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you

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Hey team, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And before I crack on into it, I'd like to just tell you that Monday's Matter Registration is open now through to Sunday, the 9th of August. We kick off next Monday, 10th of August. It is my eight week fat loss plan designed to give you the skills, the habits and behaviors that lead to lasting fat loss, all while utilizing

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Protein-sparing modified fast as an effective fat loss tool. In addition to me, we've got Darren Ellis, who was on the pod last week, programming the strength training component for either your home gym or your commercial gym base. And we are both on hand guiding you through the process across the course of the eight weeks with our Facebook community, our Zoom calls. You've got everything at your fingertips to allow for your fat loss success.

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We will put links in the show notes to that. Come along and join us for this eight weeks. Don't wait till spring. Don't wait till the fall. Depending on where you are in the world, come join us now. This week though, I want to chat about food noise. Now this came up because I was recording a pod with my mate Brandon D'Cruz and we were discussing GLP-1s and whether or not they've replaced a fad diet. Anyway, Brandon quite rightly pointed out that food noise

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had emerged as a term that is just sort of thrown around like everyone has food noise. And he's like, well, hang on, food noise is actually, there's a clinical definition for it. And it's very different from just cravings. And I thought, well, that's insightful as it always is with Brandon. So I wanted to devote an episode that really talks about food noise versus actually just hunger and cravings and what the differences are because there is a difference.

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And as I said, food noise has really exploded into the mainstream because of GLP-1 medications. People started universally using some agglutide or tuzepatide and reported, almost universally, that this mental soundtrack they didn't even realise was running had suddenly gone quiet. And it's a pretty fascinating natural experiment really, because it tells us that food noise is this real identifiable thing happening in the brain

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separate from that physical sensation of needing to eat. But it also means that the term arrived in pop culture without this clean definition and now it's getting used for basically anything that makes someone wants to eat when they'd rather not want to eat. Or just to describe any sort of hunger or craving. So today, so what I want to do is delineate between hunger and cravings and food noise in a way that allows you to understand which one you might be

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experiencing and give you a bit of a, I guess it would give you a little bit of a roadmap as to where to go next. So let's just start with hunger, right? Hunger is your homeostatic system doing its job. Your body tracks its energy status through this enormous number of signals. You've got blood glucose, you've got circulating amino acids and fatty acids. You've got that physical stretch of an empty stomach and it integrates all of it into the hypothalamus.

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The single most important hormone, some would argue, in that system is ghrelin. This is released from the stomach and it's the only hormone whose job is specifically to switch hunger on. Ghrelin rises predictably before your habitual meal times and falls once again when you eat, which is part of why hunger has a rhythm to it rather than appearing at random. And for what it's worth, you can feel hungry as ghrelin is increasing, yet

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get pulled into a meeting, for example, and you'd notice 15 to 20 minutes later that that hunger would dissipate. So this is a really anticipatory response to when you typically eat. On the other side, there's leptin. This is released from fat tissue, which tells the brain how much energy you're carrying in reserve and dampens hunger signaling when reserves are adequate. When you diet, leptin drops quickly. Greelin creeps up and the whole system tips

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towards eat more, feel less full. Which is exactly why this sort of deliberate calorie restriction, i.e. dieting, can make hunger climb over time. Physiological hunger has a few practical fingerprints. It builds gradually, rather than arriving as this urgent craving for one specific food. It's satisfied by pretty much any reasonable food, i.e. an apple or a chicken breast would work as well as a biscuit, arguably better.

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And it comes with physical correlates, a hollow feeling, potentially low energy, sometimes irritability, sometimes a literal stomach rumble. There's also interesting piece of research here from Stevenson, 2023, who argues hunger isn't purely physiological at all. It's built substantially on memory. This is super interesting. He distinguishes specific hunger, which is a desire for one particular palatable food,

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triggered by recalling how good it tasted from general hunger, which is his broader desire to eat, triggered by cues like the clock reading midday. Both draw on the brain's memory systems, which is part of why damage to those systems can blunt hunger almost entirely. Now, this research team even demonstrated it experimentally. Participants who were tricked into believing a stomach grumble sound was coming from their own body rated food as more desirable, regardless of when they'd last actually eaten.

