A New Look at Food

A Journal piece, in Mel’s voice — this is personal experience, not general health advice.

There’s a particular kind of thought that arrives fully formed, uninvited, and completely convincing. Mine, for example, turns up in the shape of a donut.

It’s not hunger. I know that. It’s what I’ve come to call food noise, a background chatter that’s plagued me for decades, insistent enough to feel like instinct when it’s nothing of the sort. Go on, you deserve it, it’ll only take a second. For years I listened to that voice as if it knew what it was talking about. It doesn’t. It’s not instinct. It’s not memory. It’s noise, dressed up as both.

This is the article I’ve wanted to write since we started Gut & Grain, because before any of the science, before fibre targets or fermentation or polyphenols, there’s a much more basic question: where does food noise actually come from, and what do you do once you can hear it?

Where food noise comes from

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and what the research increasingly backs up: food noise isn’t really a willpower problem. It’s a nourishment problem. When your body has what it needs, protein, fibre, steady blood sugar, the craving tends to quiet down on its own, because there’s nothing left for it to be shouting about. I don’t think willpower is much of a factor at all once the craving itself has gone.

Protein and fibre slow digestion, help steady blood sugar, and trigger hormones like PYY and GLP-1 that signal genuine fullness to the brain, which is part of why meals built around them leave cravings with far less to work with. Foods that spike blood sugar quickly tend to crash it just as quickly, and that crash is what sends you looking for something sweet an hour later. In one trial, a diet higher in fibre, fat and protein reduced sweet cravings, and the reduction held even after the study ended, which suggests this isn’t about temporary distraction, it’s about the body’s demands actually changing.

That’s why I don’t really want a donut any more. It has nothing to give me: no protein, no fibre, nothing that steadies me, just a fast spike and an equally fast drop. I’m what I’d call a sensitive soul when it comes to this; that kind of food leaves me wired and flat rather than fed, and eating it now feels like working against myself rather than for myself, so my body has largely stopped asking for it. I know that’s not everyone’s experience, and I’d never want this to read as a warning about a specific food. It’s simply what happens once the noise has quietened enough for me to hear what my body actually wants, which usually isn’t the thing I used to reach for.

It’s a pattern, not a flaw

For most of the two decades I spent inside that loop, one donut had a habit of turning into two. The first one never delivered, so I’d eat a second, telling myself maybe that one would. Then the voice would change tone entirely: that was greedy. And that single thought, greedy, became the hinge the whole day swung on. Because once I’d decided I’d been greedy, I’d also quietly decided the day was ruined, and if the day’s ruined, what’s the point of the salad I’d planned for lunch? Might as well have the rest of what’s in the cupboard too. Here we go again.

I used to believe that spiral said something about me: greedy, weak, no self-control. It doesn’t, and I don’t think anyone should be labelled for it. What’s actually happening is mechanical, not moral. The blood sugar crash from the first donut is often what pulls you towards the second, and the drop that follows that one is what makes the whole day feel undone. Once a food rule feels broken, people tend to keep eating well beyond what their body needs, and the research on this pattern points the finger at the food and the rigid rule far more than it does at the person following it.

Reframing it that way was one of the more relieving moments of my adult life. It wasn’t a character flaw. It was a predictable pattern, sitting on top of a body that hadn’t been properly fed, and neither part needed a harsh label attached to it, just a bit of understanding.

Mindfulness is what lets you tell the two apart in the moment: is this a body that genuinely needs fuel, or a mind reaching for a story? Applied to eating, that’s as simple as pausing to notice whether you’re actually hungry, or reaching for something else entirely. That pause, small as it is, is often enough to break the link between the craving and the reflex to act on it.

The spreadsheet that taught me to see myself

Long before I had language for any of this, I built myself an Excel tracker and used it, properly, for two years. I genuinely don’t know how I stuck with it, because it wasn’t glamorous and nobody was checking up on me. But I did, and it changed things.

What I learned wasn’t really about calories. It was about patterns I’d never have spotted from inside my own head, including how often the food noise showed up on days I’d barely eaten properly. I cyclically gained five pounds and lost the same five pounds, most months, on repeat, like a tide going in and out and going nowhere. I could see exactly which foods I reached for and when. And, more uncomfortably, I could see where I’d been vague with myself, not lying exactly, just softening the entry, rounding down the portion, forgetting to log the second helping. Not deliberate. I didn’t want to face it, so some part of me simply didn’t write it down properly.

Facing that vagueness, in black and white, week after week, was more useful than any single piece of nutrition advice I’ve ever been given. It made me accountable to myself in a way that talking about it never had, and it’s how I first noticed that the loudest food noise almost always followed the days I’d under-fed myself, not the days I’d eaten well.

This lines up with what the research shows more broadly. In one well-known dietary trial, people who logged their food most consistently lost significantly more weight than those who logged rarely, and how consistently someone tracked mattered more than which particular diet they were following. The mechanism isn’t magic. It’s just seeing yourself clearly, which is far harder than it sounds and far more useful than it seems.

How much, how often

You don’t need two years of spreadsheets to get something from this. What helped me:

Feed the craving’s root, not the craving. A meal with real protein and fibre in it does more to quiet food noise than any amount of willpower.
A week is enough to start. Not for a verdict, just to notice one pattern you didn’t know was there.
A photo works as well as a written log. If a spreadsheet feels like too much, a quick photo of what’s actually on the plate catches the same honesty, and it’s harder to round down a picture.
Write down the second helping. The moment you’re tempted to round down or leave something out is usually the moment worth noting most.
Name the voice before you act on it. A few seconds of “is this hunger or is this the story I’m telling myself” is often enough to change what happens next.
One “mistake” is one mistake. It only becomes two, three, or a whole day when we decide it means something about who we are.
Start again now, not Monday. Trust yourself, forgive yourself, and pick up exactly where you left off. You don’t need a month beginning or a special date to give yourself permission; the next meal is always the next start.

Why we’re building this

I don’t have a button to push that fixes this for anyone, and I’d be wary of anyone who claimed they did. What I have is what worked for me: understanding where food noise actually comes from, a lot of reading and listening (Michael Mosley and the ZOE podcast both shaped how I think about this), and years of paying attention to my own patterns until I finally trusted myself again.

That’s the gap Gut & Grain sits in. Not medical advice, not a plan to follow blindly, just a place to understand the problem properly, so the next decision you make is actually yours, and not just the loudest voice in the room.

And if you take nothing else from this: trust yourself, forgive yourself, and start again. Not on Monday, not on the first of the month, not on some symbolic clean slate. You just pick up where you left off, at the next meal, the next decision, whenever you’re ready. Feed the noise properly and, more often than not, it goes quiet on its own, and so does the wanting. That’s the whole practice.