Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous Dr. Stephanie Fein here with weight loss for fertility, and welcome to the podcast. Today we're talking about food noise. Do you know what that is? Most of us do, but it's persistent thoughts of food. It can feel like disruptive or constant. It feels like our brain is constantly thinking about food. And there's a range of intensity for that. For some people, it's very distracting, and for some people, not so much.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:35]:
And also, each person can have times of intensity and relative ease. We'll often see this during a period, like, you know, a cycle. So if someone's like, during pms, they may have a different level of food noise when they actually are having their period. It might be different, you know, the week after that or obviously ovulation. There could be different amounts of food noise depending on that, seasonally, everything. There's lots of different reasons why we may have more or less. One of The Benefits of GLP1s People report is that they do have a relief of some of that food noise. So it's a neurochemical issue.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:21]:
But medications are not the only way to do this. That's the good news, and that's what we're talking about today. Food noise dampens, decreases, eases naturally as a consequence of the weight loss for fertility way of losing weight. And so in today's episode, we're going to discuss four ways food noise flares and the processes in the weight loss for fertility method that quiets them down permanently. It's pretty exciting, isn't it, really? It's so nice that it can be done not only with medications, but in this way. And the interesting thing, too, just a tidbit before we get into these four ways, is it ends up being neurochemical. So anytime we're decreasing food noise, it's neurochemical, Whether we do it with a medication or we do it what I'm calling naturally we change the neurochemicals, but we can do that with the way we think, with our behavior, with things that we do. It doesn't only have to be a medication that we inject into ourselves or that we swallow.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:31]:
And that is really good news. Now I'm gonna say something that just made me think of sort of like antidepressants or whatever. There certainly are times when it makes sense to use medications, and that's between you and your doctor. And it's important to get things checked out. Also. There are spectrums of this, and sometimes we can be in eating disorder territory, and that is often best helped with therapy and specific eating disorder Methods and processes. And that's beyond the scope of what we do here. So listen to this, take this in.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:14]:
And if it's something that's really bothering you, I would talk to a professional one on one about that and medication may be part of it for you. I don't think there's anything wrong with medication in general, but I also like that there's a way to do it without. And especially when we're talking about weight loss for fertility. Sometimes we cannot take medications. There are plenty of medications you can take during pregnancy. This is another thing to discuss with your doctor. But if we don't have to, if we can manage it this way, amazing. So nice to have options.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:50]:
Okay, four ways Food noise flares. Food noise increases when we're hungry. So one of the ways to notice when we're hungry might be that our food noise increases. It's more persistent, it's more specific, it's louder, it's more often. That could be an indication of hunger. Remember, around here we use the hunger scale. It goes from negative 5, which is empty, to positive 5, which is totally stuffed. We want to eat at negative two, which is just hungry, not over hungry, not really hungry.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:35]:
And we stop at two, which is satisfied, not full. The way we can stop easily at satisfied, not full is because we eat at just hungry. If we started eating when we're over hungry, it's very difficult to stop at positive two, satisfied, not full. If you're finding it very difficult to stop when you're satisfied, not full, it's likely that you're waiting too long to eat. That's a very important distinction and I love that that's the answer because we like to blame ourselves at the point of overeating. And that's not a fair time to notice it, to think we can do something about it. It happens an hour before. So food noise, if you're really distracted by your sitting and you really weren't noticing it, then all of a sudden you're noticing it more and more and it's really distracting.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:36]:
That may be telling you that you are hungry. Sometimes we get grumbly tummy, sometimes we get a headache, but sometimes it's the food noise. Now, it could be also in combination with a grumbly tummy and that sort of thing. But notice it might be when food noise is really bothering you, that you are hungry. And in fact you might be over hungry by the time food noise is really persistent. So food noise can be an indication of hunger. That's really good to know. Food noise May also increase when you don't have a plan for food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:09]:
What I mean by that is when you're just leaving it up to sort of chance, or when you're hungry, you'll figure out what you'll eat. Well, the brain doesn't love that. The brain would like to know what's going on. So if you don't have a plan, it will give you one. It will be like, why don't we drive through? Why don't we order in? It will come up with ideas because it's a little concerned that you don't know what you're eating and when you'll be eating it. And often, if we don't have a plan, we're waiting until we're hungry. If we do that, we're often waiting until we're too hungry. And then getting the food is another 30 minutes at best.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:54]:
And then we're super hungry. So this is another version of hungry. But when we don't have the plan, the brain will happily offer you one up over and over and over and over and over again. So that's number two. When we don't know where our food's coming from, our brain will happily bombard us with suggestions, otherwise known as food noise. The fourth way that food noise increases is if we judge our thoughts about food. So this is an important point. All humans think about food, all of them.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:42]:
