WHAT IS FOOD NOISE?
One of Australia's Most Popular Podcasts with Hundreds of 5 Star Reviews
Grab your FREE Ebook copy now!
Have you struggled to lose weight and keep it off?
Start your journey to boost metabolism and transform your body into a fat-burning powerhouse.
Episode 235:
Show Notes
Episode 235:
Transcript
Dr Mary Barson (0:04) Hello, my lovely friends. I am Dr Mary Barson.
Dr Lucy Burns (0:09) And I'm Dr Lucy Burns. We are doctors and weight management and metabolic health experts.
Both (0:16) And this is the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast!
Dr Mary Barson (0:17) Hello, lovely friend. Dr Mary here, joined by my fabulous, smart, wonderful colleague, Dr Lucy. Happy Christmas Eve. Dr. Lucy, how are you?
Dr Lucy Burns (0:29) I'm fabulous. So fabulous. So much fun. Lots and lots of things going on for RLM. But lots and lots of things just going on in the world. And honestly, I feel great. So, huzzah!
Dr Mary Barson (0:40) That's good. I love it. That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful mind flip. You ask most people how they are this time of year, like, busy. So, I love that you're embracing the full facet of life there.
Dr Lucy Burns (0:51) Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I think that you and I are in different seasons. I've got grown-up kids, you've got little kids. So Christmas is different, you know, different ways that we look at things and things that we have to prioritise. I don't have to run out and, you know, buy Santa dog treats or anything like that.
Dr Mary Barson (01:11) No, you don't have to be Santa's personal assistant.
Dr Lucy Burns (01:14) No, not at all.
Dr Mary Barson (01:15) No, yep, that would be quite handy.
Dr Lucy Burns (01:17) Not at all. But, you know, again, I just think it is a busy time, but it doesn't have to be hideous. So, you know, great. So I feel wonderful.
Dr Mary Barson (01:28) So good, so good. I'm excited by today's topic. It's one that we've got a few requests to talk about, and it's a big topic of understanding food noise. What would you say food noise is, Lucy?
Dr Lucy Burns (01:47) Well, I think the first thing is that food noise is a relatively new term. So, you know, when I was growing up, and even in diet culture, nobody used that phrase. It wasn't a common phrase, and possibly some of you listening have never heard of it either. But the way I think of food noise is it's in your brain. So it's like thoughts, intrusive thoughts, intrusive sentences that are all about food, and it can range from thinking constantly when's my next meal, what can I eat, what am I, I'm still hungry, there'll be little phrases. And for some people, they can take over and they can find it hard to concentrate. They, you know, go to bed thinking about food, wake up thinking about food, and they kind of basically do non-stop food thinking. I think like everything in medicine, and in fact probably everything in the world, there's a spectrum. So, you know, some people will have mild food noise, some people have moderate, and some people have really intense food noise.
Dr Mary Barson (02:57) Yeah. And I reckon it's important to understand that, yeah, it is complex and it's not caused by just one thing, that food noise is influenced by our brain chemistry, influenced by psychological triggers, genetic predisposition and environmental cues. So it's got hormonal, chemical, psychological, environmental, genetic factors that contribute to how much, you know, each of us deals with food noise. And it can vary over the course of the day, over the course of the years. There are certainly a lot of things you can do to just help dampen it down and get more peace and less of that mental chatter. But everybody experiences it differently and we experience it differently at different times.
Dr Lucy Burns (03:46) Yeah, absolutely. And I guess the one thing I'd say is that there's certainly, as you mentioned, there's things that you can do. And it doesn't have to rule your life. I think that one of the things that people sometimes have trouble distinguishing is what we call physiological hunger, so, you know, you're hungry, versus food noise or cravings or, you know, desire. So again, sort of food noise, cravings, desire for food, they're variations. They're not exactly the same but they're variations on a theme. Then there's actual hunger.
