Summary 

Ever wonder if that constant hum in your brain around food — the what, when, should I, can I — is just part of life now? This episode is going to challenge that idea in the best way possible. Recorded from a hotel room in Toronto, I’m diving into a powerful, unscripted conversation about food chatter, dopamine, overachievement, and the real reason we over-snack, overthink, and overdo.

If you’ve ever felt like your brain is constantly buzzing about food, and you’re tired of it, this conversation is for you. I’ll take you through a totally new way of understanding food noise, from hormone shifts to habit loops, and help you see that freedom is possible — not through willpower, but through strategy, science, and soul.

Learn more about the group: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/group 

Get the Hormones Training: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/hormones

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The unexpected airplane convo that sparked this whole episode and made me grab my mic on the spot
• Why food chatter isn’t a willpower issue and how four “rooms” in your mental house are fueling the noise
• How your 20s, overwork, and missing joy created a sneaky reward loop with snacks and screens
• What estrogen, cortisol, insulin, and leptin have to do with cravings (and why it’s not just in your head)
• The science-backed shifts that helped me stop obsessing over food

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

• Get the Hormones Training by clicking here.
• Want to work with me? Learn about The Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group by clicking here. 

Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey, unstoppable friend. You're listening to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, a physician turned a stress and weight loss coach for professional working moms and the founder of the Burn Stress, Lose Weight Feel Unstoppable Small Group Coaching Program. This podcast is going to inspire change at the root for you on and off the scale. I've lost a little over 60 pounds while being a busy physician mom with two young kids and an unpredictable schedule. And along my journey, which was full of many, many imperfect moments, I have learned how to skip past the fads and the gimmicks. I am on this mission now to share with you how you can have real strategy and mindset skills to really have more of the life you want, that you have worked so hard for. Let's get into it. Hey friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. I am in a totally different setting if you happen to be seeing this on video. If you're not seeing this on video and you're driving in your car, which is where most of my listeners are listening to this podcast, then I wanna give you a little bit of a visual about where I am and why I am bringing you this podcast episode from this brand new place. So I'm on a short three day trip to Toronto, Canada, where I am meeting up with one of my most important mentors and coaches that I have had in years past. She's someone that has very much influenced me, not just. As a coach, though, she definitely influenced a lot of my coaching style, but she really helped me, I think, heal a lot of my own inner critical thoughts. A lot of my own inner criticisms that I didn't even realize for criticisms, because again, as I've shared on the podcast before, I'm a glass half full kind of person, but I'm here and I get to see her in person along with. Some other amazing coaches, and I was on the airplane flying to Toronto. I don't mean to move my microphone around, but I brought my podcast Mike with me because I was planning on recording some episodes while I was here because I've had a few ideas. I have been downloading all these ideas onto a notes app. This is how my brain works. First of all, if you can't tell, this is gonna be a little chit chatty, but today's episode is going to be such a good one, so I hope you are just buckling up for a little bit of a chit chatty episode. The way that my brain really works when it comes to this podcast, when it comes to the topics that I want to share, the stories that I want to tell, is I usually just get bitten by either an inspiration bug on something that I have personally been experiencing as a busy, professional working mom, either in weight loss, in hitting a personal new fitness goal, I've been focusing on body recomposition this past year. It could be something that I'm experiencing as a mom with two kids who can be very challenging. It can be any relationship or any professional goal. I love really sharing my own personal little moments, real life fails that I'm still learning from to this day. I love bringing it to this podcast to not just keep it real, but I just feel like it keeps this podcast feeling fresh. At least to me. And then the other place that I get a lot of inspiration to share stories, which is what today's episode is going to be, is just conversations that I have out and about sometimes with random strangers somebody that I might share an Uber with or, I mean, I don't really share Ubers with strangers. But for example, today on my flight here to Canada, I was sitting next to someone and we just started talking about what we do and she heard about what I did and one of her questions was about food chatter and mental chatter and the idea that, you know, if you have struggled with your weight, if you have been someone that has had a lot of food chatter, you might've had the thought, you might've even believed that there cannot possibly be a way or a way of living without that food chatter. And so we had a whole conversation on, on the flight, and it really inspired me. I got bitten by an inspiration bug to just come and record this podcast episode. I have no notes today. Also, I feel like my voice is feeling a little bit like I'm sick. I'm not sick at all, but I think it's just from traveling all day. So if I look a little like I've been traveling, it's because I've been traveling. I literally got off of my flight a few hours ago, and I have been resting. I've been doing some work to get ready for this event with my mentor, and I thought I would just break out the podcast, Mike, no