The Silence I Didn’t Know I Was Missing

I read an article in the New York Times recently about GLP-1 drugs, the weight loss medications that have taken medicine by storm. The researchers were astonished by something they hadn’t even thought to look for. The people taking these drugs were telling them something unexpected: that they had experienced food noise their whole lives, and they didn’t know how to get rid of it. And suddenly, on these drugs, it was gone.

The researchers wrote about it like a discovery. Like magic.
I read that and I thought: I know exactly what they’re talking about. I have known it for more than fifty years.

Food noise started for me in my teens. That constant internal hum, the pull toward food that has nothing to do with hunger. The way certain foods call to you even when you’re not hungry, even when you don’t want to want them. Cookies. Candy. Fried food. Chocolate. Cake. The noise.

I am 76 years old. I have been managing that noise for more than half a century.

Here is what I have learned, through decades of living in my own body and years of working with others in theirs: the noise is not a character flaw. It is not weakness. It is not lack of willpower. It is a biological response to a specific environmental trigger. And for me, and I suspect for many of us, that trigger is processed food and sugar.

When they are completely gone from my diet, the food noise goes silent. Not quieter. Silent.
When they sneak back in, accidentally, even in small amounts, the noise comes roaring back. Every time. Without fail.

I have been in Setúbal, Portugal for twelve days.

I have not been trying to lose weight, just eating abundantly. Oatmeal with fresh fruit for breakfast, market vegetables in every color, whole grain bread from the Mercado do Livramento (the municipal market, five minutes from my apartment), fresh sea bass grilled and served with small potatoes, feijoada brasileira (a hearty bean stew) on a rainy afternoon at a café on the Praça do Bocage (the poet’s square). At every restaurant I have walked in and ordered directly from the menu without asking for anything to be removed or modified. Real food. Just real food.

This morning I got on the scale. In twelve days I have lost ten pounds.
I have not been trying. I have just been eating the food that is here.

I want to be precise about what those ten pounds are. They are not primarily fat. They are fluid, the extra water my body has been holding, the water that makes it harder for my heart to pump. I have atrial fibrillation, which is the primary cause of my heart failure. My heart already works harder than it should. What I may be watching, in real time on a scale in a Portuguese apartment, is my heart working less hard. Less inflammatory load. Less fluid backup. Easier pumping.
I resolved years of lymphedema through diet and lifestyle. I no longer need the daily pump sessions that used to be required to move fluid off my body. I no longer wear compression stockings. That has been true for about two years, maintained through vigilance about what I eat.

Here, the vigilance is unnecessary. The environment does the work.

And there is one more change I have noticed that I will say plainly, because it matters and because too many people living with chronic illness are told it is simply something to manage: my urinary incontinence is almost completely controlled here. Fluid retention and incontinence are connected, when the body holds less inflammatory fluid overall, the bladder is less irritated and less urgent. In Portugal, eating and living this way, that symptom has nearly disappeared. I did not expect this. I am documenting it because it is real, and because it may matter to someone reading this.

Not everyone will lose ten pounds in twelve days. This pace will slow; fluid loss comes quickly when the trigger is removed. Fat loss is slower and steadier. But the direction matters more than the pace. And the direction is unmistakable.

Here in Portugal, eating well is not an act of vigilance. It is just Tuesday.

The default food environment here does not trigger the noise. I don’t walk past displays of processed food engineered to activate craving. The bread at the market has four ingredients. The yogurt has no additives or thickeners. It’s thin because that’s what real yogurt actually is. The fish was swimming yesterday.

I have no food noise. No desire for fried food, cookies, candy, cake, chocolate. None. Give me a good tomato any day. Give me a fresh apple from the fruit market around the corner.

But I know, from many years of living in this body, that if I accidentally eat something processed, something with hidden sugar, the noise will come roaring back. It always does.

The researchers behind the GLP-1 study are astonished by their discovery. I understand why. In America, food noise is so universal, so normalized, that we have stopped noticing it as something separate from ourselves. We think it’s just who we are. Hungry people. People with no willpower. People who can’t be trusted around a dessert table.

What if it isn’t who we are? What if it’s what we’re eating?

Nobody can make money off this discovery. There is no drug to sell, no supplement, no program subscription that delivers a food environment built around real food. The only way this ever gets communicated is person to person, story to story.

A word about what I can and cannot say in different contexts. In my work as a CDC Diabetes Prevention Program facilitator, I work within a structured curriculum that does not prescribe specific diets; instead we support participants in making their own informed choices. That constraint is appropriate there, and I honor it. Here, in Small Steps Lasting Change, I speak honestly about what I have learned in my own body over 76 years. And what I have learned is this: for some of us, moderation is not the mechanism. Removal is. The noise does not get quieter when you eat less of the thing that feeds it. It goes quiet when the thing is gone.
That is my story. I am still figuring out how to tell all of it.

But first I have to figure out how to live in this lovely country, in this food environment that gives my body what it needs without effort or vigilance.
I think I’m doing that.
One step at a time.

We are in this together,
 
🌀 Nora

Read the article discussed in this post at The Day the Food Noise Died

This post is part of a series of essays written from Setúbal, Portugal and was written on May 14, 2026. Read our other posts in The Portugal Series.

This post is about Nourish, one of the four Pillars of Small Steps Lasting Change. It looks at how Aligning Values carried the real weight: fifty years of trusting what the body actually shows, over what conventional advice says should work. Learn more about Nourish and The Patterns.
Read more of our posts about Nourish and The Patterns.