When Control Over Food Starts Controlling You
How therapy can help quiet food noise and restore freedom.
You might have noticed that thoughts about food feel compulsive and impossible to quiet. Not just at mealtimes. All day, removing you from the present and sucking the joy out of a moment that was supposed to be enjoyable. What you ate. What you're going to eat. What you shouldn't have. What that means about you. It runs in the background like a second operating system, consuming resources you'd rather spend elsewhere.
There's a term for this now, food noise, but naming it doesn't make it less relentless. If anything, having language for it just makes clearer how much of your mental life it's occupied.
You probably also have a list of reasons why you haven't done anything about it yet. You don't know if what you're dealing with is "bad enough" to take seriously. Maybe getting help feels like it would make your disordered eating feel like proof that something is actually wrong with you rather than just a thing you do sometimes. Maybe you've managed this long, so part of you suspects that you should be able to keep managing. Maybe it’s the fear that getting better means giving up the one thing that felt like it was keeping you safe. That recovery means losing control of your body, becoming someone you don't recognize, and not fitting into a world that has very loud opinions about what bodies are supposed to look like. While that fear is real, and deeply understandable in the culture we live in, what may have begun as an attempt to create control can, over time, do the opposite—constricting your life, overtaking your thoughts, and leaving you feeling less free, not more.
What I can tell you is this: the food noise—the thoughts that have taken up permanent residence in your head, crowding out everything else—is not a life sentence. It's possible to get your mind back. Not through more willpower or stricter rules, but by understanding what the noise has actually been trying to do, and finding other ways to do it. That's what the work is for.
Why willpower isn't the point
Eating disorders are often treated, in the popular imagination, as a problem of motivation or discipline. You know what the "right" thing is; you just need to do it. This framing is not only unhelpful; it's backwards.
The behaviors that characterize eating disorders don't persist because people lack the desire to change. They persist because they're doing something. Restricting, binging, purging, controlling—these are strategies. They manage anxiety, create a sense of order in the midst of chaos, offer a shortcut to belonging in a culture that has very clear opinions about which bodies are acceptable, or numb experiences that are otherwise unbearable.
The behavior isn't the problem. It's the solution your system found before it had better ones.
This is why "just eat" (or "just stop") lands with such a hollow thud. It asks someone to dismantle a coping mechanism without addressing why they needed it in the first place. Meaningful recovery doesn't bypass the why. It goes straight into it.
What therapy actually looks like
In our work together, we don't start by negotiating behaviors. We start by getting curious about them. What does restriction feel like at the moment it happens: not morally, not in retrospect, but in the body, in real time? What does it give you? What would happen if it weren't available to you?
This isn't a trick. It's a genuine inquiry. Because the part of you that reaches for these strategies isn't your enemy. It developed for a reason, usually a good one given what was available at the time. Working psychodynamically means tracing those reasons—understanding the history that made these patterns necessary—rather than simply labeling them as symptoms to be eliminated.
Alongside that, we draw on Internal Family Systems (IFS), which offers a way of understanding the different "parts" of you that seem to be in conflict. The part that wants to recover. The part that's terrified of what recovery means. The part that uses food to manage feelings it doesn't have another language for. These parts aren't pathological—they're all trying to help. IFS helps you build a relationship with them rather than a war against them.
If you're not sure whether this is for you
You don't have to have a diagnosis. You don't have to be in crisis. You don't have to be ready to give everything up before you make the call. You just have to be tired enough of the way things are to be a little curious about whether they could be different.
That's enough to start.
We see individuals in my Manhattan office and remotely. You can sign up for a consultation here.. You can reach out through the contact form, or just send an email—no intake paperwork required to have a first free conversation.
