HSOS #53: Part 1: Is Food Noise Even Real?

Grab your coffee and get comfy, because this episode is all about that mental chatter that just will not shut up: food noise. I'm breaking down what the research actually says about the voice in your head insisting the ice cream in the freezer needs your attention right now, why some experts think "food noise" is more marketing buzzword than settled science, and why the whole conversation exploded the second Ozempic and Wegovy became household names. Spoiler: GLP-1 medications may quiet food noise through the brain, but that is only half the story. Part two drops next week with the piece that belongs entirely to you, no prescription required, and it is all about blood sugar.

Let's talk.

Welcome to Her Season of Strength, where women over 40 reclaim their bodies, their energy, and their voices, without apologies. I'm Kim Duffy, registered dietitian, personal trainer, mom, and your biggest hype woman when it comes to aging like you mean it.

This show isn't about chasing skinny or counting wrinkles. It's about building real strength: physical, emotional, and hormonal. Each week, I'll share straight-talking nutrition tips, sustainable fitness strategies, and conversations that help you feel powerful in your skin once again.

Menopause is not an ending, it is only the beginning. This is your season of strength.

What I Cover in This Episode:

• What "food noise" actually means, according to the very first peer reviewed definition, published in 2025
• Why some researchers think "food noise" might be more marketing buzzword than medical diagnosis
• The brand new tools scientists are using to actually measure how loud your food noise really is
• How to tell the difference between normal hunger and food noise that's running the show
• The surprising role ghrelin and leptin play in how loudly (or quietly) your food noise shows up
• Why the term "food noise" exploded the moment Ozempic and Wegovy went mainstream
• The eye opening INFORM study stats on how GLP-1 medications changed food thoughts for 550 adults
• The real reason GLP-1s quiet food noise, and why it has nothing to do with blood sugar
• The one lever you control regardless of medication, and why it's the whole focus of next week's episode
• A first look at the SUSTAIN program priority list, and why spots are limited this fall.  Click here to learn more or to jump onto the list. 

Links & resources for this episode:

Fit After 50+ Program: 8-Week Nutrition Coaching & Strength Program for menopausal women.  Join the interest list today for the best discounts, bonuses and updates about the next program coming Fall of 2026!

Free cheat sheet: "20 Tips to Crushing Menopause"

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi there, and welcome to Her Season of Strength, where women over 40 reclaim their bodies, their energy, and their voices without apologies. I'm Kim Duffy, registered dietitian, personal trainer, mom, and your biggest hype woman when it comes to aging like you mean it. This show isn't about chasing skinny or counting wrinkles.

[00:00:20] It's about building real strength, physical, emotional, and hormonal. Each week, I'll share straight-talking nutrition tips, sustainable fitness strategies, and conversations that help you feel powerful in your skin once again. Menopause isn't an ending. It's only the beginning. This is your season of strength hello.

[00:00:39] Welcome back to Her Season of Strength. I'm Kim Duffy, and I am the owner of Strength in Nutrition. I'm a dietician and a personal trainer, but I'm also a post-menopausal woman who knows everything that you're going through. And so I feel like I can personally talk about these things because I know what they're [00:01:00] like a- actually feeling them in my body as well as understanding them professionally as a dietician, as well as working with so many women in personal training and seeing kind of some of the things their issues and their complaints and stuff.

[00:01:16] So today, I am going to do part one of a two-part series on food noise. And you might be saying, "Gosh, what is she gonna talk for two whole podcast episodes on food noise about?" You're just gonna have to wait and see. All right? So this first episode... No, I'm actually gonna tell you. So I wanna talk about what food noise actually is and how researchers are now trying to measure it, why some experts are pushing back on that term, and you might be seeing this a lot on social media because I sure have, and that was what made me think about talking about that, and why that pushback might be fair.

[00:01:59] And then [00:02:00] the last part I'm gonna talk about today is why it became that household phrase the moment that GLP-1 medications came mainstream. So I think we've all had that time where we've been like, you're finishing lunch, and you're already thinking about what you're having for dinner, or there is a gallon of ice cream in the freezer, and literally, you cannot go to bed until you've had some, and you're thinking about it the minute you finish dinner 'cause it's just "Oh my gosh, I need something sweet."