notes and just record today's episode on Food Chatter. So if you're new to me, if you're new to this orbit, then this is the way that this podcast rolls. We are going to always bring to this podcast equal parts science. So you're going to always hear either my perspective as a physician, something that I have seen in my career as a physician. You're going to hear strategies on how to solve some of your biggest obstacles as a busy, professional working mom who wants to lose weight, feel better, have more vitality while supporting your hormone health wellbeing. You're most alive in your thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Sometimes I think we feel like we hit 40 or 50 and it's like it's all downhill from there. And I really want to challenge that narrative. I feel like that is just when you start living, when you have actually gotten your head straight on your shoulders after decades of kind of running around like a crazy person overworking. If you really think about this, we're really going off on a tangent, but let's just go with it. I'm just gonna reflect on my own story. Like when I think about my twenties and early thirties, it was spent in a perpetual chase. Like I was just chasing my tail with overworking because I felt the need to constantly prove myself to the adult that was in charge of my either education or my early training in residency. And I think especially women are programmed to almost like, you know, jump as high as we can when the big person in our life tells us to jump. It's like they say jump and we say how high? I've done that since I was five or six years old, because that is where we got our value from. That's where we felt valued. That is where we got our sense of. Love. That's where we got our sense of belonging. Like if I jump really high, then the big person in my life will love me a little bit more. They will accept me a little bit more. They will take care of me a little bit better. I think this is across the board, across all genders, but I just really feel like it especially touches women. And then it is, you know, in every kind of corner of society. It's so subtle. Sometimes the messaging that women get where we keep on being kind of trained in this way. Long story long I have noticed, at least when I think about my own twenties, forget twenties, like my teenage years, my twenties, my early thirties was just spent with my head not really connected to my body. And I don't just mean emotion like we've talked about, like, you know, living in our brain and being very logical in our brain versus actually being connected with our emotions, connected with how we are feeling. That's for different podcast episode, which we've done many of on this show, but what I'm talking about is just. Running a hundred miles an hour. We're running a hundred miles an hour because we keep wanting to achieve the next thing. And we've talked about arrival fallacy on this podcast before, but it's like the reason and like why is it that we run this way, is because we keep thinking when I achieve the next thing, then I will feel confident, then I will feel more certain, then I'll feel less doubt, then I will feel more sure of myself. Then I can, you know, take the leap and do the next thing and then I can calm down. I can go on and on, as you can tell and I think there just came a point for me in my late thirties, this is when I had already had my son. My daughter was six and a half months old, and I was at my heaviest, which I've shared on this podcast before. And I think I just woke up one day. I was pumping while driving to work, and I just had this like epiphany moment of what. Am I doing? These are supposed to be the best years of my life and these are the years that I want to feel my most vital, that I want to experience life. I want to experience my relationships. I wanna experience my children. I want to experience, no going on a walk outside and enjoying the nature that I'm walking in without constantly thinking about work without constantly thinking about what's missing, what's lacking, what I need to do because my life is passing me by. So I shared this little side tangent because I think that it is when you are in your late thirties, forties, and fifties, I mean, hey, there might be some very, you know, younger people that have, you know, maybe seen the light earlier. But I think you sometimes have to have gone through those years of struggle of overworking to get to a point where you realize that what you are living. Right now is intolerable. I'm being dramatic because that's how I talk. I'm a dramatic person on this podcast, but I think a big piece of it was I realized that me living in this way, the overworking and constantly needing to seek external validation to feel good about myself and all of that nonsense was becoming intolerable. I didn't have that intolerable-ness in my twenties and thirties. That was when I was like, yeah, let me like give it to me. Let me work as hard as I can because I think I just had the reserves. I had the energy I had, you know, my youth was working for me. Like even when you're in your twenties and early thirties, your entire hormone status is very different than after the age of 35. We've talked about this before. What I think starts to happen is twofold. The first thing physiologically after 35, you're. Estrogen levels start to go down, and I've described that your estrogen, think of it like the master conductor of your body. It's like the master conductor that touches every organ system. It affects your brain, it affects your heart, your mood. It affects your muscle, it affects your energy, your metabolism, your vitality. Estrogen affects all of this. So you can imagine as estrogen levels start to go down. You start to feel different the way that you could just push in your twenties and early thirties, you cannot push as hard because your hormones are changing. So that is just normal. It is physiological, and it does not need to be a problem. The other thing that I think is not talked about. Enough, and I love to talk about it here on this podcast, I talked about it also in my hormones training. If you never grabbed that or if you grabbed it and you forgot to