How loud is your food noise?

Food noise is the colloquial term for intrusive, repetitive thoughts about food that exist outside of hunger. It shows up as mental rehearsal of your next meal while you're eating the current one, a constant background pull toward the kitchen, or an inability to focus because food thoughts keep interrupting. The phenomenon was named informally by patients before obesity researchers adopted the term; it maps onto measurable constructs like food preoccupation on the Control of Eating Questionnaire (COEQ) and intrusive food thoughts subscales used in STEP 1 (Wilding et al., NEJM, 2021).

Eight questions, each scored 0 to 12.5 points based on your answer, for a final 0 to 100 scale. The questions target different dimensions of food noise: frequency, intrusiveness, post-meal persistence, impact on focus, relationship to hunger, and emotional weight. Scoring weights draw from published food preoccupation instruments. The result is not a clinical diagnosis; it's a self-tracking number designed to detect change over time rather than to match a specific threshold.

A score above 70 means food thoughts are occupying a lot of mental bandwidth, frequently, across contexts. This correlates with higher rates of obesity, binge eating patterns, and metabolic dysfunction in population data, but a high score on this meter alone doesn't diagnose anything. It does suggest your experience is consistent with what STEP 1 and SURMOUNT-1 participants reported at baseline, and is consistent with the kind of appetite dysregulation GLP-1 medications are designed to address.

Yes, and the data is unusually consistent. The STEP 1 trial (Wilding et al., NEJM, 2021) found that semaglutide at 2.4 mg weekly produced roughly a 40% reduction in reported food cravings and preoccupation by week 20, sustained through week 68. SURMOUNT-1 (Jastreboff et al., NEJM, 2022) showed similar reductions with tirzepatide. Non-medication pathways that move the number include consistent meal structure, adequate protein, sleep repair, and trauma-informed therapy where relevant.

Weekly is the sweet spot for detecting real change without getting noise from day-to-day fluctuations. If you're starting a new intervention (medication, behavioral change, sleep adjustment), a baseline plus weekly retakes for 12 weeks will show you whether the intervention is moving the needle. More frequent retaking tends to amplify random variation without adding signal.

They overlap but aren't identical. Cravings are episodic, usually tied to a specific food or trigger, and relatively brief. Food noise is a continuous background state: thinking about food even when you're not hungry, even when you just ate, even when nothing triggered it. You can have cravings without food noise. Most people with high food noise also have intense cravings, but the noise is the bigger experience.