Food Noise, Part III: Mindset Shifts for More Peace and Self-Trust

This is Part III of a blog series that is based on the transcripts of my podcast series on Food Noise, which includes these 4 episodes:
Ep. 198: Food Noise, Part 1: Bingeing is Not a Solution
Ep. 199: Food Noise, Part 2: The Effect of the Food Environment (You’re Not Broken or Powerless)
Ep. 201: Food Noise, Part 3: Mindset Shifts for More Peace and Self-Trust
Ep. 203: Food Noise, Part 4: Eating Foundations for More Stability and Ease (with Marcus Kain)

If you haven’t read Part I or Part II yet, I recommend that you do that when you can because they lay the foundation for this discussion.

As a brief recap, in Part I, I focused on what I believe is the most essential recovery truth when it comes to food noise in the context of bingeing, which is that you’re never destined to binge in response to food noise. Bingeing is simply never a solution. Even if it feels like it gives you temporary relief in the moment, it always harms you and always ends up turning up the volume on the food noise.

Then in Part II, I talked about the effect of the modern food environment, and how it makes sense that food noise is more common and more intense for many people now, but also that you don’t need to let that make you feel broken or powerless. You can have an understanding of why food noise is showing up, which gives you compassion for yourself, and then you’re in a better and less self-critical place to move toward solutions.

Solutions are what I’m going to turn to in this Part III post (and in Part IV as well). It’s one thing to understand the concepts that I’ve been talking about and say, “Yes, food noise does not have to cause bingeing,” and it’s another thing to be in the moment experiencing food noise and determining what to do.

In this post, I’ll primarily help you learn to shift your mindset surrounding food noise in a helpful way. Then, in Part IV, I’ll dive more deeply into talking about the food itself and some solutions there. But I do want to mention one main thing about food and eating in this post because it’s so important to know upfront, and that is: adequate eating is the foundation for learning to deal with food noise.

You Can’t Turn Down the Food Noise if You’re Not Eating Enough

If you’re familiar with Brain over Binge, you know that to stop bingeing, you absolutely need to be eating enough food. This is not usually the full cure for bingeing because, even when you’re eating enough, there’s still the habit to decondition, and that’s why learning to dismiss the urges to binge is crucial as well.

The same goes for reducing food noise. Eating enough is the foundation, but eating enough is usually not enough to eliminate the food noise—at least not right away. It takes the body a long time to feel safe after deprivation and for the brain to stop making food seem like the top priority.

People are often frustrated that eating enough does not immediately take away the urges to binge or the food noise, and I definitely had this experience as well. Lingering food obsession is an expected response to food restriction, which was shown way back in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, where the participants who were put in a calorie deficit stayed preoccupied with food long after the restriction had ended.

The takeaway here is that eating adequately is absolutely necessary and can go a long way in helping reduce binge urges and food noise, but there’s still work to be done even when that foundation of eating enough food is in place.

You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Food Deprivation

The discussion in this post assumes that foundation is relatively in place, not in any sort of perfect way, but simply that you’re doing your best to nourish yourself. As I’ve mentioned, in Part IV, I’ll talk more deeply about eating and address some factors related to food types, quantities, and timing, and I’ll also address the question of whether or not eliminating certain foods can help with food noise.

As I said when I started this series, this is a multilayered topic; but for now, as you read this post—which focuses on using your mindset to help with food noise—know that you can’t use mindset shifts to think your way out of problems that are caused by real food deprivation.

You don’t want to use any mindset or action strategies to distract yourself from food noise that’s resulting from physically needing more food.

In these cases, you simply can’t expect to make much progress reducing food noise until you’re eating more.

So why am I not talking about the eating part first? It’s the same reason that in the Brain over Binge Recovery Guide (my second book), I talked about dismissing urges before I talked about eating adequately. And in the Brain over Binge course, it’s laid out in that same way—the first four lessons are about dismissing urges, and the second four lessons are about eating adequately.

I do this because if you start eating adequately and that does not make the urges to binge go away—due to everything I’ve said about it not being a full cure—then you might be tempted to abandon the whole process. However, if you have a background in knowing how to dismiss urges as you implement adequate eating, then you’re in a great position to build lasting and sustainable recovery.