watch it, it's just sitting in your email inbox my friend, like right after this podcast episode. Go and watch it. You can grab it at www.burnstressloseweight.com/hormones. Do not wait. I talk about this in even more detail where I get into hormones and weight loss and wellness and how they all tie together. But the other thing that most people don't realize is estrogen has a direct impact on cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone. So just think about this, right? The master conductor estrogen, which is helping to regulate all of your body systems, including your mood, including your stress, starts to go down. What happens to your cortisol levels? Your cortisol levels, your stress, your ability to regulate, your stress starts to go down. So what happens in perimenopause and as we get older is it's not just that we're just getting older and that's all it is, or life is just getting harder, and that's just what it is. It's that your reserve tank. Has gotten depleted because you've been overworking like a crazy person for the last 10, 20, 30 years. I share this because I think that all of us, at some point, and it might be earlier for some and it might be later for some, there's literally no such thing as too late. It is the day you realize we have a wake up call. I had that wake up call when that was pumping while driving to work and I realized, what the hell am I doing? Like, what is happening? And it was more like. I think that the, what the hell am I doing? That the sentiment wasn't coming from a place of criticism of myself. It was more a challenge for me to really look at where have I been prioritizing the parts of my life and my patients were my top priority. Finishing my charts were a top priority, laundry was a top priority. The next vacation was a top priority. My kids, my family, that was a top priority. But me, I would just be like at the bottom of the list. And there comes a point, I think, for all of us, and again. For me, it was in my late thirties. I'm actually really grateful that I discovered and had that moment when I did, and you're here listening to this podcast, which means you have likely had this moment as well. Your reserve tank has been depleted simply because it is normal physiologically, but also we have been running around like crazy people addicted to productivity without knowing how to rest and play. So anyways, why do I share this very long kind of ramble. It's not really a tangent as I like to do. I like to bring all these things back together. I wanna come back to this conversation I was having with. This woman on the flight today. So she heard that, you know, I'm an OBGYN as my background, and she's like, wait, you're not in practice anymore, but you're a stress and weight loss coach. And I don't understand. She had so many questions, which I adore and I love, and I was trying to answer her questions as I do on this podcast very forthcoming and very transparently that I never left medicine because I hated my practice. I actually loved being a physician, and I loved being an OBGYN, but I just loved this more. I loved coaching more. That's all it was, and it's because of what we're gonna talk about today. So one of the things she asked me was, because she has struggled with her weight, this woman who was also like very forthcoming in this conversation was saying that she has had weight loss in some form on her mind for as long as she can remember. She's in her early forties, and she was saying even in childhood, not that she struggled with her weight in childhood, but she was saying that her body was always on her mind, even in middle school and in high school, like, you know how she looked, the clothes that she was wearing, the group that she wanted to fit in with, like the way that she looked was always on her mind. And of course in the eighties and in the nineties, we all know that the diet industry had a very specific look for what was beautiful. So that also informed not just her, probably a lot of us listening to this podcast, informed a lot of what we thought was beautiful and she was sharing that she started to think about food a lot, especially in college. She would think about her next meal. She would think about the next weekend. She would think about, you know, she lost a lot of weight because of a lot of strict, disciplined calorie counting. And she was saying at one point she stopped even using the app. She was like, I could just tell you, if I just look at a food, I could tell you exactly how many points it was, exactly how many calories it was. Like she could just tell you, because she had been so attached to her tracker, you know, her calorie tracking app. And one of the things that she asked me was. I have just assumed that I would always be like this. I always would have to think about food or have this food chatter of, should I eat this? Should I not eat this a little bit or a lot? Can I eat this? Can I not eat this? Am I loud? Will this throw me off? Am I gonna gain a pound? Like so many of these questions. That was one layer of it. And then the other layer of it that she was talking about was, we've talked about this before on the podcast as well. This idea, like food is calling to you like your favorite foods. It's gonna be so good, like delicious, yum. Like all the yuming. All the yuming on the foods. And one of the things that she shared with me, which is why I wanted to talk about this on the podcast today was. This idea that she assumed that she would always have to feel that, that she would always have to have this mental chatter. Her genuine question to me, which caught me off guard, because I don't think that I've ever actually talked about this on the podcast before, but this idea that, is it even possible for someone to not have food chatter? Have you ever thought that way? I'm actually very curious. If you're listening to this, you wanna share with me, I'd actually love to know your answers. Email me, send me a message on Instagram. I really would love to know, have you ever had some flavor of that question in your mind? Can I ever lose the weight that I want to lose, achieve my body goal? Maybe it's body recomposition. You wanna build more muscle, lose percent