Dr Mary Barson (04:37) Yeah, yeah, physiological, like physical hunger. And they are governed by different processes in our bodies. So hunger is largely hormonally influenced and there are actually a lot of hormones that are involved in hunger, a lot of our metabolic hormones. The main ones are like ghrelin is our hunger hormone. And when that's released, it sort of stimulates our desire to eat. We sort of get hungry, and our appetite increases. And then we've got lots of hormones that then control when we feel full, like cholecystokinin, peptide YY, and leptin. Insulin also plays a really important role in sort of governing our overall hunger as well and how well these hormones work and how resistant our bodies are to our satiety hormones. So it is a complex hormonal interplay that governs whether or not we're feeling physically hungry or not. And what helps to get back in control of that, of our physical hunger, is eating real food. And I feel like a broken record but I'm going to keep saying it, you're going to keep saying it, in particular reducing the amount of processed foods and processed carbohydrates that we eat because those foods are designed to not, they override our normal hunger and satiety signals and they also hijack our cravings and our brain reward system. So processed foods are bad for both the psychological and the physical hunger. So Lucy, a brief summary, what do you reckon would be useful ways to get your physical hunger into a nice, normal, natural balance?
Dr Lucy Burns (06:32) Okay, so I mean we know at the heart of all of these hormonal imbalances is, again, insulin as the king hormone or the queen if you're gender neutral. So the head monarch hormone is insulin. And the others all follow behind. So if we reduce insulin and, again, they don't all follow behind straight away. So, again, we need some patience and time. But if we can reduce insulin first and we do that by reducing, as you mentioned, the amount of carbohydrates in our diet, in particular processed carbs. But while we're doing that, we need to make sure we're eating enough protein and we need to make sure we've got a bit of fat in our diet because carbohydrate and fat are our two fuel forms. And so what I see a lot of people doing is they're already on a low-fat diet for whatever reason. Again, that was the story that we were all told. We're all told to do that, definitely. Yeah, so then they reduce their carbohydrates as well, and it's like, okay, that's two of the three macronutrients. You're really just left with protein, which, look, protein by itself is not very appealing. And also you've got no fuel source. Your body is having to sort of use protein as its fuel source, which it can do, but it's not very efficient and it's really and you'll be tired and hungry and you'll feel rubbish. So definitely, initially, protein and some fat sources will help with this balance, the physiological balance of hunger and satiety. And, again, over time, you know, there's a whole host of lifestyle measures that we talk a broken record on and on about to improve other, you know, particularly leptin. You know, there's some evidence coming out now about its role in mitochondrial health in relation to circadian rhythm. So, you know, those are really important.
Dr Mary Barson (08:41) Yeah, sleep, sunlight, managing your stress, moving your body, also important as well to literally get control back of your normal natural hunger and satiety.
Dr Lucy Burns (08:54) Yeah. So hunger's one thing. That's the physiological bit. That's hunger. And it's normal and natural and you shouldn't be afraid to be hungry. No. It's normal.
Dr Mary Barson (09:04) Nor should you be afraid to eat when you're hungry.
Dr Lucy Burns (09:06) Yeah, absolutely. And if you're hungry, you are allowed to eat. You don't have to white-knuckle your way through. And, interestingly, when your hormones are in balance, as we've talked about, hunger is reduced like it actually is, which is easy. It's great.
Dr Mary Barson (09:26) And that goes such a long way to calming the psychological drivers of the food noise when your hunger is just naturally under control. It does make all the psychological drivers more quiet, but it doesn't necessarily make them go away.
Dr Lucy Burns (09:41) No. So, Miss, one of the things I'd like to talk about is there are strong proponents both on social media and, you know, around the place that suggest that restriction increases food noise, that if we restrict particular foods, then our brain just wants them more and more and more until we cave. And so the solution is don't restrict anything. What are your thoughts, Miss?