I think it’s a similar process when it comes to food noise. Having the knowledge of how to deal with food noise gives you the confidence to know that you can nourish your body without going overboard and engaging in harmful overindulgence.

Finding Real Solutions for Food Noise: 7 Simple Mindset Tips

There is a lot of advice out there about how to deal with food noise—anything from reducing stress, to getting more sleep, to increasing hydration, to adding more fiber and protein, to therapy. Other common recommendations are eating mindfully, reducing environmental cues, physical activity, or taking probiotics or other supplements. And, of course, now there is a lot of hype surrounding the GLP-1s and other medications as solutions.

There is definitely not a shortage of information on this topic, and there are so many strategies out there that could be very useful to you. I encourage you to use any strategy or tool that you personally find helpful, and when it comes to medication, that becomes a conversation to have with your doctor about potential risks and benefits.

Like I talked about in Part I of this series, once you know that bingeing is never the solution, you open yourself up to finding real solutions that uniquely help you, and that may look a little different for each of you who are reading. My aim in this post and the next is to guide you toward the goal of finding real and personalized solutions by talking about some overarching concepts that can help you deal with food noise—from the perspective of your mind and your body.

This post focuses on your mind.

I’m going to give you seven simple mindset tips to use as you overcome food noise. This is not meant to be a checklist where you feel like you have to do everything. The purpose is to give you some options and some clear ideas you can choose from and come back to.

You can think of these concepts as anchors or reminders that can help you stop spiraling and start responding to food noise in a way that supports recovery and peace with your eating.

1. Don’t Resist or Fear Food Noise

Something I talk about a lot when it comes to urges to binge is that when we resist and fear something in our minds, we can inadvertently give it more power. Binge urges and food noise can and do feel uncomfortable, so it’s totally understandable that you have some fear and that you would want to try to make the discomfort go away. You may be jumping in to try to “fix” the food noise or get rid of it, and it may feel like an emergency in that moment. That urgency can lead to a lot of internal fighting—as if you’re in a tug-of-war with your own mind.

What tends to happen when you fight the food noise is that you keep your attention locked on it, and you keep reinforcing the idea that the food noise is important. There’s a popular saying, “What we resist persists”—and I know that sayings like that can sound a little simplistic—but I do think the core idea is true in the sense that resistance is a way that you’re engaging with, and therefore fueling, the noise. It’s a way you’re giving the noise attention and energy.

Instead of reacting to food noise with fear and an immediate desire to make it go away, try to start shifting your mindset to acknowledging that it’s there and acknowledging that it’s uncomfortable, but reminding yourself that this isn’t an emergency and you don’t need to rush to fix it.

You can tell yourself things like, “Yes, this is annoying, and I’d rather it not be here, but I’m still okay,” or, “I don’t like this, but it’s not meaningful, and it’s not urgent that I make it go away right now.”

Notice how different that feels. When you’re not treating it like a threat, you’re already reducing the intensity of it—not because it magically disappears, but because you’re not adding fear and resistance on top of it. Next time the noise arises, instead of having the first goal be to rush to make it go away, let your goal be to view the food noise as irrelevant to you. Try to stop fueling it with your attention as much as possible, which allows it to weaken over time.

2. Depersonalize the Food Noise

A big mindset shift that you can use is to stop seeing the food noise as a personal defect, and instead start seeing it as a brain experience that you can work with. Like I talked about in Part II of this series, it makes sense that food noise is more common now because of so many factors in our modern environment.

Food noise can feel personal because it shows up as thoughts in your own head, and these thoughts can sound like you. It’s easy to think, “This is what I really want,” or, “This means I’m weak,” or, “This means something is wrong with me.” But I want you to start thinking that these thoughts really aren’t you at all.

I talk a lot about the higher brain and the lower brain in Brain over Binge. The higher brain directs rational thought and executive function and connects you to your goals and identity. Then there’s the lower brain—the part that’s habit-driven, cue-driven, reward-driven, and sends out automatic messages based on what it has learned in the past.

