Food Noise
GENZING BY KIARA WIJEWARDENE
Food can be the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing running through your head when you go to sleep. You might not even be hungry, but you’re already thinking about calories, what you ate yesterday, what you can eat today and whether you’ve already eaten too much. For some of us girls, this becomes such a regular part of everyday life that we barely realize how much mental space it takes up. You could be sitting in a lecture, getting ready with your friends, watching something on Netflix or scrolling through TikTok, and there’s still part of your brain keeping track of food.
Discovering calories can genuinely feel like one of the worst canon events for a girl who is already conscious of her body. Before you know the numbers, you can eat something because you like it or because you’re hungry without really thinking much further. Once you start paying attention to calories, it can become very difficult to look at food in the same uncomplicated way. A slice of bread is no longer just a slice of bread because you’re thinking about how many calories it contains. A coffee is no longer simply something you enjoy in the afternoon because you’re wondering what went into it. Going out for dinner becomes more than choosing something you like because now there’s the question of whether you can justify eating it.
It gets even more complicated when social media is constantly showing you what everyone else is eating. There are videos of girls showing their daily meals, counting calories, cutting out certain foods, losing weight and talking about how they changed their bodies. Even if you never search for that content yourself, it somehow seems to find you. When you’re already insecure about your body, it becomes very easy to start comparing yourself with girls online, wondering whether you should be eating the way they eat, exercising as much as they do or avoiding foods, they say they've given up. You can start believing there must be a perfect way to eat and that everyone else has somehow figured it out.
The difficult thing is that trying to control food can sometimes make you think about it even more. There can be days when you eat very little because you are determined to be disciplined, only to spend the rest of the day thinking about all the things you want to eat. Then there are days when the restriction catches up with you and you eat far more than you intended, sometimes continuing until you feel painfully full and wondering why you couldn’t stop earlier. Afterwards, there can be guilt and the promise that tomorrow will be different. You tell yourself that you will have more control, eat less and be stricter with yourself, only for the same cycle to begin again.
This is exactly what makes a difficult relationship with food so exhausting. You can feel as though you’re constantly trying to control what you eat while also feeling completely out of control around it. You might not know whether you’re actually feeling hungry or whether you’re simply craving something, and you can start questioning whether you should have another portion, whether you’ve eaten enough, whether you’ve eaten too much and whether you’ll regret whatever you decide to do. Something as ordinary as eating can become a constant negotiation with yourself.
On top of this, it can also change the way you experience things that should be enjoyable. Going out for dinner with friends can mean looking through the menu and immediately calculating what you can eat. Someone bringing cake to a birthday could make you hesitate because you’re already thinking of how you’ll feel afterwards. A holiday can involve worrying about how much you’re eating instead of simply enjoying the food that comes with being somewhere new. You can be sitting around a table with people you love, laughing and having a good time, but silently thinking about everything you’ve already eaten that day.
The people around you might not even know any of this is happening. From the outside, you can seem completely normal. You’re still going out, laughing, taking pictures, studying and spending time with your friends. There’s nothing visibly wrong, but inside your head you can be having the same conversation with food again and again. That’s probably one of the loneliest parts of it because it can be difficult to explain why eating something that everyone else seems to enjoy without thinking can leave you feeling anxious or guilty.
For teenage girls and women in their twenties, there’s already so much pressure surrounding bodies and appearance. You grow up hearing comments about weight at family gatherings, seeing certain body types praised online and watching people treat losing weight as an achievement (oops, guilty!). You become aware of your body at an age when you’re still trying to figure out who you are, and it can become difficult to separate what you genuinely want for yourself from what you’ve been taught you should want. You are constantly being told to love yourself while simultaneously being shown hundreds and thousands of reasons why you should change.
Food then becomes an easy thing to blame. You start thinking that if you could just eat less, stop craving certain things or have more self control, you would finally feel comfortable with yourself. It can seem like everything would be easier if you could just learn when to stop eating, but the more rules you create around food, the more important food can become. The more you tell yourself that you can’t have something, the more you end up thinking about it. Eventually, you can spend so much time trying to control your eating that food becomes one of the biggest things occupying your mind.
This is something I understand on a bit of a personal level because food has always been a sensitive subject for me. I’ve struggled with controlling how much I eat and with knowing when to stop. I feel like I’m always either eating too little because I’m trying to control myself or eating so much that I feel like my stomach would just explode. Neither side feels particularly good, and what makes it worse is all the mental energy that goes into thinking about it.
Some days I wake up already thinking about calories and what I can and cannot eat. I can spend the day thinking about what I’ve already had, what I’m going to eat later, whether something is worth the calories and whether I should restrict myself afterwards. Even when I’m doing something completely unrelated, those thoughts can still be sitting somewhere in the back of my mind. By the time I go to sleep, it can feel like food has taken up an unreasonable amount of my day, even though I’ve spent most of my day doing things that have nothing to do with eating.
I think that’s what makes it so sad. There’s so much more happening in a young person’s life than what they’ve eaten. There are friendships, university, relationships, dancing, holidays, nights out, family dinners, stupid conversations with your friends and all the little things you’re supposed to remember when you look back at being young. It’s difficult to realize that you’ve spent so much of those moments thinking about whether you ate too much or whether you should have eaten something at all.
Nobody wants food to consume their every waking thought. Most girls who struggle with this probably just want to eat without feeling guilty afterwards. They want to go out for dinner without calculating everything first, have cake at a birthday without spending the rest of the night regretting it and be able to enjoy a meal without secretly keeping track of every bite. They want to stop thinking about food so much because there are so many other things they would rather be thinking about.
Food will always be a part of life, and caring about what you eat isn’t automatically a bad thing, but I believe there’s a difference between being conscious of your choices and feeling as though every meal, snack and craving needs to be monitored. When food takes up that much space in your mind, it becomes difficult to be present for the rest of your life. You spend so much time worrying about what you’re putting into your body that you forget there’s so much more to life than keeping track of what you eat.
