The Gold Standard for Treating Food Noise: GLP‑1’s vs Therapy

Body image issues: so common, yet deeply so personal

Why do body images issues feel so deeply personal when they’re actually super common? It’s strange that as women, we know how rampant body insecurity is, but yet, when we’re experiencing our own insecurities, they feel so uniquely our own.

The way we think about our bodies, the way we think about food, the expectations we set for ourselves, the shame that we hold about how we eat, when we eat, what we eat or the shame we hold about how we did or didn’t move our bodies for exercise today. So many of us are experiencing this noisy inner world centering around body image and food, and each of those inner worlds can be so very loud.

It’s distressing, really. To be constantly, and unintentionally thinking about your body and how it exists in the world. It can be frustrating, anxiety inducing, sometimes exciting, but often overwhelming, exhausting, and stressful.

We want so badly to feel comfortable in our own skin, to move confidently through the world, and to feel good about how we look and experience our physical bodies. But we don’t actually want to be thinking about it all the time. We want to be able to just live and enjoy the present moment, but so many of us struggle to when we’re absorbed by that “food noise.”

What is “food noise?”

“Food noise” is the term used to describe a constant, obsessive mental chatter related to food that plays in the background or in the forefront of the mind, and is just feel like they’re always going. These thoughts are persistent and they’re more automatic than intentional.

Food noise isn’t a medical term, it’s actually one that’s been popularized based on anecdotes from patients that have taken GLP1’s and reported a quieting of those obsessive thoughts related to food; offering distress relief and supporting a more controlled approach to eating.

I’ll be completely honest with you and say that this article is not about the science behind GLP1’s because I don’t know it; this post is instead about other psychological explanations for food noise and how we might be able to lean into these other therapeutic and theoretical understandings of the mind to help quiet food noise.

What I have understood is that upon terminating use of GLP1’s, food noise nearly instantly reappears.

So for women that are feeling hopeless, confused, skeptical but also curious when it comes to GLP1’s, you might want to know about other, deeper, long term treatments for food noise and for treating underlying body image issues.

For women that need a GLP1 to lose weight more rapidly for health reasons, please trust yourself and trust your medical professional. This article isn’t about dissuading women from taking GLP1’s; rather I hope it adds to your healing journey so that when you’re ready to discontinue GLP1’s, your mind and body and prepared to continue doing the deeper mental and emotional healing.

The Only Way Out Is Through

Maybe you’ve heard this before, “the only way out is through.” It’s something we hear a lot in the mental health field and it’s a phrase that speaks to the idea that we can’t heal from something we’re unwilling to go through.

If we’re unwilling to or unable to move through a particular emotional experience, we might be able to suppress it for a while, but it will inevitably make it’s way back up (often at some of the most inconvenient times.

We have to think about this though: if we don’t know how to process emotion, if emotions feel like too much, if our attachment figures didn’t know how to and didn’t teach us how to process emotion and regulate again we’re likely going to automatically push down or avoid mental or emotional experiences that feel like too much.

So how on earth do we go through when there a wall up that won’t let us?

Let’s Start At The Beginning

Over the course of our lives, we go through things… lots of things. We experience challenges, heartbreaks, traumas, stresses, losses, rejections and all kinds of things on a scale of super mild to super severe.

With each stressor, particularly those traumatic ones, we adapt. And we keep adapting and we keep adapting in order to fit the mold of something that feels most safe, most loved, and most worthy.

As humans we have to do this for our safety and survival; we adapt automatically and those adaptations become part of our personalities and how we move through the world and how we experience our minds, emotions, and bodies.

As girls, we all remember it: that point in childhood when we learned “my body isn’t right.” And here’s where things get personal, deeply personal. We might all have body insecurities in one way or another, but the way we adapted was unique based on the stressor we experienced.

Some of us were bullied for our shape or weight.

Some of us learned from our mothers; them hating their bodies taught us there was something wrong with ours.

Some of us explicitly learned from attachment figures when they commented on how pretty your face was, “if only you could lose some weight.”

Some of us learned it from the media when we watched shows on television or we saw magazines lined up by the candy at the grocery store.

And the trauma can be so layered. Weight gain often happens in childhood or adolescence because there’s other extreme stress or trauma in the background, and then when girls are bullied for their size or shape, or judged in one way or another, they start to develop complex trauma.

How Complex Trauma Shapes The Inner World

I’m a therapist that practices internal family systems (IFS), so let’s break it down from an IFS perspective here.

IFS says that we’re a system of parts and Self. Our “parts” are those pieces of our personality that adapted over time to our experiences, particularly our stress and trauma.

IFS says there’s 3 classes of parts: protective managers (their motto being “never again”), exiled parts (suppressed by protectors as they pose a threat to the system), and protective fire fighters (their motto being “when all else fails” and they activate when exiles are accidentally triggered).