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the physical sensation people call hunger has a psychological layer baked into it from the start. And interestingly as well, another distinction, not all eating driven by biological need is enjoyable and not all pleasurable eating is hunger driven. We know that. Arslan 2025 recently proposed the concept of sadatic hunger to describe a third pattern, eating purely because the body needs fuel.

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with essentially no sensory or emotional engagement in the process. There are people who describe that they only eat purely for fuel. this in part may be describing that notion. He describes it turning out particularly in people experiencing depression, chronic stress, or long periods of restricted eating, where food becomes something to get through rather than something to want or enjoy. And I guess this is just

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a useful reminder that hunger versus food noise split isn't the only axis in play. And if eating has started to feel like an indifferent chore rather than sort of a physical need or a pull towards something specific, I think that is actually worth noting in of itself. A little bit of a separate conversation from the one that I'm having today though. Interestingly, another distinction to draw between the sustained hunger of sort of genuine dieting and the more severe hunger of starvation

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because people sometimes assume any noticeable increase in appetite during a fat loss means something has gone badly wrong. Stubbs and colleagues from 2021 reviewed decades of famine and therapeutic weight loss research, and they've pointed out that psychological and behavioral erosion seen in true semi-starvation, the all-consuming function-impairing drive to eat, is categorically more severe than the modest gradual rise in appetite

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typical of an intentional and well-managed calorie deficit. Increased hunger on a diet is expected and manageable, and it's not the same as starvation, and it shouldn't be treated with the same alarm. And you know, I do see out there the way that people talk about hunger is often in this alarmist and extremist notion of, am starving, and that in of itself can send alarm signals to your body that aren't really justified.

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Like language is actually really important. So what about food noise? Food noise is a different system. It's the hedonic pathway. This is part of the brain built around pleasure and reward rather than energy accounting. And it's the same broad circuitry involved in other rewarding and addictive behaviors. So Hayesha and colleagues in 23 put forward a useful framework here called the C R O model. Q

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influencer, reactivity, outcome. The idea is that external cues like an advert or the smell of bread or internal cues like stress or boredom trigger a reactivity response that isn't really about energy needed at all and that response then shapes what you eat. Food noise in their model is best understood as a heightened food cue reactivity. Your brain's alarm system for food is available and rewarding

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firing more often and more intensely than it needs to. A researcher, Lo, in 2005, laid the groundwork for this distinction between physiological and psychological hunger, and he made an important point, and that's that the hedonic system can be chronically switched on simply by living somewhere with constant access to highly palatable food, independent of whether you were in any kind of energy deficit. He calls this resulting sensation

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perceived deprivation. You're not actually short on energy, but restricting access to foods you find rewarding can feel a lot like genuine hunger because it's recruiting this overlapping part of the brain. And this is a good time to think about those ultra-processed and hyper-palatable foods. Jewel and colleagues in 2025 reviewed the mechanistic evidence in Nature Reviews Endocrinology and described how the soft texture, high energy density,

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and specific nutrient combinations in these ultra-processed products are engineered to affect satiety signaling and food reward systems directly, not just to taste good, but to make you eat faster and stop noticing fullness cues as readily. And there was a finding from a controlled feeding trial run by Gildino Silva's group in 2024.

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So when people ate a meal built entirely from ultra-processed foods, matched for calories, macronutrients, sodium and fiber, against a non-ultra-processed meal, they ate faster, they chewed less, and they reported greater remaining capacity to keep eating afterwards. So it was the same nutrition on paper. It had the same amount of fiber, but it was just a different signal to the brain.

