Food Noise

Body positivity couldn't quiet it. Ozempic might. But nobody's talking about why.

William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon's Joy (Hecate), c.1795. Colour print finished in pen and watercolour. Courtesy of the Huntington Art Museum, San Marino, California.

It starts before dinner. A pull. A restlessness. A voice that isn’t quite a voice but won’t stop. By evening it’s insatiable. You eat. You keep eating. You eat until your body finally surrenders into sleep.

This is what nobody is talking about when they talk about celebrity weight loss.

For some people, food isn’t just food. It’s noise. Relentless, insatiable, exhausting noise that doesn’t quiet down at the end of the day. It gets louder. And for years, I lived inside it.

I was overweight and I struggled constantly with cravings I couldn’t explain. I overate sugar and refined carbohydrates. I used food to numb out. Especially in the evenings, I would keep eating until I reached what I used to call a sugar coma — eating until I actually fell asleep.

For a long time I didn’t understand the biology behind it. So I carried the shame instead.

I tried every diet. Each time I regained the weight, often more than before. I tried intuitive eating. I went through a period of radical body acceptance — accepted my curves, allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted, genuinely tried to find peace with food.

But the food noise didn’t stop. It intensified.

What I eventually came to understand is that this wasn’t a willpower problem. It was a biology problem.

Sugar stimulates dopamine. The gut microbiome can become conditioned to drive cravings. And underneath all of it, our ancient neurology — wired for scarcity, confronted daily with an environment of engineered abundance — simply wasn’t designed for this.

The breakthrough for me came when I stopped trying to make peace with the foods that were triggering the cycle and removed them instead. Sugar. Flour. Alcohol. Processed food. And focused on what remained — protein, healthy fats, minerals, whole foods.

The food noise quietened.

Not because I was suppressing my appetite, but because my brain chemistry began to stabilise. I didn’t have to fight myself anymore.

Something else became clear in the quiet. I didn’t hate my curves. What I hated was the noise.

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Which brings me to GLP-1 medications. And to the conversation we’re not having about them.

There’s a cultural critique circulating right now — and it’s not wrong. Celebrities are getting very thin, very fast. The body positivity era appears to be quietly over. The media is treating extreme thinness as aspirational again. And nobody is talking about how the weight is disappearing — hiding instead behind vague talk of wellness, lifestyle changes, prioritising health.

That silence matters. Because when extreme thinness gets normalised, it doesn’t stay in Hollywood. It trickles into beauty standards, diet culture, body image, eating disorders, and the daily inner lives of ordinary women and girls.

But here’s what that conversation keeps missing.

Oprah Winfrey was a rare exception. She spoke openly about using weight loss medication, reframing it not as vanity but as a medical decision for a body she had fought her whole life. She described food addiction in plain terms. The relief of finally having help.

The reaction was revealing. Even then, with full transparency, people still found a way to make it a moral story.

Because we are not yet willing to look at what people are actually seeking relief from.

Some of the people using these medications may not be making a red carpet decision. They may be making a survival decision.

Consider someone with a history of addiction — where the brain’s reward pathways have been dysregulated for years. Addiction and compulsive eating share significant neurological overlap. Dopamine dysregulation. Disrupted reward circuitry. The compulsive seeking of relief. People in recovery from alcohol or substances frequently find that food — particularly sugar and refined carbohydrates — begins to fill the same role. The brain is still seeking the hit. The substance just changes.

For someone living with that biology, a medication that finally quiets the noise isn’t vanity. It’s relief from something that may have been driving their behaviour for decades. That is a completely different story to the one we’re telling.

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Demi Moore has spoken openly in her own words about her history with cocaine and alcohol. What we rarely consider is what happens to a brain shaped by that history when the substances are gone. The reward pathways don’t simply reset. They keep seeking. And for many people in recovery, food — particularly sugar and refined carbohydrates — becomes the next answer to that seeking.

If Demi Moore is using a GLP-1 medication, we don’t know why. But the possibility that it’s quieting something neurological rather than something cosmetic deserves more than silence.

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That doesn’t mean GLP-1 medications are without risk. They are not. Without sufficient protein, healthy fats, and resistance training, significant muscle loss can accompany the fat loss — and muscle matters not for appearance but for metabolic health, blood sugar regulation, and long term resilience of brain and body. These medications create a powerful hormonal shift we don’t yet fully understand, and people can find themselves on them without a clear plan for coming off.

Turning off the appetite is only one piece of the puzzle.

But the point isn’t to defend or condemn any particular path. My path was different — I found relief through removing the foods that were driving the cycle, and that worked for me. It won’t work for everyone. Biology is individual. Circumstances are individual.

What isn’t individual is the suffering. The relentless pull. The shame of not being able to stop. The exhaustion of fighting yourself every single day.

Until we start talking honestly about that — about the biology underneath the behaviour, about what people are actually trying to escape — we will keep having this conversation at the level of optics and missing everything that matters.

And for anyone who has lived with relentless food noise, that quiet — however they find it — can feel like coming home.

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If this resonated with you, I’d love to know. And if you’ve lived with food noise — whatever form it took — you’re not alone, and it was never a character flaw.

With love,

— Charlotte Annice

Have you experienced food noise? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.