9 Yang Practices for Quieting Food Noise (Without Ozempic) - Part 3

When our body feels at ease, our mind feels at ease.

Nov 30, 2024

∙ Paid

Welcome to the third and final part of my series on quieting food noise (and other unhelpful thoughts or cravings) naturally. Part 1 is an entry into this conversation; Part 2 offers ideas for internal (mental & emotional) caretaking, and Part 3 (today) offers practical steps for external (body & physical) caretaking.

Part 3 ended up being quite lengthy, but I decided to keep it intact as a comprehensive, immediately helpful resource for paying subscribers. It’s here for you to use now or revisit later.

Believe it or not, I still have lots more to say on this topic! Future essays on Food & Body are coming, including a fun new feature launching in January. Heads-up: most Food & Body content will be behind the paywall. For full access, you can upgrade your subscription here:

As a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine since 2012, a practicing Buddhist and yogi for more than two decades, and someone who’s sober from alcohol and in full recovery from eating disorders, three things:

Shifting patterns related to food (which we can’t just quit) is challenging and liberating.
Changing these default patterns naturally is possible.
Through exploration, observation, and practice, we receive gifts that benefit all areas of our lives.

If you feel caught up in unhelpful patterns around food and eating, please know you’re not alone. And if you’re exploring ways to quiet food noise naturally (or quiet other unhelpful thoughts and cravings), this series is for you.

A quick recap:

In Part 1, I wrote about seeing online discussions in which people mention reduction in food noise as one reason they’re taking or considering Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs. I interpret food noise as incessant thoughts about and fixation on food and eating (usually accompanied by a desire to stop thinking and obsessing about food all the time).

To recap some highlights: we affirmed that we are the number one caretakers of our bodies, that we cannot selectively numb, that we need to tend to both our minds and our bodies, and that finding inner calm, stillness, and silence from food noise naturally is possible.

So, how to get there? The steps that worked for me can be roughly grouped into Yin practices and Yang practices:

Yin practices are things we do internally to get to know ourselves and our patterns more intimately. That’s the focus of Part 2, which I strongly recommend reading before moving on to Part 3.
Yang practices are things we do externally to take care of our physical, material body. That’s our focus today.

Part 2 established the importance of becoming an expert in your food noise: noticing when it shows up, when it’s loudest, when it quiets and settles. Noticing what conditions make it more or less intense and insistent, your participation in those conditions, and what else is happening beneath and around the food noise.

All that information is vital for what comes next, as we shift from more internal Yin practices to more external Yang ones.

Today, I’ll answer the following questions:

After asking our body what it needs to feel energized, rested, strong, and at peace, how do we take healthy, mindful action?
What do I, Dana, do to take care of my physical body?
What ways of eating and living do I find supportive for quieting food noise?
What ways of eating and living tend to make food noise worse?

Taking Care of Our Physical Bodies

The worse we feel in our physical body, the less we want to be there—so the more tempting it is to disconnect and check out. Once disconnected, the easier it is to do more of what ends up hurting us. And, because we can’t actually turn our minds off, the food noise ramps up in reaction to the body’s distress.

For this reason, and with “food stuff” in particular, I’ve found physical caretaking paramount in addition to emotional caretaking.

It’s also because we are physical, embodied beings. Our minds want to keep consuming information and will come up with stories and justifications and plans and explanations all day long, but I promise you that isn’t going to quiet or solve the food noise.

Just as we can’t consume or stress our way out of stress, we can’t solve a problem by doing the same thing that created it. And one part of what created the problem of food noise is what we’re doing or not doing to and for our bodies. I find this especially true when we’re talking about food and eating—the means by which we literally constitute ourselves.

Before we get into how to change things, let’s revisit the destination:

Your mind becomes stiller and less agitated but also clearer and more alive—it’s a completely different sort of quieting than the dulling and deadening that happens with numbing out or turning off. In the process, you become more connected to your body’s innate intelligence and inner knowing. You also gain a skill, practice, and way of perceiving and responding that will apply to every area of your life and which no one can take away from you.
And, guess what? You still get to love food! You still get to look forward to and enjoy your meals! In fact, you probably enjoy them more, because you’ve made a few shifts that help you feel good not just while eating, but afterwards. You’ve become a present, responsive, loving caretaker of your body. Your body feels more like a refuge and more like home.

To get there, you probably have to leave behind “business as usual.”

For the purposes of this series, I’ve separated internal Yin practices from external Yang ones. But as you read through everything that follows (the Yang side), remember that Yin-Yang are inseparable and comprise a whole.

For Yang practices to truly work in an integrated, impactful, lasting way, they must go hand-in-hand with the Yin practices in Part 2. And commitment to doing something different is at the heart of it all.

If you truly want things to shift—in both body and mind, including the food noise—you have to make a clear decision to leave behind “business as usual.”

No expert, coach, practitioner, trainer, writer, pharmaceutical, supplement, or lab test can make this decision for you. You have to make it and follow through.

So, if what you’re doing isn’t working, if you’re constantly preoccupied with food or simply don’t feel the way you want to feel, I urge you to try the practices laid out below.

A note on my qualifications & an advice disclaimer: In addition to completing a five-year Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine program and passing licensing board exams in both the United States and Canada, I pursued additional training in ancestral health and nutrition to become a Certified Primal Health Coach. I also developed the curriculum for and taught in the inaugural Holistic Nutrition Program at Kootenay Columbia College of Integrative Health Sciences. Additionally, I served as an instructor and Dean of Acupuncture & Chinese Medicine at Pacific Rim College, home to one of the largest Chinese Medicine programs in North America.
As a licensed healthcare professional, I cannot give individual-specific medical or dietary advice without conducting a full intake and having the client sign consent and privacy waivers. While what follows may feel like good medicine, it’s not prescriptive or medical advice.