body fat, whatever it is for you, whatever your goal is. Can I achieve this goal without having the perpetual food chatter? Is that even possible? The reason that this one conversation with this woman on this airplane is inspiring this podcast episode is because I think this is such an important conversation that I don't think I've actually ever answered very directly, at least on this podcast. I've probably answered it in other ways. I've touched on this concept in different ways on this podcast before, but I really wanted to directly answer the food chatter question because I think that that's also one of the big reasons that people do go to weight loss medications. GLP1 agonists, Ozempic, there's so many medications that you can go on, and they're very effective for so many people. But I think that it's a helpful time to also have this conversation on this podcast because I've never really answered it before. I couldn't get into all this with this woman on this airplane. So I hope that she listens to this podcast episode where I can do a deep dive. The airplane ride from Washington DC to Toronto is only an hour and a half, so we couldn't really have this entire conversation, but I wanted to share with you why I deeply believe that unless they, physiological or biological reason that you have food chatter, and there are some which I'm going to get into. It is absolutely possible for you to experience achieving your goals for your body, for you to feel taken care of, for you to lose the weight you want, for you to feel your strongest, your most vital, even as a busy professional woman feel. Free of food chatter and food noise. If you experience it, it's just sitting in the buzzing background of your mind all the time. Because I love to do analogies and I love painting a good visual picture. I wanted to think about food noise as experiencing you walking into a really very busy house. Imagine that you walk into a house. And the house has multiple rooms, and in every single room, there's a little bit of a ruckus going on. So you can imagine if all the rooms of the house have a ruckus, you're going to hear a lot of noise in your mind. You could try to escape to the basement. You could try to escape to a different, you know, corner of the house. But if every room has chaos and chatter happening, no matter how much you try to escape it, if you're in your own house, AKA, you're in your own head. It's going to feel near impossible to escape the food chatter. So the very first room in the house that we're talking about is the simplest room, the one that we have talked about on this podcast before. It's the rewards room. It's the dopamine room. It is a very important hormone pathway, dopamine and endorphins. It is where you get so much pleasure. It's where you get a lot of joy. It's where you literally feel a part of your brain light up, like actually your brain will light up. Every time you snack and scroll, every time that you even think about food. So you don't even have to actually eat food or smell food to experience dopamine hits like this. Even when you just think about food like, yum, that's going to be so good. Ooh, that looks so delicious. Like we have so many sentences that we are telling ourselves that is about food or our favorite foods. Like for me, the cool ranch Doritos or the glass of wine, it's like, Ooh, it's gonna be so good. I deserve a break, very compelling stories in our mind that really puts food, snacking, scrolling on a pedestal, thinking about food, and then definitely consuming that food or scrolling. Releases dopamine in our brain. So this is just physiologic. It's not, there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing weak about you. If you have thoughts like that, it is a very, very simple room that has some noise. Part of the issue with this room, and this is why I wanted to go on the tangent that I went on, 'cause I'm gonna bring it back in your twenties and thirties, and this probably started before your twenties. This was probably since you were in elementary school. If you have been. Overworking a lot. If you have been constantly prioritizing everyone else, if you'd never make time for yourself, if you never built in real joy outside of snacking and scrolling, if that has been your one reliable way to have joy to take a break. I remember back in the day, I might have been 11 or 12 years old, I can't even remember, elementary school, middle school, like very young and. We used to get the Costco, I mean, at the time it was Sam's Club. Is Sam's Club even still around? I don't even know if Sam's Club is still around. We had a Sam's Club near us and we would get the jumbo bag of Cool Ranch Doritos that started every at a very young age, and I remember I would secretly, I never was even reprimanded for eating food or like, we didn't even have, it was not even an issue, but I felt somehow like the need to be a little secretive, like going back and getting a second bowl of the Cool Ranch Doritos, like kind of quietly eating the pantry. So I really wanted to just spend an extra minute on this rewards room because if like the snacking has been your one reliable way to experience joy, if it's been your one reliable way, and it is the quickest way. So that's again, just science. It's the quickest way to have that hit of dopamine in your brain. We can see why the rewards room has. So much chatter. Simply all that has happened is our brain learned at a really young age, a lesson. This food is the fastest and likely only way to experience this dopamine hit, to experience this joy. And when our brain learned that lesson, it got reinforced because that's how habits are. We reinforced our habits. Whenever you might have spent like a late night studying or pull the all-nighter or you know, studying for oral board exams. Like my main source of joy was watching a movie and like. Eating my nachos and watching a movie like that is the only way that I experience joy. So we learn a lesson and then we start reinforcing the story that this is the only reliable way that I get to feel joy and have a good time. So we can see why that rewards room is so noisy. So you can kind of imagine the solution to this. Is actually teaching