'Food Noise' and the Science of Interoceptive Awareness
Why we must learn to nourish ourselves when body signals go silent.
Posted May 27, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
When working with teens who have eating disorders, we inevitably end up talking about "interoceptive awareness" within the first few therapy sessions. It sounds complicated, but it simply means the ability to feel and understand what is happening inside your own body, like hunger, exhaustion, or even a racing heartbeat. It’s what tells you if you are tired, cold, in pain, or hungry.
Interoceptive Awareness and Eating Disorders
Having poor or altered interoceptive awareness is incredibly common in eating disorders, particularly anorexia. It creates a fascinating and lethal paradox: It’s the exact trait that often allows these patients to push through discomfort and excel in school, sports, and work, but it’s also the very thing that causes them to fall deeper into their eating disorder .
Many patients with anorexia are also excellent students and star athletes, and it turns out that having muted body signals actually helps them excel in those areas. Patients have told me about their ability to study right through exhaustion; while their classmates are falling asleep, they can keep cramming for finals. Other patients who are competitive athletes have shared how they can play through intense pain and discomfort, pushing their bodies far past what others can tolerate.
But there’s a dangerous catch: These same patients who can ignore fatigue or pain also can’t hear their body’s signals for hunger.
Because their hunger cues are incredibly quiet or entirely missing, eating becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. Even when their bodies are severely malnourished and logically should be starving, they feel completely full.
People are often baffled by anorexia and ask, "Why don’t they just eat?" For many patients, this broken internal compass is a huge part of the answer. They aren't eating because they genuinely don’t feel hungry.
Food Noise and GLP-1 Medications
While interoceptive awareness has never become a cultural buzzword, I’d argue that its cousin has: food noise. One of the commonly touted benefits of GLP-1s is “the elimination of food noise.” For some, this noise may take the form of obsessions or cravings for rewards. For others, this noise may be hunger, a signal from their body. GLP-1s may be altering the body’s interoceptive awareness, disrupting signals, and weakening the brain-body communication.
When GLP-1 medications first became popular, the conversation was mostly about the physical changes, both the benefits and the side effects. Over time, people began opening up about the mental shifts, celebrating how the drugs successfully quieted "food noise." But recently, a new mental challenge has emerged, and it comes down to a total muting of the body's internal signals. Patients are describing an overall silencing of other vital human cues, including sexual arousal, physical pain, and the literal feeling of pleasure.
To be absolutely clear: This is not about demonizing GLP-1 medications. For many, these drugs are vital, life-changing medical tools. But as clinicians, we have to look at the full picture. Even when a medication is doing exactly what it was designed to do, it can still introduce unexpected psychological challenges.
If we look at "food noise" as just another way of describing the body's internal signals, then our advice for people on GLP-1s is exactly the same as the guidance we give patients recovering from anorexia: you have to learn how to eat even when you don’t feel physical hunger. This means eating "by the clock": having lunch simply because it's noon, not because your stomach is growling. For patients with anorexia, and for some people on GLP-1s, if they wait around until they actually feel hungry, they will never eat enough nutrition to keep their bodies healthy.
Whether we are talking about a teenager fighting anorexia or an adult finding health success on a GLP-1, the core lesson is the same: We cannot treat our body’s natural signals as a glitch to be silenced.
When the cultural conversation praises the complete elimination of "food noise," it overlooks a complex reality. Silencing the body doesn't automatically fix our relationship with it. When we lose the ability to hear hunger, we have to be vigilant about not losing our connection to other physical cues.
True health is about learning to nourish ourselves even when the signals are quiet, and building a relationship with our bodies grounded in mindful care rather than total control.
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Kooij K.L., Koster D.Ij, Eeltink E., Luijendijk M., Drost L., Ducrocq F., Adan R.A.H. GLP-1 receptor agonist semaglutide reduces appetite while increasing dopamine reward signaling. Neuroscience Applied. 2024;3 doi: 10.1016/j.nsa.2023.103925.
Klausen, M. K., et al. (2022). "Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists reduce alcohol craving and consumption: Mechanisms and clinical implications." Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience , 16, 994511.
Phillipou, A., Rossell, S. L., Castle, D. J., & Gurvich, C. (2022). Interoceptive awareness in anorexia nervosa. Journal of Psychiatric Research , 148 , 84–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2022.01.051
Cook, G. (2026). Quieting "food noise": How GLP-1s and mindfulness rewire the default mode network (DMN) and reward circuits. Cureus , 18 (1), e51432. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.51432
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Erin Parks, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and co-founder of Equip, a virtual eating disorder program that delivers evidence-based treatment for lasting recovery.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.