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Food noise has a neurobiological signature that's now being studied directly. Janik's team in 2026 reviewed recent literature on this and described food noise as linked to hyperactivity in the brain's default mode network, the system involved in mind wandering and rumination, alongside dysregulation and dopaminergic reward circuits. So there's a mechanistic reason why food noise feels like intrusive,

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repetitive thinking rather than a physical sensation. It's substantially a rumination phenomenon, layered on top of a reward response. so if we think about GLP-1 in this story, because this is where that term sort of food noise sort of, uh I guess, emerged much more into that sort of public sphere, there was a systematic review written by Sebastian Beduliscu. I think I have his name right. And he conducted it looking at

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GLP-1 receptor agonists and found that these drugs consistently reduced neurocortical activation in response to food cues in high calorie food images, alongside lowering both calorie intake and reported hunger. essentially, it's evidence that those drugs are working on that reward circuitry, not purely on gut hormones. And I think we know this to be true. Earlier neuroimaging work from

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Blumendal's group in 2014 showed something similar, that giving GLP-1 agonist, this one was exanitide, an earlier generation, it reduced brain activity in the insula, amygdala, and the orbitofrontal cortex, specifically in response to food pictures. And that effect disappeared when the GLP-1 receptor was chemically blocked. So this isn't a side effect of feeling less hungry in general.

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It's targeting the dampening of the brain's response to those food-related cues. And a 2025 survey from Chinese research team involving 101 people prescribed GLP-1 medication found participants reported becoming significantly more attuned to their actual hunger and fullness signals after starting the medication. Alongside, of course, a significant drop in eating triggered by emotional, external,

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or situational cues. So in their own words, food noise going quiet let physiological cues take over as the dominant driver of eating rather than reward driven ones. So if we think about it then, genuine hunger builds slowly, is satisfied by variety and comes with physical signals, low energy, that hollow stomach feeling, potentially difficulty concentrating eventually.

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It follows this predictable daily rhythm tied to your habitual eating pattern and ghrelins rise and fall. Food noise and cravings both fall on the hedonic side of the line. They tend to target one very specific food and are driven by a cue you can often identify if you pause. A smell. An ad. A stressful email, simply walking past the pantry. Reichenberger's Ecological Study in 2018 tracked

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real people's hunger and cravings via smartphone prompts across their normal day. And they found that hunger and craving for actual meals track together closely throughout the day, but cravings for snacks, foods specifically, sweet or salty snacks, they decouple from hunger entirely. They climb through the afternoon and evening, regardless of how hungry someone actually reports being.

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There's also a well established distinction in the neuroscience literature between liking and wanting, described in depth by Morales and colleagues in 2020. Liking is an actual hedonic pleasure of eating something. Wanting is the motivational pull to go get it, and the two can become detached from each other. You can want something intensely without particularly liking it once you're eating it. And that detachment, called incentive sensitization,

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shows up more in people with obesity and binge eating patterns and it's a useful gut check. If you're midway through the biscuit and not actually enjoying it much but can't seem to stop reaching for another one, that means you're having a lot of that wanting ahead of the liking and that is a food noise signature. That's not hunger, obviously. And let's just also consider the difference between food noise and cravings because they are used as interchangeable but they aren't quite the same thing.

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Craving is an acute, bounded episode. It has a start, a specific target, a build, and a resolution, whether that's eating the food or the urge simply passing. Food noise is closer to a chronic baseline. Hayashi's Q-Reactivity model I mentioned framed it as a general tendency toward heightened food Q-Reactivity across the day, and Janak's review grounds that in hyperactivity of the default mode network.

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brain's rumination and mind wandering system, rather than any single spike of wanting. So the practical difference is frequency, not just intensity. A craving is one loud event with an object. Food noise is a persistent, lower grade hum of food related thoughts that can throw off many small cravings across a day, or none at all, and still count as high. You can have low food noise and still get hit with an occasional sharp craving from a strong cue. Someone baking bread around you, for example.