your brain, and this is doable my friends. This is actually doable. It is amazing. It creates freedom from this room. When you do this piece that I'm about to tell you, this room will start to quiet down. Okay? So we're gonna go room by room. When you start to teach your brain that actually there are other ways of me to experience joy, there are actually non-food nons, snacking and scrolling ways for me to experience. Real relief from the stresses that I'm having for me to have reliable breaks, reliable, fun, reliable joy. And I keep emphasizing the word reliable because it has to be non-negotiable. This is really hard for the overachieving professional woman who keeps deprioritizing her fun, her joy, thinking that it's frivolous, thinking that it's indulgent thinking I'll get to it when I get to it. Or like I keep thinking about the, you know, you have the laundry list of things to do. And you even finish the list. And then rather than actually experiencing real rest and fun and joy and relaxation in a meaningful way that fits your life, your brain flashes forward to like, I could just get ahead for tomorrow. So what ends up happening when we become over addicted to work and productivity is that part of your brain, the rewards room stops trusting you. Like she's not gonna gimme a break anyway. Might as well get it while I can. So you can never have one chip or one cookie because you be. Get going to squirrely mode. It's like she's not gonna gimme the joy anyway. Like remember, snacking is the one reliable way that we get a break. So I really wanted to emphasize this one room because this is a huge reason that we have food chatter. You simply got very attached to using food. As a real break, it actually releases dopamine in your brain, which rewires your brain with habits. And then we reinforce those habits with the life that we were living as busy overachievers. And then we never did this other part of the work. So we just learned this is the only way to actually get a break. And when we. Believe that when we believe that snacking or scrolling is our only way to have me time, our only way to experience fun and joy and connection. You can see why weight loss might feel like the worst thing ever because it's true to achieve a goal for your body, you're going to have to eat differently. You're gonna have to make choices. You're gonna say no to things. It's just the reality. You're gonna have to say no to things. That experience will be full of deprivation and FOMO and missing out, and like your food chatter's just going to go up because you haven't done this piece of the work. This is mindset. There's a mindset element to this. There's absolutely mindset coaching around this, but there's. Also strategy around how to quiet this one rewards room. And it comes really from proving to yourself. You have to prove to yourself that you can actually experience joy and rest without the snacking. So that's a rewards room. I'm gonna call this like the worry room. It's like the room that is. Like thinking about the problems, right? The room that is your stress room. It's like the mom and dad's room or the two moms, or the two dads, right? Like the couple that is maybe thinking about, you know, how are they going to pay their bills and how are they going to take care of their kids? And you know, that one kid is really struggling in school and all that one kid was not invited to the birthday party and you know, that other family member is not doing so well. And we have this one aging parent and Oh, I didn't get the promotion at work like. The parents' room. I'm just painting a picture of the stresses that we experience as professionals navigating the work life and the home life and the kids, and the time that we have actually does increase your cortisol levels. Like actually you do experience more stress, the amygdala, which is a part of your brain experiences, distress signals when you're experiencing your life in this way and. One of the things when we don't have actual coping strategies and we don't know how to recognize our feelings in real time, when we don't know how to catch our worries and our fears and our stresses, and name them and allow those emotions to be there and problem solve for them in a constructive way, what ends up happening over time is. Our brain gets tired. It's like when you're experiencing so much perpetual stress, worry, overwhelm, frustration, you know, worry about your kid or your family or your work. At some point your brain needs a break from that. Right. And if we don't have a strategy on how to take a break from those emotions or. From those stresses, that room is going to be very noisy. It's going to really ramp up a lot of thoughts like, we deserve a break. This is where the I deserve, it's come in. I deserve a break. It's going to have the most compelling, convincing, convenient stories for why just this one time doesn't matter. And it will be very real snacking and scrolling and will again be feeling like your only option because your brain is craving rest. And I think a lot of times we confuse. A break like rest with snacking and scrolling and this I have shared on the podcast before. If your rest, if your break, if your deserve it, moments have regret on the other side. If it's sabotaging your dream goals for your body on the other side, like is it really a break or is it really rest? I think not right. We know this and yet because we don't have alternative solutions. We really have a very loud room in this worry room and like the parents' room that are trying to navigate real life obstacles and we just feel so much stress about it and we don't have a strategy on how to take a break. And so all that happens is we actually just take a break with snacking. So it's a really loud room. I'm going to call this like. The habits room. This is just you have habits. So for me, I've kind of gone back and forth with this habit. It's like I kind of undo this habit. I kind of create better habits around it. Then I kind of slip back. So this is one of those habits that's sticky for me. It has been sticky for me. Even though I've lost over 60 pounds, I still sometimes slip with this habit, which is the whole point of habits. This