[00:02:35] And you can't let it go. You can't move on. You can't move past it. I- that's the way I think of food noise because I think that we all have food noise to a degree. I think some struggle with it a lot more than others, and I think that can be related to hormones, not just estrogen and progesterone, but like I've talked about the hunger and the fullness hormones, ghrelin and leptin.[00:03:00] 

[00:03:00] Some of us have different may- maybe inadequate amounts or overactive amounts of these hormones that, that can make us actually feel that food noise more strongly or less strongly. This term, food noise, it's exploded over the last couple years, mostly because of medications like Ozempic and Wegovy.

[00:03:21] So that's gonna be in part one, and then part two- for n- the following week, we're gonna talk about kind of the lever that you have control over, whether or not you're on GLP-1s or on medication, and that is your blood sugar. And I've talked about this many times, but I specifically wanna talk about it in relation to food noise, and we will talk in that in the next, the, the next episode.

[00:03:47] It'll be episode number 54. But first, let's get clear on what we're even talking about today. So in plain language, food noise is when we have those [00:04:00] persistent, intrusive thoughts about food, what to eat, when, how much guilt about what you already ate that's loud enough that it kinda crowds out the other things that you're think- trying to think about or to do.

[00:04:15] Like I was talking about it, it's, there can be a scale of food noise. For some people, it might be kinda quiet. It's just "Oh yeah, I really kinda want that." But you might be able to say, "No. You know what? I just had lunch. I don't need to have that treat or whatever." Whereas other people, they, can't function until they've given into that And, there, there's a difference here between normal hunger or normal food interest.

[00:04:40] It isn't about, just thinking, it's 4:00 PM and you're hungry, so you're thinking about dinner. That's not food noise. It's those thoughts that actually intrude, and they repeat and repeat, and they create distress or decision fatigue. Like I, I just, I don't know what to do, so you end up, ordering out or [00:05:00] whatever.

[00:05:00] So I wanna talk a little bit about the actual science and research 'cause I wanna, I wanna talk about real. The first peer-reviewed definition of food noise was only published in twenty twenty-five. It was in the Journal of Nutrition and Diabetes, and research des- researchers described it as, "A heightened and/or persistent manifestations of food cue reactivity, often leading to food-related intrusive thoughts and maladaptive eating behaviors."

[00:05:35] Now, that was a mouthful. So there are a couple me- new measurement tools. One is called the Food Noise Questionnaire. That came out in twenty twenty-five. And the RAID-FN, so R-A-I-D dash F-N inventory, and it breaks the experience into three parts, so preoccupation with food, a persistence of the thoughts, and then the associated [00:06:00] distress that those thoughts cause.

[00:06:03] Think about it just for, take a second. As I describe this, do you feel like you're nodding along and you're saying, "Oh, yes, I definitely have some of these things"? Or the opposite. There might be some of you that's "Oh, no. No. Sometimes when I'm hungry I just really say, think I want some ice cream, but nothing like that."

[00:06:24] But both are valid. There is... like I said, there's just a wide scope of people that struggle with this, even just the tiniest little bit to very significant And food noise, it's not an official medical diagnosis. It doesn't appear in clinical manuals. It emerged from patient and social media language before the science caught up with it.

[00:06:51] So researchers have raised a legitimate concern. Food noise overlaps heavily with concepts we already had names [00:07:00] for, like food cravings, food cue reactivity, food preoccupation, and aspects of food addiction so this food noise, which is a vague, catchy term that we're commercializing in weight loss marketing faster than science can actually define it, sometimes implying that having food thoughts at all is a symptom that requires medication.

[00:07:28] And that framing can frequently pull attention away from those bigger drivers like food insecurity or weight stigma, chronic dieting, and those food environments that are designed to be irresistible. So the skepticism isn't, this experience is not real, it's just that we really don't yet agree on exactly what it is or how to measure it.