A lot of the unwanted food noise is just automatic lower brain output. It’s your lower brain generating cravings, mental images, worries, impulses, and thoughts based on your history and conditioning. This lower brain output can be influenced by a lot of things: what you see on your phone, what you smell, what’s in your immediate environment, what you ate earlier, what you’re stressed about, the foods that you’ve restricted before, or the foods that you’ve binged on before.

Food noise is not a reflection of who you are or your true values or actual desires. One of the most helpful things you can do is to stop treating the noise like a deep message about yourself that you have to decode. Start thinking of it as lower brain output that’s temporarily faulty—or what I call neurological junk.

An analogy that may help you take the food noise a little less personally is to think of it like spam or junk mail.

When you get a spam email or text, you may not like it, you may be a little annoyed, but you don’t panic or think that the spam means something deeply personal about you. The vast majority of the time, you write it off as irrelevant.

You don’t start to think you actually want whatever the spam email is offering. And maybe sometimes you actually do decide you want it, and you can even do the same thing with food noise. There can be times when you, with your higher brain, decide that you do want to eat something or take some sort of action in response to the food noise. But that’s a choice that you can make for reasons that make sense to you—not because you’re powerless against your automatic lower brain impulses.

I realize no analogy is perfect, but I hope that thinking of your food noise as spam is useful. It can help you start to sort out what is important to you in terms of hunger and food preferences, which—in continuing with this analogy—is akin to all of the email that belongs in your inbox. Then, you can sort out what is spam/food noise.

3. Learn the Difference Between a Signal and Noise

My third tip is related to this difference between meaningful messages in your inbox and spam. As you start learning to change the way you relate to food noise, you may have times when you don’t really know if what you’re experiencing is noise or if it’s a signal that you should listen to.

People tell me this a lot in relation to urges to binge as well. They say, “Okay, I know I’m supposed to dismiss the binge urges, but how do I know if it’s a binge urge or just hunger, or if I just truly want some food?”

There’s a similar question when it comes to food noise: How do you know what’s normal and what’s noise?

I want to say clearly that the goal is not to silence every thought about food or to label every desire for food as spam or as neurological junk. In fact, if you start labeling too many food thoughts as noise, you can risk tipping into restrictive eating—which creates more obsession, more preoccupation, and more noise. In other words, thinking that too many thoughts are noise, and not giving your body enough food or enough enjoyable food, can backfire and make the thoughts stronger.

Getting over food noise is as much about saying yes to hunger signals and to enjoyable food as it is about saying no to the noise.

If you’re in the Brain over Binge Group, you know that I say this often in relationship to binge eating recovery as well: recovery is as much about saying yes to food as it is about saying no to binges.

You can’t walk around saying no, no, no to food all day and expect the noise to subside. Your body has to feel safe to stop making food the number one priority, and you have to eat enough for that to happen. Again, I’ll talk more about eating in Part IV, but here I’m talking about the mindset of knowing that your brain absolutely should think about food many times per day.

You’re a human who needs to eat to survive, thrive, connect with others, and experience pleasure. Planning meals is normal. Looking forward to food is normal. Enjoying food is normal. Social eating is normal. Convenience eating is normal, and even some comfort eating is normal.

You’re not trying to erase your natural relationship with food. You’re not trying to build a life where food never matters.

When you’re sorting out signals from noise, or—getting back to the analogy—when you’re sorting out spam from what belongs in your inbox, be generous about what goes in your inbox. Don’t cast off too much as spam. What is spam is the kind of food noise that feels truly unwanted, that feels very out of line with your true self, that feels obsessive, repetitive, demanding, and disruptive to your life.

Know that there are going to be some gray areas. I’m not trying to turn you into someone who’s constantly analyzing each thought, but gently challenge yourself to start separating the signals that you need/want to listen to from the noise.

It’s important to see that you can have normal food thoughts and not make them a problem. It’s also important to see that harmful food thoughts don’t have to become a problem—because you don’t need to take them seriously or respond with harmful action.

What you label as normal signals should be generous and flexible. When you embrace normal desires and you allow yourself to be nourished and satisfied, the truly harmful noise starts to stand out more clearly.

4. Drop the Idea That You’ll Have a Food Noise-Free Life

This is related to the idea of separating the signals from the noise, but it adds the important idea that you’re not aiming for a completely quiet mind in terms of food noise. Even when you can more easily see what belongs in your inbox and what belongs in your spam, you may still get some spam. I might be dragging this analogy a little bit here, but even if you get some email security upgrades or spam filters, some spam may still get through!