Self is this core energy made up the 8 C’s: compassion, creativity, connectedness, curiosity, courage, confidence, calm, clarity. IFS believes that we all possess Self Energy but we don’t often operate from it if we’re “blended” with protective parts and operating from them on auto-pilot instead.

Complex Trauma leaves us with lots and lots of adapted protective parts that are working for that same mission mentioned earlier: safety, love, and worth.

So, now imagine that a girl experiences various stressors or traumas that leads her to feel shame about her body… shame is so heavy and overwhelming, her system might adapt to suppress shame by overthinking solutions on how to fix her body.

Now she’s developed a managing protective part from which she starts operating on auto-pilot: I think about food all the time to try to limit how much I eat and what I eat.

Over time though, despite her overthinking, shame might still surface. When this exiled part rises up, she might adapt and build a firefighting part to “put out the fire” of that shame. Perhaps this firefighter is hopelessness and so she gives up… she eats whatever she wants and however much of it she wants.

From here, the system might start to trigger itself so much that it continues to adapt to include anxiety, an inner critic, an indulgent part, and an anticipatory or hyper vigilant part.

Now… think back to shame. Shame was just, let’s say an 8 year old girl that was just enjoying the moment, enjoying her food, and having fun. But when she learned to hold shame, she was exiled. The inner child that was present, that enjoyed, that didn’t overthink… gets exiled.

She will inevitably try to push her way back up, or inevitably protectors will lapse and she’ll shoot up without warning. She needs help processing her shame, but the system is shouting back and forth about how to protect from that feeling.

The battle between parts… is “food noise.”

GLP1’s Are Helping And That’s Not A “Bad” Thing

I don’t know what the long term effects of taking a GLP1 to support weight loss is. But I do know that there are women that are benefiting and the last thing I want to do is battle with the protective managing part (accompanied by however much Self), I want to honor it. I want to honor to urgency to lose weight and to find relief from food noise.

I also want to honor the entire system, not just your managing and firefighting protective parts, but your exiles too.

The thing with GLP1’s is that they “quiet the food noise” which means they do a really good job and turning the volume down on all your parts. But GLP1’s can’t heal your internal system. They actually teach you that your system’s distress is “too much” and that it needs to be “fixed.”

The idea of being “too much” or needing to be “fixed” makes me think about attachment wounding and how our own attachment figures responded when we were experiencing emotional distress: did they find our emotions to be “too much?” Were they hurried to “fix” the emotion and did they struggle to sit with, breathe with and help us co-regulate through those emotions?

That matters, because how our attachment figures responded to our emotions is often how we develop to auto-pilot respond to our own.

IFS teaches us to accept the system and even befriend the system. It helps us come into connection with those protective parts, get to know them, understand their values and needs, and start unblending from them so we can show up for our protectors instead of as our protectors. It helps us gain permission from protective parts to connect more deeply with those exiles; as we get to know those burdened parts, we start to gently help lift the burdens off.

IFS teaches us to cultivate Self energy and experience it physically so that we can lead the system from Self as opposed to being jerked sideways by protective parts.

So What’s The Gold Standard?

It really depends on you, your situation, and what your team of medical professionals has to say; perhaps along with loved ones. But let’s keep it to these simple points:

Are GLP1’s the only and best option for treating food noise? No.

Do GLP1’s help with it? Totally, people say so all the time.

Will GLP1’s help food noise long term, after you stop them? No.

Can you pair GLP1’s with therapy to help treat food noise? Yes… but also no. If you can’t hear your protective parts, then you can’t really work with them. But also, if your protective parts are too loud, you also can’t really work with them. It can be helpful to pair the two in some cases. Similar to treating obsessive thoughts under OCD with medication, pairing something that helps quiet thoughts can be super useful alongside therapy. This is something you have to explore with medical professionals.

The Gold Standard: acknowledge GLP1’s as something that can help quiet food noise but as something that doesn’t actually treat food noise and acknowledge therapy like Internal Family Systems (IFS), Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) or Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) as long term treatments for food noise.

Accepting California Therapy Clients

If you’re a woman navigating a bustling internal system, food noise, anxiety, or relationship issues, please feel free to contact me for a 20 minute consultation call for therapy. I am currently accepting clients in the state of California. I do not accept insurance, but I submit claims for out of network reimbursement (PPO plans qualify). Thanks for reading, and know that my heart is with you if you’re a woman navigating these challenges. Even writing this article felt a little… emotional for me. You’re not alone, there’s no shame whether you’re choosing GLP1’s or not. But please remember, your system needs to not be quieted, it needs to be felt, seen, processed, loved, and led by your Self Energy.