I Didn’t Know There Was Noise

For most of my adult life, food was a background conversation in my head. What’s next, what’s allowed, what I should not have eaten. I didn’t realize how loud it was until one day it went quiet.

Remo asked what we were eating that day, and for the first time in decades, I didn’t already have an answer. Normally, by the time anyone asks that question, I’ve already run through three options in my head. What we have in the fridge. What I should make. What I shouldn’t make. What would be “better.” What would be “easier.” What I’d regret later.

For most of my adult life, I’ve carried extra weight. I’ve also carried the constant mental math that came with it. Calories, portions, trade-offs, starting over on Monday. I thought that was normal. I thought everyone lived with that kind of background chatter. I didn’t know there was a name for it. I didn’t know it wasn’t just discipline or the lack of it. I didn’t know it was noise.

And then one day, it was gone.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just… quiet. The kind of quiet you don’t notice until someone asks a simple question and you realize there’s no answer waiting. I wasn’t fighting myself. I wasn’t planning ahead. I wasn’t negotiating. I just hadn’t thought about food at all. Which sounds almost ridiculous considering what I do for a living. I spend my days staring at food. Testing it. Photographing it. Writing about it. Editing videos of it. My work revolves around ingredients and instructions and what we’re eating next.

But this was different.

This wasn’t about recipes or creativity or work. It wasn’t about planning dinner for the blog or testing something new. It was the absence of the constant personal negotiation. The internal voice tallying, adjusting, calculating. I could develop a recipe and not immediately translate it into what I should or shouldn’t eat. I could test something without running the mental math in the background. I could close the kitchen for the day and not keep the conversation going in my head.

What exactly is food noise anyway?

If you’ve never lived with it, food noise is hard to explain. It’s not hunger. It’s not even craving. It’s the constant awareness of what’s available and the low-level negotiation that follows. Before, if there was a piece of cake in the fridge or cookies on the counter, it wasn’t just dessert. It was a conversation. When can I have one. Should I have one. If I have one now, what does that mean later. Maybe just half. Maybe I’ll wait. Maybe I won’t.

Now? We have chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal cookies sitting on the counter. I baked them because I still love to bake. I had half of one to taste test and that was enough. When I walk past them, I don’t hear anything. Sometimes I actually pause and notice it, that I just walked by cookies without grabbing one. And it still amazes me. Not because I’m trying harder. Not because I suddenly developed iron willpower. But because the constant internal pull simply isn’t there.

I thought this was normal

For decades, I thought this was just how everyone lived. I assumed everyone had that low hum running in the background. The constant checking in. The small negotiations. The mental math. I thought this was what being “responsible” around food looked like.

I never once considered that it might not be universal.

When I tried to explain it to Remo, he looked at me like I was describing something foreign. I told him about the constant back-and-forth in my head. The planning. The trade-offs. The quiet countdown to when I could have something. He had no idea what I was talking about.

He just… doesn’t have it.

That might have surprised me more than the silence itself.

I thought it was discipline. Or lack of it. I thought some people were just better at managing the voice. Stronger. More controlled. I didn’t realize that some people weren’t having the conversation at all.

That realization hit me slowly. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the quiet space that followed when the noise disappeared. When I walked past cookies without planning my return trip. When Remo asked what we were eating and my brain wasn’t five steps ahead.

I started to understand that what I had lived with for most of my adult life wasn’t a personality trait. It wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t a flaw. It was something biological. Something that had a volume control I didn’t know existed.

And that’s the part that’s hard to put into words.

Because when you’ve spent decades believing the constant internal debate is simply who you are, it becomes part of your identity. The “food person.” The one who loves to cook but always feels a little conflicted. The one who is good most of the time but thinks about it all of the time.

I didn’t know that thinking about it all the time wasn’t required.

When I Finally Had To Pay Attention

We had just moved to the acreage, which should have felt exciting. Instead, it felt overwhelming. The build had been stressful. Selling our old house was stressful. Managing the transition while still running my business was stressful. I told myself I was handling it. I wasn’t.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I stopped taking care of myself. I gained weight. I wasn’t sleeping well. I brushed it off as a busy season. I’ve had plenty of those.

Then we moved in, and my body started pushing back.

I developed severe allergies in the new house. I didn’t feel well most days. Then a rash showed up that sent me to urgent care. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but my blood pressure was through the roof.

That was the moment things felt less abstract.

When I finally went to my doctor, he didn’t sugarcoat it. He told me I was at the age where heart attacks happen. Especially at my weight.

I’ve never been the person who runs to the doctor for every little thing. In fact, I’ve avoided going more times than I should admit. The irony is not lost on me that now I go every month. My health is monitored closely. We track everything. Nothing about this is casual.

That matters to me.

I knew about Ozempic. I had heard the chatter. But I had never heard of Mounjaro. When he suggested it, I didn’t hesitate. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about aesthetics. I was thinking about staying healthy. I was thinking about not ignoring the warning signs anymore.

I was desperate.

This isn’t me telling anyone what to do. It’s not medical advice, and it’s not a blanket solution. It’s simply my experience. I know medications like this aren’t for everyone, and I respect that. I can only speak to what changed for me. I know these medications come with opinions. I’m not here to debate them. I’m just here to tell the truth about what happened in my own head.

The Shift I Didn’t Expect

When I started Mounjaro, I wasn’t looking for a mental breakthrough. I wasn’t waiting for some dramatic transformation. I was thinking about my blood pressure. My health. The very real lecture from my doctor about heart attacks at my age and at my weight.

I was trying to be responsible.

The first few weeks weren’t cinematic. There was no obvious moment where everything changed. I didn’t wake up one morning feeling like a different person. If anything, I was just paying closer attention to how my body felt.

The quiet came later.

It slipped in gently. So gently that I didn’t recognize it at first.

One afternoon, when Remo asked what we were eating, I opened my mouth to answer and realized I hadn’t been thinking about it at all. No pre-planned options. No internal debate. No mental tally of what would be “better” or “worse.” Just a blank space where the conversation used to be.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I still love food. I still love cooking. I still love baking. My career is built around it. That hasn’t changed.

What changed was the urgency.

The constant pull. The background hum. The low-level negotiation that had followed me for most of my adult life simply wasn’t there.

And that absence felt bigger than anything I had expected.

Bigger Than Weight

What surprised me most is that this isn’t about weight in the way I thought it would be.

Yes, my body is changing. Yes, my health markers are improving. But what feels monumental to me is the mental space. The energy I didn’t realize I was spending every single day thinking about what I had eaten, what I would eat, what I should eat.

I thought that was responsibility. I thought that was discipline. I thought that was just part of loving food and living in a body that didn’t always cooperate.

At almost 54, I’m used to believing I understand myself. I didn’t realize how much of what I thought was personality was actually noise.

Sometimes I think about my 20s. Not about being thinner. Just about being quieter. About what it might have felt like to walk past a plate of cookies and not feel the pull. About how much energy I might have redirected into something else.

I can’t rewrite those years.

But I can choose how I move forward.

And for the first time in decades, the conversation in my head is calm. Not because I’m trying harder. Not because I finally figured it out.

But because the noise is gone.