Craving Food Noise

The newly-coined term may hide a universal experience under a different name

Nobody knows why the world became so obese. As nature abhors a vacuum, the mind abhors a lack of understanding. Insufficient stories and just-world thinking rush in to fill the gap. “It’s just…” No, it’s not. If a single simple cause fit, we would have found it.

“But I lost weight by…” Great. It likely won’t work for many others. You’re assuming your journey was harder and your obstacles are a superset of others’, so your method must scale. “If I can do it, anyone can!” Consider that the less successful weren’t weaker or less determined. Maybe they faced stronger headwinds. If that never crossed your mind, imagine what else hasn’t. For men who hit BMI 30, the chance of being normal weight in 9 years is 1 in 200. At BMI 40, it’s 1 in 1,300. Yahtzee on the first roll. Not good odds.

You can starve yourself down to any weight. Eat less than you burn and you’ll drop pounds. The moment you try, a system fights back. We know from countless studies that you can’t really exercise to lose weight. Your metabolism will drop to keep the day’s expenditure roughly constrained. They ran those Biggest Loser contestants ragged for hours. What happened? Their metabolism tanked by 500 calories a day to undo it, and they gained it all back. Each kilogram of weight lost makes you 100 calories hungrier a day, so you can’t trick the body with a few “good days” and hope for hunger amnesia. It remembers.

Starvation doesn’t work long-term. It’s like trying to breathe slower than your oxygen demands. Maybe if you concentrate you can do it for a full minute, but eventually you will give in and gasp for air, making up for all the breaths you held back. No one argues superhuman willpower lets you breathe at half rate forever. A biological urge will compound until you give in. Resisting it is a brief exercise in self-flagellation. We rarely grant overeaters the same grace.

Hunger is specific in timescale. It punishes you for undershooting maintenance on that particular day. It’s not a lack of reward, but an active unpleasantness. If you are normal weight and eat under maintenance, you will shortly waste away and die. Hunger seems decently calibrated in most people, even the obese. Well-calibrated isn’t always ideal, though. If you’re 300 lbs. and want to eat below maintenance to lose, you’ll likely go to bed hungry, night after night.

Everyone experiences hunger, but we had no idea that there was a second type. Five decades into the obesity epidemic, new drugs were discovered that silenced it. Normal-weight people had no idea the obese experienced it, and the obese had no idea the normal-weight didn’t. All we could do was talk past each other. “You must have less/more self-control than me.” Only when the same people experienced both did it get a name as a distinct experience: food noise. Sapir–Whorf strikes again.

Food noise isn’t like hunger. It’s not a punishment, but a potential reward for capturing nearby resources. Think of it as a persistent awareness of food’s availability multiplied by its deliciousness. I may not recall which canned soups are in the cupboard, but I know chips are there. I bought them tonight and somehow made it into bed with the bag unopened. I will feel its presence not unlike you feel with a toddler near stairs or a car in your blind spot. Maybe I can hold out a full day before caving but not much longer. Proximity isn’t required. If the thought lands that it’s been “long enough” since my last pizza order, a clock starts ticking.

This is surprisingly similar to how alcoholics describe temptation. When they arrive at a party, they immediately inventory the available libations. “How much can I drink without looking suspicious?” I do the same, sitting by the bowl of nuts, eating just slowly enough to look casual before switching seats when they’re depleted. When departing a restaurant, alcoholics may be tortured by a swig of beer left in someone’s glass. For me, it’s the excess eggroll left after fair division. Food slides to the center of everything. Every time a pizza box flips open, I act natural, but I’ve already drafted my top three slices.

It gets weirder. A friend described being similarly tortured by an unclaimed package. Each day of a snowstorm, he updated us with a photo of the shipment he saw left outside a neighbor’s door. As time passed, he struggled with a desire to snatch it up for himself. He relayed this without embarrassment as if it were a universal experience. Obviously the longer it sits, the more you want it. Is this not a normal desire we all suppress that compounds over time?

Seeing the same script play out across vastly disparate domains was intriguing. Food noise, alcohol noise, package noise? One drug blunted them all, and many others like gambling and opioid use. Some generic resource-acquisition circuit seems to be mediated by the same pathway.

These rewards aren’t like hunger’s unpleasantness. If hunger is the stick punishing today’s shortfall, food noise is the carrot rewarding movement back toward your set point. It feels good because ignoring it isn’t lethal, just uncomfortable, and its loudness may have to do with a weight your body wants to defend.

Both work together to keep you at some weight. If you’re already obese and still experiencing food noise, you may not be there yet. It could even be an unbounded arrow that is unreachable no matter how much you gain. The mechanism might be the same for both the chronically obese and healthy weight. Normal-weight people happen to be near their set point, and food noise doesn’t kick in unless you dip below it.

If you don’t buy set points, you have to account for those who stay the same weight their entire adult life. This was once the norm. If their hunger calibration were off by as little as 50 calories a day—an accidental 3 oz. instead of 2.5 oz. of cream cheese on a morning bagel—they’d be up ten pounds in two years. Fifty by their next high school reunion. Bob’s effortless 175 lbs. his entire life is proof of a homeostat.

To explain Bob, you either need supernatural calorie bookkeeping or simple weight sensing. If Bob was 175 in 1980 and 178 in 2010, across 11,000 days he ate 11,000 calories beyond the 27 million he needed—one extra calorie a day. That’s half a Tic Tac. No biological process could tally that accurately over that span. Either something is supernatural at counting, or there is a homeostatic mechanism that can detect weight directly. This is the hypothesized gravitostat—sensors likely in the bones of the lower extremities that can detect pounds of pressure applied. Less pressure increases appetite, more suppresses it. Simple, if we can find it.

How does this play out for Bob? Maybe when he hits a low 172 lbs., he uncharacteristically orders dessert with his standing order at Texas Roadhouse for a few weeks, returns to 175, and no one’s the wiser. He may even say, “I was really craving that!” We brush it off for him in a way we don’t for someone at 300. “Craving, sure,” we roll our eyes at the man who’s worn the same pants since high school. Who’s to say his craving is any different from our chronic food noise, and only has a different name because of its transience?

Next year, after a vacation of eating out, he climbs to 178. Unknowingly, for the next few weeks, he eats less and returns to his baseline. Here’s the surprise. Obese people can do the same. When I was at my set point—that was well into obesity—I had no trouble getting rid of a few pounds of vacation weight in the same way. Then, when I hit the weight I had been for months prior, the wall reappeared.

This may be why many healthy-weight people think of GLP-1s as cheating. They get great joy from delicious foods like anyone else and assume we’re simply giving in more often. The disconnect is they are usually at their set point, so their cravings are rare and resolve when they return to it. Only when below it—where an obese dieter lives—does the desire to indulge exponentiate.

Hunger and food noise are different jobs in the same system, split into punishment and reward. Hunger is the day-to-day auditor, a negative reinforcer tied to immediate deficit that’s mostly agnostic about set point or ideal weight. Food noise is the name given to persistent craving that rewards you for moving back toward your set point, whatever that may be. Once you see the split, obesity looks less like a moral deficit than set-point defense gone awry.

Tomorrow, how I frame struggles like this to better find a path through life.

---