is where it is 4:00 PM or 5:00 PM You've picked your kids up from school, you've gotten home from work, you haven't yet prepared dinner, and you notice food chatter. You notice food noise. It's like, ooh, could just have a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Like you just notice because your brain has a habit of snacking in between work and having dinner, your brain just has a little tiny signal saying, Hey, where's our habit? If you grew up in a family, my family did not have this, but you might have grown up in a family where you always had dessert after dinner, guess what? Your brain starts craving something sweet to eat after dinner, simply because that was. Your habit for day after day, year after year. The part of your brain, this is the basal ganglia part of your brain. Think of it like a, like a robot. It's a decision maker. It helps you decide what you're going to do, and we have these habits created in our brain. Our threshold for decision making by the basal ganglia Does this because. Especially professional women, you're making thousands and thousands of decisions per day. You don't even realize how many decisions you're making you're making 30-40,000 decisions per day. Yeah. 30-40,000. And if you're a professional woman, you're likely making more than that, like more than the average bear. So our brain has created shortcuts. We've created habits simply to give ourselves the ability to live the very busy, very complex life that we are living. Have you ever wondered, you know, when you get in the car. I've definitely done this. I've definitely done this multiple times, so I'm curious if any of you have ever done this, but you get in the car and you're driving to work, you don't even know how you got there. Have you ever experienced that? You get in the car, you put the seatbelt on, you're not actively thinking while you're driving. I mean, you're driving safely, but you're not actively thinking while you're driving. That is your habits have kicked. It's like you're thinking about probably your to-do list. You're thinking about the complex project you're working on. You're thinking about the team meeting that's coming up, or maybe the surgical case you're about to walk into. You're thinking about your patients or your clients. You're thinking about the problem with your kid. That's like all of these things that's requiring your active brain power. There's an autopilot mode that your brain goes into and you just show up at work. It's brilliant. The thing is, this very brilliant mechanism has also created very brilliant habit loops around food. And so when you first embark on the journey to lose weight, to change your body composition, to build muscle, to lose body fat, and it requires you to change some of your habits, there's a room in the house that is going to protest. Why is that? Because if you keep your habits, if you keep your current status quo, it requires little to no energy, little to no active energy, right? Changing a habit, changing the way you eat, making a new decision, it's like taking a new way to work. All of a sudden you can't be an autopilot anymore. You have to develop a new skill. You have to plug in the new road, the new GPS. You have to actually start paying attention to the road names. So because of the effort that is involved with changing the habit, because there's that effort to say no to the habits that you have been having up until this point, that room in the house will be very noisy. That's the room in the house that will create stories like why bother? Is it really worth our effort? This will be the room that's like, what if we put in all of this effort and it doesn't even work? Have you ever had that thought? That's that room. That's your old status quo habits room. That is the part of you that is like, let's just keep the status quo, girl. Let's not change it. Why are you messing with us? We have a good thing going. We have our autopilot route. Like, why are you messing with us? This is the most primitive part of our brain that simply wants to conserve energy. We don't wanna put any extra brainpower, any extra effort. We don't wanna learn the new road. We just wanna keep our status quo because we want to conserve energy. Here's the key with this room. The key with this room is you have to actually go in the room and you have to actually tell that part of you that doing this work of finding the new road is actually going to be in the long run or shortcut for saving energy. Imagine that you are able to develop a system where you had a strategy, a way of eating, a way of living your life, no matter how busy you are, no matter how many. Kids you have no matter what your work life is like, where you could actually lose the weight you wanted and save hours of time every week and do it in a way that actually felt good 'cause that's what we do in the Unstoppable group. But let's just say you could wave that magic wand and make it happen. Do you think that that experience of living your life in that way would save you? Effort in the long run. It's a rhetorical question because the answer is yes, losing the weight. For me, and I see this with my clients, when you have started to ha have a strategy that actually folds into your real life, that's built into your real life, that takes your real joys into account. I can go on and on this topic, you will save. Hundreds of hours per year because you're not dealing with this problem anymore. So there's a part of our brain, the habits room that is creating a lot of, it's like making your ability to execute on a new strategy. Feel sticky. It's like trying to throw in all the obstacles. It's like, don't do it. Imagine that you're like trying to go onto this new path, which is by the way, going in the long run, going to be the shortcut. Okay, the shortcut is like, you actually have to do this work, but like. Let's just say you found this new pathway. It's going to be the shortcut, but imagine that the part of your, that part of your brain, the primitive part of your brain, is like throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you to prevent you from doing it. It's like, don't do it. It's gonna be too hard. It's gonna take too much