause and have a quick conversation with yourself. We live in a world of instant gratification, and thus we often eat before thinking about it logically. Learn to process your emotions and think realistically.

Think about what you feel like immediately after you have eaten and what you feel like later that evening or even the following day. It literally can take seconds to go through this process of evaluation. Have positive thoughts instead of negative ones. Give yourself a chance to feel empowered by making the right decision.

Don’t tell yourself you can’t have something; rather, tell yourself why your body deserves something healthy and why you want to provide good, nutritious food for yourself. Remember that our body is not a garbage can. Treat it like a temple. Get rid of the negative mentality. If you have a binge or a “cheat,” use it as a tool to get better and learn from it rather than throwing up your hands and giving up.

Assess whether you are craving food or whether you are actually hungry. Hunger has physical cues like stomach growling, low energy, or irritability, whereas food noise is constant intrusive food thoughts. There is a feedback loop between the stomach and the brain. Hunger is a physical sensation in the gut, whereas food noise starts in the brain. When food noise dominates your daily life, it is a problem. It creates guilt and shame.

To help diminish food noise, eat balanced, regular meals; avoid overly processed food; avoid sugar, which triggers cravings; don’t restrict or skip high-protein meals; practice mindful eating; get enough sleep; move your body regularly; manage stress; and seek support and accountability.

If needed, explore natural supplements or prescription medications that work either on the appetite center in the brain or on the hunger hormones in the gut. Studies have proven that accountability and help from a professional are still the number-one success tools.

There are many natural supplements, vitamins, and minerals that help support glucose and insulin balance, aid in carbohydrate metabolism, boost energy levels, and lower cortisol:

• Magnesium, zinc, and B vitamins act on glucose and insulin balance and help with carbohydrate metabolism.
• Omega-3 fatty acids help improve insulin sensitivity and energy levels.
• Resveratrol is an antioxidant that helps lower cortisol, your stress hormone, which then decreases cravings.
• L-glutamine is an amino acid that balances blood sugar and cuts down cravings by increasing your serotonin level in your brain so that you feel more satisfied and happier.
• Natural yerba maté can stimulate GLP-1 hunger hormones from your gut to a higher level that stays around longer to control eating for up to four to five hours.
• GLP-1 agonists, such as semaglutide or tirzepatide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound), are peptide prescription medications that work to mimic the body’s own GLP-1 to reduce preoccupation with food.

GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) is a hormone produced in the gut after you eat that regulates blood sugar and insulin, slows digestion, and signals satisfaction to the brain. Because these medications regulate blood sugar and insulin levels, they are also used to treat type 2 diabetes, thus decreasing cardiovascular risk. Because of the slowing of gastric emptying, these medications create a feeling of fullness faster, but at the same time, they can lead to nausea, reflux, diarrhea, and constipation.

Ultimately, it is still about changing your ways. Medications are great tools but should never be used as a crutch and should be used safely. Regardless of the tools used, rapid weight loss and lack of high levels of protein can cause muscle loss. This becomes very critical in the dosing of medications and the instructions that go with them.

Remember to focus on a nurturing mindset and long-term goals. If you haven’t learned new habits because you lost the weight quickly by just “not eating,” the weight will come back when medications are stopped.

If you have formed new habits, created a healthy lifestyle, and changed how you think about food, then by keeping your focus on protein, high-fiber vegetables, water, and daily activity, you should be able to maintain success.

So, create a nurturing mindset. Create habits that are long-lasting. Provide self-care, honor your body, and live a happy, healthy life.