Today we’re gonna talk about how to handle and deal with food noise. This is Chelsey from The Slay Squad Fitness and Nutrition Coaching and Phoenix Personal Training. We recently did a community call inside the program with all of our one on one clients about how to address food noise. This was a popular topic that our clients were struggling with and wanting to hear practical help, tips, and solutions on how do they practically reduce food noise in their life. If you don’t know what food noise is, it’s this constant or recurrent noise in your head, where you can’t stop thinking about food, or where food thoughts interrupt your daily life. For example, maybe you’ve already had breakfast, but donuts just start randomly popping into your head well before you’ve had lunch, about food, how many calories are in food, how that food will affect your body. You can’t really go to other places without having thoughts about food. You fixate on it, maybe you dream about food, you want to look at pictures of food. You can’t focus on other things because lots of food just kind of take over your mind. I have been there, and it’s extremely frustrating, and having excessive food noise is absolutely going to keep you from weight loss or make weight loss 10 times harder because you’re constantly thinking about it. So, we did a call to help our girls with it, and we got a lot of positive feedback. Today, I just want to give you a little bit of the tips and tricks and practical takeaways of how you can begin addressing the issue of food noise today.
First, I want to start off with a little bit of background of when I dealt with a lot of food noise. I just started my own fitness journey. I had hired a trainer to get me in incredible shape to do a NPC bikini bodybuilding shop. And I hired her for my own personal Phoenix personal training trainer. She put me on a rigid meal plan for about 16 weeks. I was on near 1100 calories. It was the same thing over and over basically like chicken, broccoli, little bit of oatmeal, peanut butter, but very low calories, very small portions. Same foods every single day – chicken and broccoli multiple times a day. Very low fiber diet. I became very lean, but I was also very hungry. And I began to think about food a lot. Food consumed my mind. At night, I would look on Instagram and scroll through photos of food, food pages. Usually like dessert type of pages, things that I was not allowed to have tell post show. And it’s something you see a lot with competitors is fixation on foods like donuts, cookies, and ice cream- like those really excessive desserts that you could see that’s like a milkshake with candyware coming out of a donut on top. Competitors are kind of obsessed with foods like that because they’re not allowed to have them, because they’re dieting so hard. And that’s when my struggle with food noise began. To overcome this, it really took coming out of the competitive world, being done with shows, and then a lot of time, also working with my own coach that helped me to increase calories. So my food noise was created from a place of restriction, extreme restriction. So, I want to start with talking about that. Sometimes food noise is from a biological need. My body was giving me all the signs from a hormonal perspective, that it was not getting what it needs. For example, I was not having a period. I was a young, in my mid 20s. I didn’t have a period for two years, having extreme gut health issues, very tired, low libido. My body was giving me all the signals that I was not getting enough, and then excessive thoughts about food. I want to start with the idea that sometimes food noise is a serious thing that needs to be addressed. If you are under consuming calories, you’ve lost an excessive amount of weight. You are excessively lean. You are not eating enough to support your body’s basic functions. They say that a woman’s cycle is the fifth vital side. So if there’s issues without something that’s gone wrong, we need to address that. That’s what was going on with me. And I was creating this food noise. Sometimes you create it by restricting. If you eat too low calories for a significant period of time, You will develop food noise. If you restrict foods that you love to an extreme level, for example, cutting out all carbs, all desserts, never allowing yourself to eat out. That restrictive mindset can create food noise where you think about it, it’s kind of human nature. Where you think about the things you aren’t allowed to have. So that’s the first thing to look at. Are you eating too little of calories for your body? Are you losing too much weight, and going too hard, too fast, and creating a world where you have a biological physical need for more calories, so your body naturally is thinking about food. And what’s a solution? Of course, to add a bit more calories back in, bit more flexibility back in. and then give it time. Everything is gonna take a little bit of time when it comes to rewiring your brain and how you think about food. Food noise can disrupt your entire life to the point that it really does affect your ability to focus on other things. Focus on work, be productive. It can affect your whole life in a negative way. So it is important to overcome. Well, another way to help reduce food noise is to tackle this from a balanced eating perspective. To understand this, I’m gonna give you a brief overview of how your body works. When you eat carbohydrates, your