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and high food noise looks more like near constant background thinking about food, whether or not in any single moment it reaches a full craving intensity. So it is worth thinking about stress and emotional state specifically here as well, because they can act as an amplifier for that hedonic system. There's research looking at craving management in medical weight settings, and it makes the point that cravings are shaped by an overlapping set of

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sort of neurohormonal and psychological drivers. Cortisol and other stress hormones interact directly with the same dopaminergic reward pathways that generate food noise. And this is part of why a genuinely stressful week reliably makes that craving at 3pm louder and more persistent, independent of how much you've actually eaten that day. And there's been research looking at people who have been induced with this negative mood state,

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finding that food craving intensity increased regardless of whether they're just eaten or they were in a fasted state and it specifically shifted preference towards high calorie, savory and sweet foods rather than neutral ones. And I think this is just worth mentioning because the fix for stress amplified food noise or cravings is not found on your plate, right? It is actually addressing that stress itself. And I talk a lot about this with the people

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that I engage with both in my programs and in my one-on-one clinic. So how do you tackle food noise then if it's not using a GLP-1? Intuitive eating has been studied for this actually, so training attention back on internal hunger and fullness cues. And research does show that women with higher intuitive eating scores were more likely to maintain their weight over time and less likely to gain weight, along with

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showing reductions in reward-driven and uncontrolled eating. However, systematic reviews looking specifically at whether mindful and intuitive eating interventions actually change energy intake or diet quality have found no significant difference. and we hear this a lot, right? You cannot rely on intuitive eating as a fat loss strategy because it's not been shown to reduce calorie intake. It can absolutely help make you feel calmer around food.

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that is different. We know that reducing the frequency with which ultra-processed hyperpalliable foods are in easy reach matters, just because removing accessibility then makes it harder for someone to grab it, right? So you're going to eat more food overall and report eating despite feeling full more often when you've got access to this hyperpalliable food. So removing access is another good way to reduce that food noise. Of course, protein and fiber

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matter here as well, because they are two nutrients with the strongest, most consistent effect on the satiety hormones, such as CCK. And that feeds back into that hypothalamic circuit that ghrelin and leptin operate through. So it's going to quiet that homeostatic side of the equation, that physiological hunger, which does make it considerably easier to notice whether something is hedonic noise or whether it's sort of driven by this actual

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genuine requirement for calories. And of course, sleep and stress, you know, they're not incidental as well. Both leptin and ghrelin signaling are disrupted by short sleep and stress hormones interact directly with that same dopaminergic reward pathway that drives food noise. So it is worth tackling that if they show up for you. And of course, a lot of this will help with those sort of specific cue like cravings that I was talking about. I do know that for some people,

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that constant in the background food noise may only really be tackled by something like a GLP-1 receptor agonist medication. I will say though that I've had people both on Mondays Matter and other one-on-one clients and just friends reporting that they've tried Callocurb and that actually does help with reducing their cravings, reducing their appetite and that background food noise as well. So that's definitely something worth

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trying if you are experiencing food noise yet you don't have access or a GLP-1 receptor. Agonist medication is not an appropriate tool for you. So something like HelloCube could also be super helpful. So hopefully that was interesting to you. I always find this whole topic around appetite and food intake. I find it fascinating, of course, because it's my job to do. And hopefully the delineation between physiological hunger

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hedonic hunger, what food noise is, and how that is different from cravings. I hope that that just helps delineate these things for you. Just so you know what you can actively work on, I suppose, if you find that you have some challenges in that area. All right, team, have a great week. Sign up for Monday's Matter if you're in the market for an excellent fat loss plan that helps you lose weight and keep it off. And you can find details of that over on Instagram @mikkiwilliden.

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Facebook at @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website @mikkiwilliden.com and click the link that you will see as soon as you pop on there. All right guys, you have the best week. See you later.