effort. What have you put in your whole effort and you get lost. That is all going to create more food noise. It's going to create more food chatter. It is actually going to drive up your. Urges and cravings to be like, you know what? Forget it. Let's just do the old way because we know the old way, the old way's familiar. So this is the third room that will actually really add to a lot of your food noise and a lot of your food chatter. And I think it's important. I wanted to share this as one of the actual rooms in the house because we wanna normalize this. I'm sharing kind of this analogy and I'm going through all the reasons that we have food chatter, because I want to normalize if you've experienced food noise or food chatter, number one, there's a solution out of it. And number two, all of these experiences. Our normal human brain experiences, we all experience these in different ways and there's a way to walk out of it. Okay, the last room, I mean there, there's multiple more rooms in the house, but for the intents and purposes of this podcast episode, I feel like this is gonna be the last room we talk about. This is the antenna room. When I think of an antenna, I'm thinking of like, if you're younger than apologies if this analogy doesn't really land for you, but like an antenna is like amplifies the signal of something like a radio signal. Think about insulin and leptin as very important hormones in your body. That shuttle energy, they signal to your body when to move glucose into your cells and when balanced and appropriately managed your energy expenditure and how much food you're consuming is very well balanced and very well matched when you're eating highly processed foods for long periods of time when you are overeating that food, when your body is physically not getting enough actual rest, like I mean sleep type of rest, not just like frivolous joy, but real sleep, you actually start to damage those pathways. You start to develop. Insulin resistance and leptin resistance. And so physiologically that antenna, which signals to your brain that you're full or signals to your brain, you know, we've had enough starts to degrade. So even if you've eaten a full meal, even if you've eaten enough food, because that that signal has degraded your brain might still crave more. You won't actually feel satiated. You won't actually feel like you've gotten to that place where you've eaten enough. And so you'll eat more food than your body actually needs. So when we. Think about this room, the antenna room. We can see why this room very much amplifies food chatter, food noise. It's physiologic, right? When you've been, and I don't want to put all of the responsibility on just like crap food. That is one of the biggest reasons eating highly processed foods. Well, I, absolutely be the biggest source of this, but it's even just overeating. Overeating in general will also start to have this effect. So just to kind of recap, we have these four rooms. Imagine that you just walked into a really noisy house and you're wondering like, it's so noisy. There's so much food chatter. There's so much food noise. But here I have my PDF plan on paper with the macros that I'm supposed to be eating and the calories and points I'm supposed to be eating. Like, can we see why that doesn't work? Like just having a plan with what you're allowed to eat or not allowed to eat doesn't quite the food noise. Can we see that? It's not actually addressing any of the rooms. It's like, go do this, and a part of you wants to do it. A huge part of you wants to just pull the plan, right? A huge part of you wants to just like do what you said you were going to do, but I promise you, you do not have a discipline problem if you're an overachiever. I will say this forever. You don't have a discipline problem. You're not lazy, literally. You either have a strategic gap in your plan, which means you do not have the right nutrition. You're not eating enough of the right food. You're eating foods that are highly processed, which is really adding to your insulin and leptin resistance, which is adding to food noise. Or you have like a actual mindset gap, which is one of those other three rooms that we talked about. Again, there is overlap. You're going to have overlap between the mindset gaps and the strategic gaps you have with nutrition and with guilt-free rest and play and movement, and of course mindset. I've talked about this. This was the five pieces to success. We talked about this in the podcast recently. You should go back and listen to that one. But if you really think about like, how can I actually quiet the food noise? How can I actually have calm in the chaos of these rooms, we have to actually go into the room, into each of these rooms and solve for the problem. So for the dopamine room, we actually have to find real ways that we experience joy, that we actually have rest. Put it on our calendar. Make it non-negotiable. Stop calling it frivolous. Stop putting it off. Stop letting tomorrow's to-do list. Bamboozle your rest for today because a tired brain will always crave the cookie. Your food noise is just going to go up when you think about the worry room, like you have real worries as a busy professional if you have children, like actually thinking about raising little humans into decent humans, right? This is a big responsibility with the, especially the state of the world. You put the news on and all you're hearing is something negative, something negative in the workplace, something negative in the news, something negative with your community, something negative is going on. All the time we're inundated. And when we don't know how to really control our thoughts, when we don't know how to redirect our thoughts, we don't know how to challenge our most low denominator belief thoughts. You're going to live in a perpetual state of worry and overwhelm. This is where coaching comes in, and when you do, your brain's gonna wanna break from stress. From the worry, from the stresses that you're having. Food noise and food chatterers going to go up. Nothing has gone wrong. When you have habitually been using snacking and scrolling to treat yourself, that's been your main way to take a