body is going to digest those carbs and turn it into glucose. Glucose is gonna hit your bloodstream. When you have glucose in your blood, you are not gonna be as hungry or have as many cravings, but when your blood sugar crashes, you may find yourself hungry, having cravings, thoughts of food, light headedness, wanting to eat now. And foods that are going to cause these spikes and crashes of blood sugar are our simple carbs. That’s anything that contains table sugar. It’s like donuts, white breads, cookies, cakes. Pastries. All these things are gonna cause your blood sugar to spike, and then to crash. And when that happens, you may find yourself having a lot of craving. If you’re someone that has specific cravings a lot, and you look at your diet and you don’t have any complex carbs at all, simple carbs, that’s something we need to look at. Complex carbs are going to be fruit, veggies, whole grains, things like that. Those carbs are processed differently. When your body digests those, it releases sugar into your bloodstream slowly, which is going to help you with balance blood sugar, which leads to reduced cravings, which oftentimes is going to completely help your thoughts about it, because you’re actually not hungry. So having to balance meal is sometimes all it takes. You want to have three balanced meals a day, which means you have a protein towards a carb source, and if that was horse, you want those carb sources to majority of the time be complex carbs, that’s going to create stable blood sugar levels in your blood. which is going to help you not have those extreme ups and downs and food cravies. So that is a biological way that we can address the food noise that you’re experiencing. With the Slay Squad fitness and nutrition coaching and Phoenix personal training, we also help people to modify their behaviors around food. Modify your environment. So junk food, as we all know, is highly addictive. The more processed foods you eat, I’m talking overly processed foods like chips, cheese-its, cereals, things like that. Things that you can easily overconsume. If you have foods that typically get in your head and you consume a huge amount of without thinking, just kind of mindlessly, maybe you need to reduce the consumption of those foods. Maybe you need to reduce and fix your environment. So, what I mean by this is, sometimes it is out of sight, out of mind. If you keep all those snacks around the house, then you tend to overeat them. Maybe you just need to get them out of the house for a period of time. If every time you open your pantry, you see all the foods that you’re more prone to overeat and overconsume or think about, you need to get rid of it. You need to cultivate an environment that sets you up for a success. When we have nothing but Whole Foods in our house, I’m obviously a lot more likely to eat that when those foods are prepped. I’m even more likely to eat those. But when there’s all those delicious, highly palatable, snacky foods, everywhere, I’m way more likely to eat that. So, one thing we do, with the Slay Squad Phoenix personal training, is teach our girls how to set up their environment for success. This can be hard. This is something that you’ve never done. You may be thinking, my family eats like this, but you have to understand, your family doesn’t have to eat entirely different than you. If you’re a parent, you control what your kids eat. And if they’ve been eating junk forever. Yeah, it’s gonna be a little bit of a transition, but you’re gonna benefit, they are gonna benefit. I’m not extreme, I don’t teach good or bad foods. But if you and your kids tend to over consume those things, you need to have less of those things, more of the food that are gonna cause you to feel good, and also think about food less. Some food is literally designed to be addictive. So cultivate an environment that sets you up for success.
This also means spending a little bit of time thinking of your meals ahead of time, planning those balance meals we talked about ahead of time. If your food is pre-prepped, you’re gonna eat it. If you’ve made a healthy lunch, that’s balanced, healthy breakfast, balance, maybe you’ve even pre-logged it into our app. You’re probably gonna eat that. So planning is really key to following through on plans. With the Slay Squad Fitness and Nutrition Coaching in Phoenix Personal Training, we do a lot more than just tell you. Okay, these are the calories you need to hit. These are the proteins. How many proteins do you need to hit? Yes, that’s a part of it, but how do you actually modify your environment and your behavior so that this is something that you can practically do. How do you make decisions around food? How do you control your thoughts around food? And this is definitely a process.
This was just part one about food noise. It’s a long topic, a complicated topic. Those are just the first couple things to do. Work on balanced meals, plan your meals ahead of time, don’t overly restrict, cultivate an environment where food, especially addictive foods, are not constantly just being stuck in front of your face. And there’s a lot more strategies that I have that you can implement, come back for another blog post that’ll be part 2 of handling food noise. This is Chelsey with the Slay Squad Fitness and Nutrition Coaching and Phoenix Personal Training. If you need help building your dream body, losing weight, fill out a form today, and we will contact you.