Why Your Brain Won't Stop Thinking About Food with Emily Dhurandhar

Food noise. If you’ve heard the term, you probably know exactly what it means. If you haven’t, you might be about to have a lightbulb moment. It’s that relentless mental chatter about food, not hunger, not cravings, but constant, unwanted thoughts that just won’t quit.

For years, people struggling with this phenomenon didn’t even have words for it. They thought it was a willpower problem. It wasn’t. And now, thanks to groundbreaking research, we finally have a way to understand, measure, and potentially treat this invisible burden that affects people across the weight spectrum.

Join Holly and Jim as they sit down with Dr. Emily Dhurandhar, Director of Research Special Projects at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and lead author of the RAID-FN Inventory, the first validated tool to measure food noise. Discover why patients, not clinicians, coined this term, how GLP-1 medications are revealing what many have silently endured, and what the future holds for treating this pervasive issue.

Discussed on the episode:

• Why food noise is completely different from normal thoughts about food
• The surprising discovery about who experiences food noise (hint: it’s not just people with obesity)
• What turning off a kitchen fan has to do with understanding these medications
• How bodybuilders and endurance athletes might experience food noise differently
• Why your environment in the 1940s versus today changes everything
• The one word clinicians need to stop assuming about food noise
• What to do if you think you’re experiencing this, but your doctor has never heard of it