And you can see why we need food, right? We are designed. We need fuel. We think of food. Food noise, as I said, increases when we're hungry. So that piece is motivating, right? So if. If we're in a place where there's not a lot of food, the food noise will urge us to go look for food. We happen to live in a place, most of us, that food is readily available, so it starts to be more of an annoyance rather than a help. But when we don't understand that we are going to have thoughts of food, I like to say brains think.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:22]:
So hearts beat, lungs breathe, brains think, brains just kick out thoughts. And it will happily kick out thoughts about food. If that's what you like, if that's what you respond to, it will kick out thoughts of puppies, too, depending on how you react to them. If we have the normal thoughts that come through our head, there's something like 60,000 thoughts we think every single day. The brain just kicks them out. The heart beats. The heart just beats. Brains just think.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:54]:
If we grab onto the ones that involve food and judge them, they will be louder. And what I mean by that is we're going to have lots of thoughts. Some of them may be about food. But if we're very sensitive about food and we judge ourselves for thinking about food, and every time we think about food, we think there's something terribly wrong with us. Why are we thinking about food? We shouldn't want food we just ate. Why are we thinking about food? I'm somehow terrible because I'm thinking about food. If we're doing judging our thoughts, we are amplifying them. We are creating drama really around the fact that our brain may think about food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:44]:
And it's not a problem that it's thinking about food. It only becomes a problem if we think we have to do what our thoughts tell us to do. And the brain blessed news is that we don't. So our brain can think crazy things all day long. And as long as we realize that we are not our thoughts, our brain just thinks thoughts and we are separate from those thoughts. If we don't feel compelled to do the things that our brain suggests or thinks, then there's so much ease around the fact that our brain may shoot out some thoughts about food. But if we think our brain's thoughts are mandates, then it can be very painful because we will think about food, potentially a lot. And if we glom onto them and judge them, we are creating a lot of drama for ourselves.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:42]:
So judging them, thinking they're very meaningful and that we are compelled to do things, it thinks that that increases the intensity of food noise. And then the fourth one, how food noise increases, is if we have no other coping mechanism for emotions. So this is emotional eating. If the only way we handle boredom, anger, sadness, exhilaration, if the only ways we know to deal with emotions is eating, we will have a lot of food noise because it will be boredom. Where's the food? Where's the food? Where should I go? What's in the pantry? If it's angry? I've got a crunch. Let me find the thing to crunch. We will have a lot more food noise if that is our only coping mechanism. And for some of us, it is for some of us.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:36]:
We first have to learn to identify that we're having a feeling and then notice that we're handling it with food. It's a process to do. It's an important one. And when we unravel, uncouple food from how we deal with emotions, our lives open up in terms of not being so connected to food and food noise. That's what we would call food noise. If our brain offers us the Idea of eating when we've just eaten, but we get hard news or our boss asks us to do something else. If immediately we go to food that feels like food noise. But what it actually is is the coping mechanism we've honed over years to manage our emotions.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:33]:
So those are the four ways that food noise increases. Let's talk about how when weight loss for fertility, we decrease that food noise. So when using the hunger scale, we decrease food noise because we're eating when we're hungry and we're stopping when we're satisfied, not full. That if we get good at recognizing when we're just hungry. At negative 2, we. We prevent all the food noise that would come if we let ourselves get to negative 3, negative 4, negative 5, it works really well because we're just hungry. We're feeling very calm about being hungry because at 3, 4, and 5, we feel more and more desperate about eating. But at negative two, we're not desperate.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:23]:
We're easily calm about eating. Oh, it's time to eat. Let me get up and get my food. And now I'll eat it and I enjoy it. And now it's easy to stop then that you can see there's lots of food noise. Then that's not needed and therefore won't happen. And that is a really important piece of decreasing food noise and also a big way that we lose weight around here. The second one is when you know where your food is coming from, your brain does not nag you about it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:59]:
Really. That's what it is. So we like to make plans around here. They're not rigid, terrible, punishing plans. They're just looking at your day and figuring out what you'll eat when you're hungry, how you'll get it, where it's from, all the rest of that stuff. And when we plan that out, our brain calms down. It's like, okay, got it. Oh, we're having lunch with PD today.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:28]:
Fantastic. @ the Mexican place. Amazing. Now your brain doesn't have to be like, and then, what should we do? Where should we go? What should we do? It can just say, oh, you just answer it every time it asks you. Oh, we're having lunch with Petey at the Mexican place. Done. No drama, no extra things. No.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:45]:
Maybe we should have ice cream for lunch. Maybe we should do the. No, we know exactly what we're doing for lunch. But it's important to mention here, we don't plan for restriction in the weight loss for fertility way. We're not saying, okay, I'm having Lunch. But I'm having a twig and cottage cheese like that. I mean, unless you love a twig and cottage cheese. Otherwise that's not what we're planning for lunch.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:09]:
The planning is not a secret code for, you know, eat broccoli only. The plan is just literally, what am I going to eat? And when your brain knows that, the food noise goes down. But it's not code for restriction. Restriction doesn't work. Planning does. But some people recoil from planning because they're only used to planning when they were restrictive with themselves. That's not what we do around here. But planning is very helpful.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:41]:
