Until she started taking the weight loss drug Wegovy, Staci
Klemmer’s days revolved around food. When she woke up, she plotted out what she
would eat; as soon as she had lunch, she thought about dinner. After leaving
work as a high school teacher in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she would often
drive to Taco Bell or McDonald’s to quell what she called a “24/7 chatter” in
the back of her mind. Even when she was full, she wanted to eat.
اضافة اعلان
Almost immediately after Klemmer’s first dose of medication
in February, she was hit with side effects: acid reflux, constipation,
queasiness, fatigue. But, she said, it was like a switch flipped in her brain —
the “food noise” went silent.
“I don’t think about tacos all the time anymore,” Klemmer,
57, said. “I don’t have cravings anymore. At all. It is the weirdest thing.”
Dr. Andrew Kraftson, a clinical associate professor at
Michigan Medicine, said that over his 13 years as an obesity medicine
specialist, people he treated would often say they couldn’t stop thinking about
food. So, when he started prescribing Wegovy and Ozempic, a diabetes medication
that contains the same compound, and patients began to use the term food noise,
saying it had disappeared, he knew exactly what they meant.
As interest has intensified around Ozempic and other
injectable diabetes medications like Mounjaro, which works in similar ways,
that term has gained traction. Videos related to the subject “food noise
explained” have been viewed 1.8 billion times on TikTok. And some of the people
who have managed to get their hands on these medications — despite persistent
shortages and list prices that can near or surpass $1,000 — have shared stories
on social media about their experiences.
Wendy Gantt, 56, said she first heard the term food noise on
TikTok, where she had also learned about Mounjaro. She found a telehealth
platform and received a prescription within a few hours. She can remember the
first day she started taking the drug last summer. “It was like a sense of
freedom from that loop of, ‘What am I going to eat? I’m never full; there’s not
enough. What can I snack on?’” she said. “It’s like someone took an eraser to
it.”
For some, the shortages of these medications have provided a
test case, a way to see their lives with and without food noise.
Kelsey Ryan, 35, an insurance broker in Canandaigua, New
York, hasn’t been able to fill her Ozempic prescription for the past few weeks,
and the noise has crept back in.
It is not just the pull of soft-serve each day, she said.
Food noise, to Ryan, also means a range of other food-related thoughts:
internal negotiations about whether to eat in front of other people, wondering
if they will judge her for eating fried chicken or if ordering a salad makes it
look like she’s trying too hard. Ozempic is more of a way to silence the food
noise than anything else, she said.
“It is a tool,” she said. “It’s not like a magic drug that
is giving people an easy way out.”
There is no clinical definition for food noise, but the
experts and patients interviewed for this article generally agreed it was
shorthand for constant rumination about food. Some researchers associate the
concept with “hedonic hunger,” an intense preoccupation with eating food for
the purpose of pleasure, and noted that it could also be a component of binge eating
disorder, which is common but often misunderstood.
Obesity medicine specialists have tried to better understand
why a person may ruminate about food for some time, said Dr. Robert Gabbay,
chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association. “It
just seems to be that some people are a little more wired this way,” he said.
Obsessive rumination about food is most likely a result of
genetic factors as well as environmental exposure and learned habits, said Dr.
Janice Jin Hwang, chief of the division of endocrinology and metabolism at the
University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Why some people can shake off the impulse to eat, and other
people stay mired in thoughts about food, is “the million-dollar question,”
Hwang said.
The active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy is semaglutide,
a compound that affects the areas in the brain that regulate appetite, Gabbay
said; it also prompts the stomach to empty more slowly, making people taking
the medication feel fuller faster and for longer. That satiation itself could
blunt food noise, he said.
Klemmer said she worried about the potential long-term side
effects of a medication she might be on for the rest of her life. But she
thinks the trade-off — the end of food noise — is worth it. “It’s worth every
bad side effect that I’d have to go through to have what I feel now,” she said:
“not caring about food.”
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