It was raining again.
Not the gentle kind that soaks in and does some good. The kind that keeps coming, day after day, until the ground can’t take another drop and the field you needed to be in sits there too wet to touch. I sat in my office looking out the window watching it come down, and I could feel my whole body tighten.
The thoughts started their swirl. This isn’t sustainable. How are we going to get everything done if it keeps raining like this. What’s this going to cost us. Markets doing one thing, input costs doing another, weather doing whatever it wanted — none of it in my hands. And that’s farming. You can do everything right and the sky still decides.
So I walked to the kitchen.
I wasn’t hungry. Let me say that plainly, because it’s the whole thing. There was no growl in my stomach, no shaky, no headache coming on. My body didn’t need one bit of fuel. But I stood in that kitchen and I ate — something, it didn’t much matter what — and for about a minute, I felt better. The swirl went quiet. The tightness let go.
And then the rain was still falling, the field was still too wet, the markets were still doing their thing, and I was standing in my kitchen having solved exactly none of it.
That’s food noise. And I lived with it for years before I understood what it actually was.
Here’s how I’ve come to picture it.
Imagine you’re walking through a big, crowded city. Cars honking. Sirens screaming. Traffic backed up as far as you can see. People rushing past you, late for something. Construction tearing up the sidewalk. Billboards flashing. A train station packed shoulder to shoulder. It’s a lot. It presses on you from every direction, and you can’t turn any of it off.
Then you come to a park.
The park is quieter. Softer. But here’s the thing — you can still hear the city. The sirens don’t stop because you found a bench. The traffic is right there past the trees. The noise is still going on all around you.
Now imagine you sit down on that bench and put on a pair of headphones, and some calming music comes on. There’s still sound coming through — you haven’t gone deaf to the world. But something shifts. A different vibration moves through you. Your shoulders come down. You feel a little more relaxed. A little more tolerant of it all. A sense of calm you didn’t have a second ago.
That’s what the food was doing for me in the kitchen. It was a pair of headphones.
And I want to be honest with you about what headphones do, because it matters. They don’t stop the sirens. They cover them. The city is exactly as loud as it was — you just can’t hear it for a little while. The moment you take them off, all of it comes rushing back in, unchanged.
There are a lot of things that can put headphones on you. Some of them come in a container. Some of them come in a prescription. And I’m not here to tell you those things aren’t real or don’t work — a pair of headphones is a real relief, and there’s no shame in wanting the noise to stop. But headphones were never going to make the city quiet. They were only ever going to make me quiet, and only for as long as I kept them on.
The rain kept falling the whole time I was in that kitchen. My eating never once slowed it down.
So where does the noise really come from?
It comes from a lot of places. Past diets and years of restriction, where you told yourself no so many times that food started shouting. Not enough water. Not enough sleep. Not taking care of yourself in the plainest ways. The way you talk to yourself when no one’s listening. Worry.
But underneath nearly all of it, if you go looking, you’ll find the same thing I found sitting in my office looking out that window.
Food noise is almost never about food. It’s a signal that something else needs attention.
For me, it was uncertainty. The facts were just facts — it was raining, the markets were down, the costs were up. Those things were true and they were hard and no amount of thinking was going to make them not true. But the facts weren’t what sent me to the kitchen. The thoughts about the facts did. This isn’t sustainable. We’ll never get it all done. Those thoughts stirred up a feeling I didn’t want to sit in, and the food was the fastest way I knew to quiet the feeling.
It was never about the food. It was about what was going on in my life, and more than that — what was going on in my head about what was going on in my life.
That distinction changed everything for me. Because you can’t out-eat rain. You can’t out-eat a market or a bill or a season that won’t cooperate. But you can learn to notice the swirl before you’re standing in the kitchen. You can get curious about it instead of quieting it. You can ask the question I never used to ask:
What is this really about?
Not “what do I want to eat.” Not “why can’t I control myself around food.” Just — what’s actually swirling right now, and is food going to touch it? Nine times out of ten, when I stopped and asked, the answer was no. The food was never aimed at the real thing. It was aimed at the feeling. And once I could see the feeling for what it was, I had something to actually work with — which is a whole lot more than a headphone ever gave me.
The noise still comes. It rained on me plenty of times after that, and it will again. But now, more often than not, I can hear it for what it is. My body trying to tell me something needs attention. A signal, not a craving.
So here’s what I want to leave you with.
The next time the noise gets loud — the next time you find yourself walking toward the kitchen and you know, somewhere underneath, that you’re not really hungry — you don’t have to white-knuckle it, and you don’t have to give in and feel bad about it either. You just have to get a little curious.
Take the headphones off for a second. Listen past the music.
Ask your body what it’s actually trying to tell you.
It’s been trying to tell you all along.
~Amy