Knowing what you're going to eat calms the food noise. Number three, when you understand how thoughts work, remember, brains think. It's much easier to. Well, I'll say it's easier to not judge. It's not so easy not to judge. But we have a way to help ourselves not judge. We first identify that we are judging our thoughts. So we have to notice first.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:11]:
And once we notice, we can start to see what our brain's doing in terms of judging the thoughts. Ultimately, when we understand that we're allowing the thoughts to be there, thoughts just come. They just spit out. The way that Byron Katie teaches this is she's always saying, you can't stop thoughts. Thoughts just come. And she'll say, okay, don't picture this lemon. And of course, we all picture lemons, right? Because it's showing that the brain will just think thoughts, so there's no evilness there. So we can't take on blame for what the brain is thinking.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:55]:
The brain will think, and if we judge them, they'll stay. It's that same idea of what we resist persists. If we resist the fact that we just thought of an ice cream cone, then we're going to be thinking more and more about the ice cream cone. Why am I thinking about the ice cream cone? I shouldn't think about the ice cream cone. Oh, I do love ice cream. Oh, no, I better not have any ice cream. Instead, the ice cream cone floated through your brain, then it would be gone. The judgment is the thing that makes it a problem.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:25]:
And when we can know more about this, and this is an important skill to learn, then we can just let the thought be there. It just floats on by. We don't grab onto it. We let it be there. That separation of us and our thoughts is a really important piece, and it's a fantastic skill that helps us in so many ways. It very much helps with food noise. And then the last One is getting a handle on emotional eating. And the way we do that is we identify our feelings.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:00]:
We start to recognize them, the patterns, how they feel, and then we learn to process them instead of covering them up. With eating, that's a big deal. Learning how to deal with emotions in a different way than with food. Huge. But also unbelievably helpful for stopping overeating and losing weight, and also just for life and feeling better. When we start to be able to identify our feelings, which we do because we're checking in with ourselves all the time and we're noticing what's going on, it makes it much easier to identify feelings that way. And then when we notice patterns like we eat boredom or we eat anger, then we can start to come up with different ways of handling boredom and anger. And boredom is a pretty simple one because we.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:55]:
We either can allow it to be there. You know, if you happen to be someplace that you can't do much more, it's okay to be bored for a little while. But also you can say, oh, I'm bored. Let me go play my guitar, let me go call my friend. We can actually do something as opposed to eating to fill that time. Because if we're using the hunger scale, we know we're not hungry. Sometimes things like anger, we may need to just process. That's something that we talk about how to process.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:26]:
And I'm going to link up episode in the show notes to steer you in the right direction. There's processing it and then there's also deciding to do something. So if someone has done something and you're angry about it, you may be able, once you're calm and have processed the emotion, you'll be able to handle the situation, call the person, change the lock, you know, like whatever actually needs to be done. It's so much clearer to be able to do it once the feeling is processed, and then you can be clear about what the next steps are. Dealing with emotions in a way that serves you is such a valuable skill. And when we eat to mask the emotions, we're only overeating and we're not getting rid of the emotion. And then we're not helping deal with the emotion. We're not dealing with the situation in a proper way.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:22]:
It's really a game changer. And when we do all those things, we have such decreased food noise. And we have ways of handling all these things that come up that legitimate things that come up. And when we are handling them, we're losing weight. And not only are we losing weight we are changing our physiology, both in the brain and in the gut with these behavior changes. So medication's not needed and you have these skills forever. That's the exciting thing is, at least with the GLP1s, you either need them forever, which is an option, or you'll need the skills anyway. Learning them this way means you have them forever.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:08]:
It's so useful and it works so beautifully. So, my little recap for food noise. Food noise increases when we're hungry, when we don't have a plan for what we're going to eat that day, when we're judging our thoughts about food and when no other coping mechanism for emotions exists. Food noise decreases when we use the hunger scale, when we eat, when we're hungry, stop when we're satisfied, not full. When you know where your food is coming from that day, you plan your food for the day. Not in a restrictive way, just in a way that your brain is calm because it knows where the food's coming from. It decreases when you understand how thoughts work, that brains think, and that you have the ability to allow them to be there without judgment, not judging our food thoughts. And then when you have ways to identify and process your feelings, food noise goes way down.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:22:08]:
Because food is not the answer to that. You're actually dealing with the situation, processing your emotions and able to live your life in a way that doesn't use food to mask the uncomfortable feelings. It's freedom, really. That's what we're talking about. And food noise can be the way that we get there. It points to what's wrong and we have ways of handling it. That's what we do at weight loss for fertility. If you are interested in me helping you with this, because that's what I do, I help you with each of these, gaining the skills, feeling more confident, your ability to have food take its rightful place in your life.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:22:56]:
If you want help with that, I'm @stephaniefeinmd on Instagram or LinkedIn or go to the website stephaniefeinmd.com or weightlossforfertility.com and we can be connected. I look forward to hearing from you. I'm sending you so much love. Until next week. Bye.
