The 3 Truths of Foodnoise
The longer I do this work, the more I am struck by the same reality: the questions never change. Time evolves, science evolves, we evolve — but the nature of foodnoise, and what it does to the human experience, stays the same.
The impact.
The battle.
The relentlessness.
The fatigue.
The erosion of confidence.
They continue — no matter what.
I’ve worked with people whose foodnoise and body image struggles are long behind them. They sit far in the rearview mirror, only popping up at times of stress or uncertainty. And every new consult, every person reaching out to tell me that what I describe is exactly what their brain feels like, reminds me how pervasive this really is.
People always ask, “How do you understand exactly what I’m experiencing?”
They’ve been to therapists. They’ve tried to get help.
But if someone does not understand this particular animal, it is almost impossible to treat.
Food preoccupation mirrors addiction in many ways — with one crucial difference: we need food to survive.
We cannot abstain. We cannot cut it out, change our friend group, or avoid the trigger. Food is not a relationship we can extinguish. It is one we must rehabilitate. From the ground up and from the inside out.
And please hear this: Do not lose hope.
It is doable. It can be slow and it can be arduous — but there is another side. For me, the best place to begin is always with information.
What the hell is foodnoise?
Why do we have it?
Why does it organize us and control us?
Information is power, my friends. So let’s start there. Welcome to Foodnoise 101: The 3 Truths.
1 . The Environmental Truth
Our society is obsessed with thinness. Full stop.
It doesn’t seem to matter that being underweight comes with real medical risks — risks that are often neglected or minimized. Some of them are irreversible.
A few of them:
low heart rate
low bone density
depression and anxiety
decreased libido
impaired concentration
fertility disruption
These are just the medical complications — they don’t even touch the excruciating emotional labor of counting every calorie, negotiating eating with exercise output, or the shell of isolation that both restricting and bingeing create. They don’t touch the interference in emotional development, the fatigue, or the way this takes over your entire inner world.
Ask any recovering anorexic and they’ll tell you:
“My life is so much better now. I don’t want to go back. But I miss being thin.”
Ask someone about the hardest time in their life — grief, divorce, illness — and they may say:
“At least I could wear whatever I wanted.”
And that is the truth. Try that sentence on right now — it may be true for you too. Our environment feeds our foodnoise.
We live in a culture that treats thinness as privilege — a flawed but fundamental belief that thin is somehow superior. And that belief gets baked into us early.
2 . The Biological Truth: The Flawed Food Loop
The Flawed Food Loop is the neural pathway wired by:
chronic restriction/starvation
preoccupation with food because of starvation
obsession with body size
bingeing because of starvation
extreme shame and self-hatred
returning to starvation because of the shame
What we practice grows stronger. Practice doesn’t make perfect — it makes permanent. When we practice this abusive cycle of starvation, our body learns to repeat it. It becomes a freight train of a neural pathway.
Think about how early this started.
Think about how early your brain began to learn that thin was preferred. From birth we are tracked, measured, evaluated — children learn fast that thin = good, fat = bad. Over time, this becomes unconscious.
We diet or restrict, we become preoccupied because we’re hungry, we binge because we can’t stop thinking about food (and because we are literally starving), then the shame hits — and the shame sends us right back to restriction.
Neural pathways form through repetition. I always describe it like sledding: the first run leaves tracks. Over time, grooves deepen until you can’t steer anywhere else.
Restriction, calorie counting, obsessive exercise, body checking — all of it deepens the groove. The Flawed Food Loop becomes a belief system.
And everything you practice becomes permanent — even the things that make you profoundly unhappy.
3 . The Evolutionary Truth: Darwin, the Lion & the Zebra
Humans are animals with survival-driven brains. Hunger is a primary biological drive. We cannot override it with emotion or “shoulds.”
Starvation — intentional or not — activates a survival cascade.
If we were in the Sahara, how many hungry lions would walk past a zebra without killing it? Only those who were sick or dying. Certainly not the hungry ones.
Humans overriding hunger because of emotion is biologically unnatural. We were wired for survival, not thinness.
When we manipulate food intake, we activate primitive responses: restriction signals famine, the body becomes hyper-focused on food, anxious about scarcity, and driven to compensate.
This is why you feel out of control. This is why you feel like you can’t trust yourself around food. Because your body has learned not to trust you.
So… how do we fight these 3 truths?
1. Work toward rejecting thin obsession and thin power.
I am not asking you to pretend that body size has no impact on how you feel — we live in the real world.
But you can make the obsession smaller. Just because something is culturally valued doesn’t make it true.
Remember: smoking was once considered glamorous and sophisticated. We eventually learned it killed us.
2. Stop the restrictive loop.
It will never serve you. If you restrict, you will binge. Period.
3. Eat. Consistently.
Do not trick yourself into believing we’re living in a time of scarcity. We are not. Eat three meals and two snacks.
We are lions. Eat when you are hungry, and you will naturally not eat when you are full.
Your body is your friend — not your enemy. And it has been trying to keep you alive.
We got this.
xxx Dr. d
Get to KnowDr. Danielle Shelov
Dr. Shelov's therapeutic approach emphasizes understanding individuals within the context of their families, childhood experiences, relationships, and larger systems as crucial to psychological treatment.
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