Dr Mary Barson (10:11) First of all, I have not found any evidence that this is true. And just because something is said a lot doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And I think that the devil is in the details with this. So let's, you know, bring out again the humble Tim Tam. So my clinical experience, both personally and with our beautiful course members, with our beautiful patients, is that when you reduce your processed carbohydrates, your desire for processed carbohydrates does go down. It really does. And then say that out comes a packet of Tim Tams and somebody then eats a Tim Tam, then eating one Tim Tam increases your desire for more Tim Tams. It wakes up dopamine, the brain's reward system. We get that dopamine release, you know, eating those sugary processed foods. It triggers those pleasure signals. Our brain's like, ooh, I want more of this. And those modern processed foods are literally designed to reach this bliss point, to flood our brains with dopamine so we'll eat more of them. The more we eat, the more these processed food companies make. So I think that a lot of those sugary, high-carb processed foods, are designed so that we can't easily regulate them. We just want to eat more and more and more. But the amazing thing is that when you do, to sort of remove those harmful foods from your life, the desire for them really does go down. And so it depends on what you mean by restriction. I think you should fuel your body and you should eat nourishing food and you should eat as much nourishing food as you want. You should enjoy your meals. Food is joyous. Food is lovely. But processed foods, I don't believe that restricting processed foods really leads to any adverse outcomes at all.
Dr Lucy Burns (12:00) No, and look, you're right. I also searched, like I was doing a literature search for restriction increasing food noise. And, you know, I wasn't able to find any. And I'm happy if somebody's got some, please send them to me, but I would like to review them. But the theory I think for lots of proponents of this type of eating is that, you know, we call it the pink elephant effect. So, you know, when someone says you don't think of a pink elephant, of course, what pops into your mind, is a pink elephant. And, again, I think that if your brain is saying don't eat Tim Tams, don't eat Tim Tams, don't eat Tim Tams, well, yeah, it's going to want Tim Tams. So there are many psychological tools that we can use to reframe our thoughts around food. Simply white knuckling and saying don't have them, that's not going to work. That honestly will not work. You've probably tried that. It's not going to work. You need strategies. You need frameworks. And it is absolutely doable, but it is a skill. So I'm going to say to you that the people that say to you restricting will cause you to want it more or will cause binging are probably not giving you the skills you need to stop thinking of pink elephants.
Dr Mary Barson (13:18) That's right. That's it, yeah, yeah. The term restriction really does, I think, build up a lot of negative connotations. You know, people think that it's, you know, toxic diet culture. It's, you know, you're not worthy unless you're thin. You know, hunger is good. All of those toxic diet culture messages that have, you know, but that we have been fed for a long time. But that is certainly not how we would ever approach a healthy life to get our body into a nice, beautiful balance. It's not about, you know, restricting your food. It's about choosing nourishing foods that are both yummy and helpful and get your body into a balance, can improve your quality of life, improve your longevity. You know, you can live a wonderful, happy life. And as a fabulous happy side effect, they also do help decrease food noise. Restriction, I think, is a dirty word, and I would argue that choosing real food and nourishing your body with real food is not restrictive. I know that people would definitely argue with me about that, that if I say, you know, processed carbohydrates are bad, then that's a restrictive diet and that's not sustainable. But I very strongly disagree with that view. You can make sweet foods if you want them. You can have your cocktails. There's lots you can do within the framework of lower carbohydrate real food.
Dr Lucy Burns (14:39) Oh, absolutely. And I think even, I mean, there's now, you know, guidelines around reducing carbohydrates to manage things like type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, PCOS, all of the things that we know about. And interestingly, when the guidelines were first proposed, I remember they came out with the phrase therapeutic carbohydrate restriction. And I thought, oh, no, we need to change that language. And it's now therapeutic carbohydrate reduction because you are reducing. Restricting is an unhelpful phrase in many, many parts of life, but particularly around food.
Dr Mary Barson (15:19) I've got another really useful point to discuss when we're talking about food noise is how it isn't a purely psychological thing. And we know this to be true and it's not a sign of, you know, character flaw or weakness or that there's something wrong with your brain if you've got more food noise than the person next to you. Because of a really interesting phenomenon that we are noticing with injectable weight loss medications, the GLP-1 receptor agonists, and medications such as semaglutide, which is marketed under the brands of Ozempic, Legovy and the other ones that are in that family. Yeah, Tizepatad is Monjaro. That these medications are what people are taking and they're noticing that they're getting a reduction in their food noise so these medications, which essentially are hormonal interventions, these hormonal interventions have an impact on the dopamine reward pathways in our brains and people are noticing that it really reduces their cravings, reduces their food noise, which is I think fascinating. I don't think you necessarily need to be on these medications because you've got food noise, but it is an extremely interesting observation that a hormonal intervention reduces food noise.