Remember, we live in an environment that tends to generate food noise, and in this environment, I believe the goal is not silence, it’s neutrality. It’s about not overreacting or being self-critical if you do have some food noise pop up. You can’t control everything that you encounter out in the world. It’s possible to be doing really well and then see a commercial, or be offered food in your office, or see a weight-loss ad on social media and have some thoughts that are not ideal.

If you panic about the thoughts, it can create more preoccupation.

But if you stop believing that “noisy” thoughts have any relevance to you, those thoughts can fade into the background, and you can realize that some background noise now and then simply is not a big deal.

5. Stop Checking for Food Noise

Sometimes what keeps the food noise alive is not even the thoughts themselves—it’s the constant monitoring and checking for those thoughts. Food noise has become a buzzword, so I think many people are out there checking for it when, in the past, they would have mostly just chalked up their thoughts to normal desires.

Food is pleasurable, we want it often, and we have thoughts about it. Sometimes we have too many thoughts about it, but we can have them and still make decisions that are best for us and move on with life. However, now that our collective and our personal attention is on food noise, we might move through our day asking ourselves, “Am I thinking about food right now? How loud is the food noise today? Is the food noise gone yet?”

That kind of scanning can become its own form of preoccupation. It makes sense that you may be doing this if you’ve struggled with bingeing, because food feels risky, so you may find yourself wanting to monitor everything. This can have a good intention behind it in that you simply want to make sure that you’re safe.

Despite the good intentions, what happens when you constantly check is that you keep putting food at the center of your attention.

This is similar to what happens when someone tries really hard not to think about something, and they end up thinking about it more. The more you try to check and control your thoughts, the more you keep your mind on the topic.

One of the best mindset shifts you can make is to gently and kindly help yourself stop checking and scanning for food noise—not in a way that you ignore real hunger or enjoyment in food, but in a way where you stop monitoring your mind for every tiny detail when it comes to food.

If the food noise shows up, yes, you’ll notice it, and you can do everything I’ve talked about in the previous tips. But as much as you can, try not to go looking for it.

I know that’s not always the easiest goal, so just do the best that you can. A helpful way to do this, which I’ll talk about a little later in this post as well, is to redirect your attention elsewhere as much as possible.

The main takeaway from this tip is simply that you don’t need to take your “food noise temperature” all day. You deserve to live your life and to put your energy into what matters to you. When you just let it be what it is when it comes to food noise, without the constant checking and monitoring, it feels less and less important, and your brain can start to let go of the food focus.

6. Reduce Inputs That Inflate Food Noise

This tip is about what you’re feeding your brain. Remember that the lower brain is automatic. It senses inputs and produces responses based on conditioning. If you’re constantly consuming content that keeps food and bodies front and center, it’s not surprising that your mind feels noisy.

If you’re watching “what I eat in a day” videos, diet content, recipe reels, conversations about good and bad foods, before-and-after photos, constant body comparison, constant “fixing your eating” content, you’re basically placing yourself inside a stream of cues that are going to activate and fuel your food noise. I’m not saying you can never watch any sort of food media because it’s nearly impossible to get away from completely, and of course, you’re going to need some practical content in terms of food—even if that’s just a cookbook.

You don’t need to avoid life to overcome harmful noise, but you can really help yourself if you intentionally choose your inputs instead of just letting yourself be flooded with food-noise-producing content on a frequent basis.

For a lot of people, these types of inputs are like gasoline on the fire and make you think so much more about food, make you so much more self-critical, and make you feel like you’re doing everything wrong in terms of eating. So, one very practical and very compassionate thing you can do is to reduce these inputs. I encourage you to curate your feed, mute or unfollow accounts that trigger food obsession or body obsession, take breaks from diet culture conversations, and be selective about what you let into your mind.

This is about recognizing that your brain is healing, and the last thing you need is to keep blasting it with messages that intensify the noise.