break. Don't be surprised at 4:00 PM for me, or 8:00 PM for you, or 11 o'clock at night. If your brain creates a very compelling reason or story to like, let's just take the easy way. Let's just take the way we know. Let's not do the alternative pathway that we've decided like making decisions. I call this magic action structure. It's actually like the entire video that. I give my clients on the very first week that they start working with me. Magic action structure is making decisions in advance, is going to be like the success recipe for how to have the shortcut. Like in the long run, it will be the shortcut. Does that actually make sense? In the long run, it'll be the shortcut. You get what I'm saying? It will save you hundreds of hours of time. Yes, it requires effort, but your efforts worth it, right? Because a status quo has become intolerable. The last one, we actually do have to make changes to our nutrition. When I really think about like our reserves have gotten low after, these are 35. When you're hitting your forties, you're getting older, and your hormone levels are changing. We cannot pussyfoot around this anymore. We cannot take for granted our vitality and our metabolism anymore. We actually have to change the way that we are eating. It doesn't mean that you have to eat canned green beans from cottage cheese. You can actually love the way you're eating. You can eat more. Of the right food, but we do have to make a change to actually quiet that fourth room, the insulin and leptin resistance room. And that doesn't mean that you never have a cookie or a piece of cake. If you're following me on Instagram, you see the kinds of food that I'm eating. I eat all the things. I just don't eat all the things all the time. I actually, I really think it's so important that when you go on a weight loss journey or a body recomposition journey, when you really want to achieve your goals in a way that stands the test of long-term, like sustainability. We want to create a real strategy that takes real life into account. So if you're on date night you wanna enjoy some dessert with your partner, you do. Or if you're out with your friends and you want to enjoy a little bit of something you know how to, without completely sabotaging and undoing your successes. This is a piece of the process that I, when I talk to my clients about it, it's called Guaranteed results. So how do you guarantee results on a weekly basis? And also love the way you're eating. It's like I really want you to imagine you push yourself to answer that question. Yes, that might mean that we say no to eating all the processed foods for eating simply to quiet the food noise in the food chatter. I also do want to mention that GLP one agonists and actual weight loss medications can absolutely play a role in reducing food noise. It is very, very effective for the right person. It is an important tool to have in your toolbox for the right person. But what I've seen, and I've been talking with so many women that have either been on it for a short time or they've been on it, they experienced some success, but then they plateau or they experienced some success, but then they undo it being on any medication will only improve the biological reasons for your food noise and food chatter. It will not take away the emotional ones. It will not take away the stress and the worry breaks that you're using. It will not take away the dopamine hits that you're going to get if you only use snacking for your joys. Right? So we really have to see, and I really wanted to put that into this podcast episode that, you know, being on Ozempic or any kind of weight loss medication can be a very important tool, but it cannot exist. On its own. I don't think that it can exist on its own in a way that is truly sustainable for your entire life, unless you already have dialed in those other parts of food and food chatter.

  I feel like this podcast episode has become very long. I don't even know how long we've been talking. I think we've been talking for quite a while, but I really wanted to share this kind of chitchat style. We're like sitting in the hotel room. I'm really hoping that the quality of my sound was okay, but I wanted to really answer this question about food noise and food chatter, and is it possible to be free of it? To me, that's freedom, and I think that the way that we get there is we have to decide that that freedom is worth it. That freedom is worth our effort, that freedom is worth us trying and having it be a little tricky or challenging, that freedom is worth us feeling embarrassed and that freedom is worth us stumbling and learning and stumbling and learning again, like how worth it is that freedom for you. That's at least my perspective on it because for me, getting to the other side of this experience where I don't have the food chatter and the food noise anymore, where I feel like I can really enjoy my life, where I can be present with my kids when I'm with them, I can be present with my work. When I'm with work has created an experience of my life that I had been wanting, and I want that for all of you. I hope you all loved this podcast episode. If you did, give this episode a share, share it with a friend, like it, head over to whichever podcast platform you're on. Leave me a rating and a review. I would love it and greatly appreciate you and share it with someone in your community. If you're in a Facebook group and you hear someone talking about food chatter, share this episode with them. Drop in with me on Instagram I am @BurnStressLoseWeight. Let me know what you think about it. If you like the style podcast episode, I might record a few more podcast episodes while I'm sitting in this hotel room. We'll see if I come back in the same outfit. You'll know. That I have done that and I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I'll see you all next week. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out. That you don't need to have a stress-free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses with true strategy, we will game change how we show up, and how we hit our goals. If you wanna take what you are learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.