Dr Lucy Burns (16:36) Yeah, absolutely, and I think it leads weight too to that restriction causes food noise debate because honestly people who are using these medications often are not eating very much food. So, you know, it's not about them, they're restricting and that's causing their food noise. In fact, the medication is stopping it. So I think you're right. It's a complex concept, the food noise or cravings or chatter. I mean I used to call it chatter before food noise became a thing, the chatter in my brain. And so, again, this is part of where at Real Life Medicine we're not this or that. We're not saying to people, you know, you can only manage this by following our frameworks. We're saying there are lots of tools to use and people should be given the option of all the tools available and make informed choices about what is going to work for them and be able to make those choices then without shame and judgment because this is the other thing I see is that people out there and, look, I know that there's two camps in the injectable weight loss world. There's a camp where, you know, there's lots of sort of pop-up clinics all over the place that are really they're not part of the person's whole health journey, they're just, you know, a prescription-only service essentially versus people at the other end of the spectrum saying, oh, nobody should use any of this, we should all just be able to manage it. And, I mean, we're going to do an episode more on this in the next couple of weeks, but really I just want people to know that there is no right or wrong. There is no this and that. Medications are powerful. The dose in which you need them, again, Real Life Medicine, we believe the lowest effective dose is the best dose for the person and the reason for that, one, that it's cheaper for you. It's always good. Two, less side effects, less other drug interactions, less long-term effects particularly those long-term side effects at lower doses. So the way to have lowest dose is to really be looking then at the biological and psychological strategies that you can do to reduce food noise.
Dr Mary Barson (19:25) That's right. And, lovely, Lucy, we have a masterclass coming up where we are going to talk about just this, our masterclass, we're going to dive into this exact topic.
Dr Lucy Burns (19:37) Yes, absolutely. And, again, I may change the name because it's currently called Three Strategies to Overcome Sugar Cravings. Interestingly, I've had a few people email saying, oh, sugar's not my problem, it's chips. So, again, it's now kind of Three Strategies to Overcome Sugar, in brackets, and Carb Cravings. Yes. You can check that out. It's on our website, but it's also rlmedicine.com/cravings. If you're driving, don't try and look it up now. All the notes and all the links will be in the show notes, of course. And next week, I mean, we've got so many exciting things. I'm so excited about it. Next week we're actually going to talk about our new telehealth clinic that we're opening. So this, again, is part of a holistic service that works with your doctor, with Lifestyle Medicine as the foundation, and really with the aim of either deprescribing or prescribing medications in a holistic form. That's basically going to be the aim of our clinic, but we'll tell you more about that next week. Exciting. I know. So if you want to go on the wait list for when we open, again, I'll put the link in the show notes, but it's rlmedicine.com/clinic, nice name, to hear when our opening dates are. Okay. So I just want to finish. Again, if you have food noise, it's not your fault. It's not your hopeless. You're not weak. Your brain's not disordered or anything like that. It's just looking. And, again, at the very, very core of food noise, it's a survival mechanism where humans were designed to look and forage and be excited by food, because without food, you know, we diet, and that's not good for the human race. So this is really just a part of our survival instincts that are just a little bit on hyperdrive.
Dr Mary Barson (21:47) Yep. And there are ways to calm it back down and get it into a nicer, lovely, more peaceful balance.
Dr Lucy Burns (21:55) Yeah, manageable. That's what we want, manageable. Good.
Dr Mary Barson (22:01) All right. Bye-bye, lovely ones.
Dr Lucy Burns (22:02) Bye, lovelies. Talk to you next week.
Dr Lucy Burns (22:05) The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, including show notes and links, provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.