This also applies to certain conversations in your own mind. If your inner dialogue is full of thoughts like, “I shouldn’t want this,” or, “I can’t have that,” or, “I have to be good,” or, “I have to control this,” those are also inputs. Those are messages that increase the noise. The more you can shift toward a more neutral, more self-caring internal voice, the less fuel you’re adding.

7. When You Have Food Noise, Ask: “What Else Is Here?”

My last tip relates to what I’ve already briefly mentioned in terms of redirecting your focus. This tip is, when you have food noise, to ask yourself, “What else is here?”

I’ve talked about not fighting the noise, about making it less personal to you, and about not trying to force it away. Another powerful way to avoid making it more important than it needs to be is to simply ask yourself, “What else is here?” I love this question because it helps you acknowledge that the food noise is there—you’re not denying your experience or pretending the food noise doesn’t exist; but you’re helping yourself realize that there is more going on than food in any given moment.

When your brain is noisy, it can feel like food is the main event. It can feel like you have to solve it before you can do anything else, but there’s always more happening. You can simply look around you. You can notice things in your environment. You can ground yourself in the present and your surroundings.

Ask yourself, “What else are you doing right now?”, or “What else can you do?”

Ask yourself, “What matters to you right now?”, or “What’s in front of you?”, or “What can you choose to focus on?”

Even if it’s not something in your immediate environment, you can think of something else, or reach out to someone, or focus on something or someone that you care about, or a cause that’s important to you, or a goal that you have, or just something silly or mindless, or a hobby, or a song, or a pet.

When food noise shows up, you might be working, you might be with your kids, or driving. You may be bored, stressed, happy, or experiencing any number of emotions. Food noise can show up in all of these moments, but it does not have to become the center of your attention.

You can expand what you notice in your environment and within yourself by practicing calm and self-caring redirection.

Redirection is different than panicky distraction. Distraction can certainly have its place, but you don’t need to rush to escape the discomfort of food noise—and a lot of times, the more you try to escape, the more uncomfortable it becomes.

So as much as you can, try to know that you’re safe through this discomfort and simply try to find what else you can put your valuable attention on. You may need to redirect your attention over and over again, and that’s okay. Repetition is not failure; it’s practice and learning for your brain. Every time you redirect, you’re strengthening the pathways in other parts of your life and weakening the pathway that says, “All food thoughts have to be engaged with.” Even if you can just redirect your attention for a little while, celebrate yourself for this.

Freedom Doesn’t Require the Food Noise to Disappear

A lot of people only count it as progress if the noise goes away, but especially early in recovery, the noise may not go away quickly. It may linger, but it’s still a huge win if you don’t follow it with harmful action. It’s a huge win if you turn your attention to something else. It’s a huge win if you relate to the noise differently and if you don’t see it as something to fear or something to run away from.

So don’t measure your progress by the noise going away. A better measure of progress is that the noise showed up, but you didn’t let it run your life.

If you noticed the noise, didn’t fight it, didn’t turn it into a big story, and redirected to your life, that is creating brain change. Acknowledging and celebrating your success helps solidify that change. Celebration can simply be savoring a sense of pride for your accomplishment and feeling good knowing that the food noise never has to control you.

I hope the mindset tips I’ve shared will help you relate to the food noise in a new way when it shows up, so that it feels less overwhelming and more like an experience that you can have without it disrupting your life.

By taking it less personally, fearing it less, checking for it less, fueling it with less attention, and returning again and again to the life you actually want to live, you’ll turn down the volume on the noise and free yourself from any harmful effects of it.

Do you need more help as you stop binge eating? 

Free Inspiration Booklet – The booklet contains 31 daily messages to help you stay focused and motivated each day as you let go of binge eating.

One-on-one Coaching – Book a 45-minute private and highly personalized session with Kathryn Hansen. You will learn to change your thinking, uncover what is holding you back, and get on a path to complete freedom from food issues.

Group Coaching – Includes 4 group coaching calls per week with Kathryn. You’ll also get access to a forum for encouragement and accountability, and course access.

Brain over Binge Course – Self-paced online lessons (plus an app) for only $18.99/month. Includes over 125 tracks to listen to that give you the information and answers you need as you end binge eating.

Brain over Binge Books – Get Brain over Binge and the Brain over Binge Recovery Guide on Amazon and Audible.