“Food noise” is the relentless, intrusive preoccupation with food that many people living with obesity describe, and the term has spread alongside GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, which act on hunger signals in the brain and gut and leave many users saying the mental chatter finally quiets.
A term that came from patients
Before Brenda Rogers started taking Ozempic in the spring of 2023, she did not realize how much “food noise” was sapping her mental energy. “You’re just constantly thinking about food and not having enough, having too much, ‘what am I gonna eat? Oh, don’t add in the carbs because carbs aren’t good, that’s gonna make me more fat, don’t have fat because that’s going to make you fat,'” said the 52-year-old online business manager in Vancouver. “It’s exhausting thinking that way.”
The term emerged alongside the popularity of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists — GLP-1 medications — used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity, said Dr. Sanjeev Sockalingam, scientific director of Obesity Canada and chief medical officer at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. They include Ozempic and Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, and Mounjaro and Zepbound, made by Eli Lilly.
“Food noise is not a formal diagnosis, but it is a manifestation of people’s relationship with food in the context of someone who might be living with obesity being a chronic disease,” said Sockalingam, also a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. “It really has emerged from the patients and people we treat.”
What it feels like
There is no formal definition, but people describe food noise as a distressing, “insatiable, pervasive preoccupation with food or thinking about food,” Sockalingam said. Russell de Souza, a registered dietitian and associate professor at the Centre for Metabolism, Obesity and Diabetes Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, said the thoughts can be so intrusive they are “overwhelming.”
“It gets hard for them to think about other things that they have to do. And they just become preoccupied with food to the point where it’s distracting,” de Souza said. Sockalingam said people often feel a sense of freedom after treatment: “It does liberate many patients who’ve been struggling and really preoccupied and almost captive to this kind of thoughts of food.”
Part of why the term is spreading now, Sockalingam said, is that before GLP-1 medications, health-care providers had no effective treatments for obesity that address the interaction between the brain and the gut. As awareness of the drugs has grown, conversations about obesity have multiplied and stigma has eased, so people are more comfortable describing the experience. “We have to understand that gaining weight is not a personal failure — it’s a chronic disease,” de Souza said.
How the medications turn the volume down
GLP-1 medications mimic the GLP-1 hormone, which helps control feelings of hunger and fullness, and they act on receptors in both the brain and the gut. The hypothalamus regulates hunger and appetite and receives signals about when to stop eating, de Souza explained. “Sometimes that signal is not as strong in some people as others, and it may not last as long,” he said. The drugs strengthen that signal and slow the emptying of the stomach, so people feel full faster and stay full longer.
They also work on the brain’s dopamine-driven reward circuits, which can be hyperactive in some people and drive excessive cravings. “As we consume things that bring us pleasure, dopamine then conditions us to really want or crave it. And so we have seen cravings decrease with GLP-1 receptor agonists,” Sockalingam said.
Medication is not the only route
Cognitive behavioural therapy can also help, Sockalingam said. CBT works with the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s decision-making centre — to change how people respond to intense cravings, using coping strategies such as distraction, new behaviours and reframed thinking. De Souza added that high-fibre, high-protein foods that keep people full longer — oat bran, fruits, vegetables, fish, chickpeas, lentils, beans and peas — can quiet the noise as well.
But he warned against swinging too far the other way. “When you restrict foods that you like a lot, that technique can actually backfire sometimes and you can just crave that food that you’ve been missing so long,” he said. “It can create more food noise than it takes away.”
