Food Noise, Stimulant Meds, and Ozempic Abuse The Problem With Appetite Suppression

When I was 25 years old, there was a show on TV called “Desperate Housewives.”

At that time, my ED was still going very strong and I lived in a chronic state of restricting and bingeing. Most of the restriction was mental because the binges were so frequent and brutal, but I also dabbled in the seasonal attempt at the Atkins diet and I also remember Slim-Fasting my way to my friends’ bridal showers and engagement parties.

One Sunday night, back when you had to catch TV shows in real time, I watched an episode of Desperate Housewives where Lynette (played by Felicity Huffman) was trying to be the perfect Mom (a concept I had no relationship with yet). In order to stay awake, energized, and productive, she started abusing a prescription drug used to help people with ADHD and consequently lost weight. The show was trying to highlight the pitfalls of such drug abuse but of course, I just used it aspirationally.

I recognize that in retelling this story, I am potentially propagating the same phenomenon whereby the cautionary tale becomes the inspiration for the toxic behavior it intended to prevent. But the risk here is low, because everyone knows that there is a new medication in town originally developed for a condition entirely unrelated to its current purpose. I don’t even have to say the name.

My Adderall was today’s Ozempic. It was the illicit shortcut to regulating our appetites and reducing the “food noise.”

NOTE: I will admit that I am not 100% against the use of Ozempic and there are situations where I understand and respect why people take it. I am not black and white on this issue.

But it IS being abused. I have clients whose doctors’ have handed out prescriptions of the drug thoughtlessly and indiscriminately. I know women in my personal life taking the drug who are already thin, but want to be thinner. I have a new client who became extremely sick from it a few months back, and I personally know someone who took it and the weight is coming back on. So this is nuanced.

But back to the story.

I made an appointment with my doctor and guess what? He prescribed me this medication. I do not have ADHD.

And that’s how I started abusing amphetamines.

Allow me to pause for a moment because this was a very, very monumental period of my life up until then. I had been binge eating for eight years — it had ruined most of my college experience and was constantly threatening my jobs and relationships. I was drowning in food chaos and didn’t know how to stop it. All I could think about was food — what I was allowed to eat versus what I wanted to eat, what I ate yesterday, what I should eat tomorrow. My desire for food was always, always there, running like white noise in the background. There was no such thing as being around food and not feeling pulled towards it.

And when I started taking this drug, all of that stopped.

Like, poof.

I woke up in the morning and — well, wait. I actually started waking up before the sunrise after a while because my entire sleep schedule got turned on its head. When you take Adderall but don’t actually have ADHD, instead of regulating you, it makes you wired and manic.

So I would wake up at the crack of dawn, pop a pill, and start writing emails for hours and watch the news and drink coffee (oh my gosh that combination made my heart skip beats! I mean that literally) and become frantic with momentum, just me plowing through to-do after to-do, so happy I was to be alive!

And food?

I didn’t even think about it! I would eat breakfast sometimes, but not always finish. I don’t remember if I ate lunch; probably, but not compulsively. The dynamic of my afternoons shifted because I wasn’t coming home avoiding or glued to the kitchen; I was able to think about other things and actually live the life I was meant to live without food running the show.

I had found the magic bullet.

I couldn’t believe it.

Thank you, Felicity Huffman!! Thank you for giving me my life back!!

I felt like…I felt like Oprah had just told me YOU WIN A CARRRRR!!!, and everything else in her holiday giveaway!! (I include Oprah here very intentionally.)

But better.

Better.

This freedom from food gave me a new lease on life. Losing weight came close, but honestly it was the freedom that made me the happiest. Like the shackles had been dropped, I’d cracked the code.

This one beautiful little pill. I can still see it in my hand. That tiny thing held so much magic.

Ah, but of course you know that the story couldn’t have ended herebecause it would still be another fifteen years before I recovered, and I hadn’t even developed orthorexia yet.

So what happened?

I’m not sure how long this went on. Three months? Six? I don’t know. It was less than a year. Somewhere along the line, I started to notice that I was thinking about food again.

Must’ve been a bad batch.

I upped the coffee. That boost should cover it.

But no, no.

It was still happening.

My pants weren’t as loose.

I got my doctor to increase the dose.

Ah! It worked!

THANK GOD. That was close.

Okay, back to manic mornings and hardly sleeping at night, but by God at least I didn’t care about Sunday bagels.

For a while.

The hunger started to creep back in.

I might have binged once or twice. Flukes, right?

Must be.

But it wasn’t feeling as easy. I wasn’t getting the same rush, my indifference to food wasn’t exactly the same…

My weight went up, slowly.

NO!

NO!

I can’t express to you the desperation.

I had gotten away! I had gotten away! What was happening to me?

I switched to Extended Release. I upped the dose again. I switched back to regular capsules and took them up to three times per day.

But dear reader (I’ve always wanted to say that) — I knew I was losing.

The binges returned. I was always able to get through the morning when the first dose hit my stomach after a night off, but after 1 or 2pm, everything broke down.

I knew I couldn’t just keep upping the dose because my heart had started to skip beats regularly and I felt…off.

For many months after that, I stayed on the drug. I used it because I couldn’t bear not to, and because I still coveted the few hours of the morning when I’d get high off of it and not think so much about food. But I knew.

It wasn’t working anymore.

My body had said: enough.

And went back to being in charge.

I am telling you this story because EVERY SINGLE TIME I hear someone say that this drug “gets rid of the food noise,” I react.

I know what that’s like. I know what a miracle that feels like. And I know it makes you believe, LIKE REALLY MAKES YOU BELIEVE, that the food noise is an unfortunate glitch in your biochemistry that is creating this urge to eat and it has nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with diet culture. Nothing to do with restriction.

I know that drugs can override systems and temporarily take over while your urges to eat slide away. I don’t know if there is a permanent way to do this — I just know there are temporary ones. Even diets have been able to do that for me on a lesser scale, like when I was fasting or did Keto. For a while, you ride the wave of the shifting biochemistry.

But it’s only, only been temporary.

And here’s what I think that is:

1. Because none of these magic bullets heal your relationship with food and/or your body image.

2. Because of #1, we capitalize on the decrease in appetite and rushheadfirst into weight loss, freaking out our body and practically forcing it to rebel in time.

3. Because if you are trying to bring your body into a weight range that is lower than it wants to be, it will simply find another way to get there by acclimating to the dose, increasing hunger cues, or slowing metabolism.

What’s interesting is that I don’t deal with “food noise” now, but I didn’t take any magic bullets. I eat enough, regularly enough, and in variety. When I did that for long enough, my food noise went away too.

And it’s always that simple because for some people, food noise exists due to trauma, emotional dysregulation, and/or neurodivergence. And imbalanced blood sugars may absolutely play a role in food noise, especially for people with insulin sensitivity, which is when this medication seems to work best.

But for many people, the food noise is not about that.

Food noise is often about controlling one’s food to degrees that have become so normalized that we don’t even see it. Or maybe we do see it, but we persist to control it because society hasn’t made it safe to stop.

Unfortunately, there are no drugs for that.

I feel really compelled to speak up on this topic because while some people may have success on these drugs, I do not believe that food noise is always the villain-living-inside that it’s been made out to be.

I think much of the time, food noise is restriction.

By fawning to this drug, we are neglecting to name the damage that diet culture has done to our relationships with food.

And I don’t want diet culture getting away with it.

Food noise is often man-made.