[00:07:54] Be cautious of anyone, including a podcast host who tells you it's [00:08:00] fully figured out and it's this, this scientific term. I'm not gonna pretend, this is more settled science than it is. But I'm also going to dismiss what so many women describe feeling. Both things can be true at once.

[00:08:16] So as semaglutide, which is things, those two medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, and then another one called tirzepatide, which is medications like Zepbound and Mounjaro, when they went mainstream, people on these medications kept describing the same thing. The constant food chatter in their heads just stopped or decreased significantly.

[00:08:41] And that's largely what turned food noise from that kind of niche phrase into a more household term. So there was a study called the INFORM story, Study, ooh, by Novo Nordisk, where it had five hundred and fifty adults who were [00:09:00] on semaglutide. Sixty-two percent reported constant food-related thoughts before they started treatment, versus only sixteen percent while on it.

[00:09:12] Sixty-four percent reported improved mental health, and seventy-six percent reported improved self-confidence. That's a large study. Five hundred and fifty adults, that's a large study. There was a separate observational study that, that used a validated food noise questionnaire that found that adding a GLP-1 medication to a behavioral weight program, it actually produced a reduction in food noise roughly four times larger than behavioral therapy alone And the reason why this is happening is 'cause those GLP-1 medications work largely through brain appetite centers and reward pathways, not primarily by [00:10:00] stabilizing blood glucose, okay?

[00:10:02] It's-- this is important to say, very clearly here. So if GLP-1s quiet food noise through the brain, does that mean the rest of us, with or without, that medication, are stuck waiting on a medication? Not even close. There's another lever, and it's one that's yours no matter what's in your medicine cabinet, and that's blood sugar.

[00:10:28] And that is gonna be what we're gonna talk about that whole, for the whole next episode. So three things I want you to take from this is, what food noise actually is, why that term deserves some healthy skepticism even though, the experience feels very real, and why GLP-1s put it on everyone's radar.

[00:10:51] 'Cause food noise is incredibly real experience for a lot of women, even though, that term, the science on the term itself is [00:11:00] still young, still early on. And whether or not you're on a GLP-1, there's something your body is doing underneath all of this that we haven't talked about yet And that is what we're gonna talk about on that next episode.

[00:11:14] Just a little reminder is that the Sustain program, we are in the, the runway for the priority list, and that is for those people who are thinking that maybe this is something they're interested in, is getting a little bit more guidance and help specifically around how to decrease cravings and how to decrease overeating without medications, a little more naturally, and that is through blood sugar regulation.

[00:11:43] So what I do is I walk you through step by step because I feel like I,  I want you to be able to incorporate one piece at a time and really feel like you're creating some long-term habits, not something that [00:12:00] you're just gonna start and quit after a few weeks. I want it to be something that you can incorporate into your lifestyle.

[00:12:07] And so that's what we do over the 12 weeks in the Sustain program. And I have the priority list just because it's for people who are s- like, "I'm interested in this. I'm very interested," because I'm only gonna be taking 20 women into this fall program. So if you're on the priority list, you're gonna have a much higher likelihood of getting into the actual program versus when I open it up for the general public.

[00:12:34] So if you're some- if you're interested in getting on that priority interest list I will put the link in the show notes. And, make sure that, you know someone who might enjoy listening to this episode, maybe someone who struggles a lot with food noise or someone who are on GLP-1s and know that how, that they did struggle with the food noise before and may be thinking about, if, [00:13:00] how can they mediate that?

[00:13:02] Because the things that we work on when it comes to blood sugar regulation are beneficial for absolutely every single one of us. It's not just for those people who are diabetics or not for those people who are wanting, maybe their A1C or whatever is high and they're trying to decrease it.

[00:13:18] This is for every single one of us, and this is a healthy way for us to live. I teach it to every single one of my clients. And always, if you have any topics that you would like me to discuss, whether they're nutrition or fitness related or menopause related please reach out. Please text me through this show or send me an email at info@strengthinnutrition.com and, give me your topic.

[00:13:44] I would love to to take a look at that and put it in one of my future episodes. And remember, as always, this is about progress over perfection. We're in this for the long haul, and this is your season of strength. Have an amazing [00:14:00] day.