Always Thinking About Food?

I know it's only breakfast, but what am I going to eat for lunch and dinner today? A cheeseburger would be nice but I should eat something right now? How many calories? I should wait until 12 pm to eat lunch, that way I don't get hungry before 5 pm. But I shouldn't eat it. Am I hungry right now?

Sometimes we may think about food when deciding what we should eat for an upcoming meal or while we're looking over the menu for takeout. But when these thoughts about food are constant and go beyond meals, it may be food noise. Food noise is the ongoing thoughts surrounding food and food-related topics.

So food noise is when things enter your consciousness, your mind, your feelings, your mental space, your frontal lobe that you really don't want to be there, especially when you should be focused on other things. Examples of food noise would be frequent or overly frequent thoughts about food and what to eat next, food cravings that enter your mind too oftenly, thoughts and feelings about being hungry and hunger, food topics, thinking about food topics throughout the day when you should be focused on other activities and plans.

Having an increased appetite throughout the day that really shouldn't be there, thoughts about what's going to be your next meal, and what was your most recent meal. And then also just kind of general thoughts about calories, weight, and other things associated with food, diet, nutrition, health, and lifestyle choices when you shouldn't be focused on those things. So it's one thing to have to think about something or be insightful or mindful about it, but it's another thing when it occupies too much of your mental space on a regular basis. That's what we call food noise.

Food noise can create anxiety around making decisions about food. This could lead you to make choices you may have been avoiding.

Experiencing food noise can be harmful because what it'll do is it'll increase your anxiety. And it causes this negative feedback loop where you're so worried about a problem that leads to more anxiety and it leads to more negative behaviors that you're trying to avoid.

So a good example of that is if you're worried about what to eat next and your calories all the time, that's going to increase your stress, your anxiety, and worry. And if you're an emotional eater, if you're eating out of anxiety, then that's just going to cause you to eat more.

There are ways to silence or turn down the volume on food noise. A key component, planning.

So the best ways to combat and prevent food noise is to be proactive. You have to be proactive and preemptive. You have to think about things ahead of time. You can't wait until Monday afternoon at lunchtime to think about what you're going to have for lunch. Then you will be anxious.

But if you take care of it over the weekend and plan all your meals and your snacks and other things, and have them readily available as your choice and make them as a decisive choice during the weekend, then you don't have to worry about being worried about it during the week.

You also want to limit the number of negative choices that you have. And so if you're trying to lose weight, if you're trying to eat more fruits and vegetables, if you're trying to drink more water, you don't need a big bag of snacks in front of you. You don't need a bunch of sources of food noise that are going to interrupt or undermine your active planning for better lifestyle choices.

The other thing is don't necessarily withhold something that you want, just reduce the quantity of it. So if you really want something that has protein in it or you really want a carb or something, get a little bit of and compromise and then do the rest with fiber and water or something else.

So don't just completely deprive yourself of things that you want, eat rice cakes and things like that all day long, give yourself some of what you want. Be mindful of the number of calories that it includes and then also what it means in terms of your daily intake and what you have on a week.

So make it a lifestyle, make it a system that works for you, and don't compare yourself to other people. Everybody's not going to be a size 1, size 2, size 3, size 4. Create a lifestyle management system that works for you, your body, and how you live on a daily basis.