Community Pop-Up: Let’s chat about food noise.
Open thread, share your thoughts! 💬
You’re invited to this month’s community pop-up!
Once a month, I offer an opportunity to connect with others in the Sober Soulful community.
Here’s how it works:
This month, as a follow-up to my recent essay on Quieting Food Noise (Without Ozempic), I’d love to know:
Do you experience incessant or disruptive thoughts about food and eating? Do you ever wish you could stop thinking and obsessing about food all the time? If you experience food noise, what does that experience look and feel like for you? How do you experience it not just in your mind, but in your body?
Similar to recovery groups, no promotion of alcohol use, sowing of hatred and division, political commentary, or unsolicited advice, please. I know it can be extremely vulnerable to share about our bodies, our relationship to food, and our health and wellness choices. Please rest assured that anyone who offers you unasked for advice on your body, your health, or your choices will be removed from the comment section.
Find someone in the comments you’d like to connect with and reply to their comment. Don’t skip this part! I want you all to meet one another!
Bonus: Re-stack your comment and this pop-up on Notes (Substack’s social media platform, for anyone unfamiliar). The more people see it, the more people can find and connect with you here!
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Thank you. I appreciate you. I’ll meet you in the comments!
- Dana
In the past (way less so now, but it’s still there), my experience of food noise was entangled in Fear of Too Much - as in, fear of too much coming from within or without. Whether we’re talking about food, love, or anything else, my default has been (still is sometimes) to pull towards elimination, deprivation, and restriction because (for me) those offer momentary relief and illusory control, keeping the dread, chaos, and waves of anxiety from dragging me under.
In my body, the anxiety centres around my chest and heart. It feels suffocating, and as though I’m profoundly uncomfortable inside my own skin. Food noise often revolved around relieving this internal overwhelm by establishing some sort of control over what I was eating and my body - it’s like, if I could at least control this one small thing, I could relieve the fear and redirect the hyper-vigilance inwards rather than outwards.
And so...my own work and practice with quieting food noise has gone hand-in-hand with easing up on attempts at control (which never really worked anyway).
In the beginning of my sobriety, I dove headfirst and hard into intermittent fasting. I lost 35 pounds that first year of sobriety and felt invincible. I told myself it was part of my new quest to health. Looking back now I can see it was just a replacement addiction. A way to feel in control as I untangled myself from years of being under alcohol’s grip. Now that I am no longer restricting how and when I eat, I feel a bit manic with my food. The noise can be deafening at times and I know it’s tied up with my feelings of inadequacy (which fluctuates depending on the day) and loneliness (which for me is more “no one gets me” versus “no one is with me”).
Thanks for giving us the runway to discuss all this, Dana 🙏🏼. I’m looking forward to the rest of your series.