If you are new to this podcast, my name is Denise Jelinek. I’m a Catholic health and weight loss coach, and I struggled with food noise, debilitating food noise where it was consuming my life. 85 to 90% of my day I was thinking about food. The thoughts were exceptionally intrusive,  I had a family with two small kids, and it just made it very challenging to stay focused on my kids and not be eating food.

And I really believe that food noise is the number one reason that women are overweight. So let’s dive into what it is, where in the world it came from, and I  promise you it is not your fault and what you can do about it. All right. Enjoy.

What is food noise and is that even a real thing? Well, yes, friends, it is a real thing and it’s the number one reason most women are overweight. Food noise is when you’re thinking about food, when you really don’t wanna be thinking about food. It feels like thoughts about food are hijacking your brain and they stay there even when you try to think about something else.

So what would it be like to not have food noise? Well, since we have to eat, you will be thinking about food at some time in your life, but it will be when it makes sense, when you’re planning your day, when you’re planning your meal plan, when you’re getting ready to eat your meal, when you’re preparing your meal.

Perhaps if you have a smell and it triggers that thought of a favorite food, or you walk past your favorite bakery, that makes sense that you’re thinking about food. When you experience food thoughts, then they feel very neutral and calm. When you have food noise, they feel very urgent and like it’s an emergency and you have to answer that noise or that drive to eat. It feels like you don’t have a choice. 

So I want to tell you, food noise is absolutely real. When I understood where it came from, it gave me so much relief in knowing that it’s not my fault that it’s there and that I had the ability to be healed from it. 

There are three main reasons that food noise is in your life. The first one is that earlier in your life, there was a time when you recognized or someone told you that your body wasn’t okay, and to make it okay, we needed to change the way that you ate. Likely it was through dieting. 

And so those food rules became like a life raft. And as long as you stayed on the liferaft, you felt safe. You felt okay. You felt like you were doing the right thing. Your nervous system started to believe that those food rules. And now you’ve added to different food rules as you’ve lived your decades and years, but that is safety.

And if you’re on that life raft in an ocean full of sharks, you can see why it just feels so safe to be in the life raft, to stay in this boundary of food rules. And so you’re probably hypervigilant to stay in the food rules. And so you’ve got many food rules. The women I work with have bags of food rules, certain food combinations, maybe no bread, maybe no sugar, maybe no white things.

Okay? Let’s just recognize that your brain and your nervous system believes that staying in the food rules is safe and nobody wants to fall in with the sharks. So you are hypervigilant to stay in the food rules. 

Okay. The second reason you have food noise is that somewhere along the line you had strong emotions or you had a feeling or you wanted to express yourself, and you were not given the safety to let emotions come out or to express yourself.

So what happens is you want to express yourself. You want to defend yourself, you want to cry. You want to scream and you are taught it is safer to be quiet. It is safer to stuff it down, but that gets trapped in you and to release it, we’re eating and that brings release. So instead of saying the thing that we need to say. That doesn’t feel safe to say, we just eat it to release those emotions. 

And the third way is that these patterns of the safety in the life raft as well as turning to food for emotional reasons, those patterns are just repeated over and over in your brain, and so it just becomes very familiar in your brain. Those neuro connections are very strong.

So you have an emotion. You eat, you’re sad or lonely, you eat, you’re frustrated or overwhelmed. You eat, you’re offended, you eat. You want to have fun or celebrate, you eat, you want to relax, you eat, and that is simply because that is what your brain has been conditioned to do.  You are not doing anything wrong, my friends, and there is a way out. 

This is the exact process that I use. And I’ve led over 5,000 Catholic women through this process so that they no longer have food noise in their life, and they now live peacefully at a healthy weight. 

What I’m going to tell you are three skills and skills are things that you weren’t born knowing. Skills are things that are new to that you’re not good at, at first, and everything that you’ve ever learned in your life was something that you didn’t know before. As you hear them, your brain will think, but I don’t know how to do that. And I want to say, of course you don’t. You haven’t learned how to yet. 

So let’s just step back and know that to overcome food noise, you get to learn some new skills. . And I know that you have done some very challenging things in your life, and this is just, again, an example of your strength of your reliance on the Lord to learn these three skills of your fortitude, of your perseverance. Okay? 

So the three skills are, number one, giving yourself unconditional permission to eat any food. The women that I work with, we create an easy to stick to meal plan, which is their day, but it’s ridiculously easy to stick to. I have three food rules. You eat the food that you love in a way that is peaceful and that works for the woman who’s going to be eating it. 

So you need to make sure it works for your day. You’ll learn how to leverage tools like fast food if you don’t wanna prepare your meals ahead of time, it just has to be ridiculously easy to stick to. 

The second thing is we stop living on autopilot. And what I mean by that is we start opening our eyes to ourselves. We start checking in with you, Hey, what do you feel? What do you need? This is a skill. A lot of women say, I don’t know. They don’t even know what they feel, and that’s okay. No one’s ever taught you how to do that. But this can be learned. 

And then the third thing is we start learning how to meet your needs. See the reason that you’re overeating now, the reason that you have food noise is because there is a need underneath the food noise, and we just haven’t identified it yet. But by giving yourself unconditional permission to eat any food, by opening your eyes on your life, your needs will be revealed. And then we simply get to work on learning how to authentically meet those needs. 

So when you’re sad and lonely, how can we soothe you? How can we bring you comfort when you’re stressed and overwhelmed? How can we bring celebration into your life and fun into your life in ways that aren’t just food, although food can be certainly part of it, and how can we give you rest and relaxation in ways in addition to food? Okay.

So it’s those three things that I’ve done myself. I live peacefully at a healthy weight, and you can too. Once the food noise is removed, your weight will balance out. Just know there is a way out of living with food noise. I used to suffer with food noise and now I don’t. And I live at my healthy weight peacefully eating the foods that I love. And you can too. 

And if you are ready to have food noise as not part of your life anymore and you’re ready to give up food, noise, this lent then join me and hundreds of other Catholic women as we truly give up food noise. This lent, go to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com and join us.