Idiom
food noise
Meaning
A mental preoccupation with food that is differentiable from hunger and from cravings but tends to urge people to overeat.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I try to ignore the food noise when I am bored.”
“She finds that constant food noise makes it difficult to focus on her work during the afternoon.”
“Despite having eaten a full meal, he struggled to quiet the persistent food noise that urged him to seek out another snack.”
Examples
simple
“I try to ignore the food noise when I am bored.”
contextual
“She finds that constant food noise makes it difficult to focus on her work during the afternoon.”
complex
“Despite having eaten a full meal, he struggled to quiet the persistent food noise that urged him to seek out another snack.”
Origin
Attested since 2007, the term relies upon a metaphor in which mental preoccupation is rendered as a persistent internal clamour. The condition is framed as a noise inside the head that cannot be silenced, possessing a quality not unlike that of an earworm.
The expression entered wider usage in the early 2020s, coinciding with a shift in the application of GLP-1 receptor agonist medications. As the indications for this class of drugs expanded from the treatment of diabetes to general weight control, the term became a standard descriptor for the intrusive thoughts such treatments were reported to suppress. It was not in widespread use before this pharmaceutical expansion.
Key words
Related idioms
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