You were never broken. You were biological. I'm Sonja Irina Johansen, and for decades, I believed my struggle with food was a character flaw, until I learned the science that said otherwise. This is Turn Down the Noise, the show about why we really reach for food and the gentler way through. Keep your plan. Keep your practitioner. Keep your medication. This is company, and not instead.
...called The Fire Extinguisher, and I just wanna give mad props to you, Pami, although I'm not gonna share your name unless you want me to. But this came to me after some exchanges with you, and I just really honor and appreciate you.
There's a sentence I hear more often than almost any other. It comes in different clothes, but it's always the same sentence underneath.
Food was never my friend.
Sometimes it comes with a little heat behind it because somewhere along the way, somebody told that person the opposite. Some coach, some book, maybe even me, said, "Food became your comfort. Food became your friend." And they sat there thinking, "No. No, it didn't. You don't understand. The food never made me happy. It never filled a need. It never gave me one good day. For me, it's been torture."
If that's you, if you've ever heard the food was your comfort language and felt yourself pull away from it, felt misunderstood by it, this episode is for you because I want to say something to you directly, and I want to take my time saying it.
First, I believe you completely. I'm not going to argue with your experience because your experience is the truest data you have. If food never comforted you, if it only ever brought shame and mess and misery, I take that at face value. You're not doing recovery wrong because the food was my friend story doesn't fit you. The story doesn't fit you because it was never your story.
So hear me clearly. I'm not asking you to make friends with food. I'm not asking you to find the hidden gift in a brownie. I'm not even asking you to stop seeing food as a struggle. You get to keep every single one of your facts because the thing I'm pointing at, the thing this whole season of work is pointing at, was never the food.
It's the reach.
Let me give you a picture. Think of a fire extinguisher. Nobody loves their fire extinguisher. Nobody has ever hung one on the wall and thought, "There's my dear companion." It has never made one single person happy. The foam is awful. The mess is worse. If you've ever actually used one, you know. You don't feel comforted afterward. You feel shaken, and you're standing in a ruined kitchen.
But here's the thing. When the kitchen caught fire, somebody in you grabbed it every time without fail. Not because the extinguisher was wonderful, but because something real was burning. Boredom that felt like it could swallow a whole evening. Loneliness that showed up at nine o'clock at night when the house went quiet. Overwhelm. Grief that had nowhere to go. A day that was simply too much with no one to hand any of it to.
The extinguisher was never the point. The grabbing was. And I want you to really let that land because it changes where we aim. For years, maybe decades, you've been aiming at the extinguisher, hiding it, hating it, making rules about it, promising yourself this is the last time you'll touch it, and none of that ever answered the actual question, which is, why does the kitchen keep catching fire?
Now, who is the one who reached? That grabbing is a part of you, a fast, loyal, ancient part of you that refused to let you burn alone. And I choose that word carefully, alone, because that's almost always what's underneath. Sarah Peyton has this phrase I love, alarmed aloneness. The nervous system in distress with no one there. That's the alarm. That's what was going off in the kitchen.
And when that alarm sounds, the body doesn't call a committee meeting. It doesn't weigh options. It grabs the fastest tool that has ever worked, even a little, even once. The tool that was always on the shelf, always legal, always open at nine o'clock at night, never talked back, never needed anything from you first. For so many of us, that tool was food. Not because food was good at the job, because food was there. The reaching part of you used the only tool it had, the fastest way it knew how.
That part of you was never your enemy. It wasn't torturing you. It was answering an alarm.
So here's where it gets tender, because most of us didn't just struggle with food. We put someone on trial for it. There's been a courtroom running in your head, maybe for years, and the defendant is the one who reached. Every time she grabbed the extinguisher, the prosecution stood up. Again? Really? After all your promises, what's wrong with you? We called it discipline. We called it being serious about our health, but it was a prosecution, and the person on trial was a part of you that was trying to keep you from burning alone.
And here's the cruelest piece of it, the irony we talk about so often on this show, the prosecution makes the fires worse, because what does all that self-attack create? More distress, more aloneness. Now you're not just overwhelmed, you're overwhelmed and ashamed and alone with it. The alarm gets louder, and when the alarm gets louder, what happens? The loyal part reaches for the shelf, faster this time, because things are worse.
You see the loop. The fight against the reacher is fuel for the fire. We were never going to prosecute our way to peace.
So what do we do instead? And I wanna be careful here, because this is where people expect me to say, "Love your body, love your food, love it all." No, that's not it. Remember, you keep your facts. Food is a struggle. Fine. Food never made you happy. Fine. Keep them. The only thing I'm asking you to put down is the gavel, because the moment we stop fighting the one who reached, the moment she's no longer a defendant, we finally get to ask her the only question that changes anything.
What was burning, honey? What did you actually need?
Ask it gently. Ask it after the fact if that's the only time you can. Standing in the messy kitchen, foam on the floor, ask it even then, especially then. What was burning? Was it the loneliness? The too-muchness of the day? The thing you've been carrying that no one has asked about in months?
Sometimes the answer comes right away. Sometimes it takes weeks of asking before the part of you that's been on trial believes it's safe to answer. That's all right. She's been cross-examined for a long time. She's allowed to be slow to trust the new tone in the room.
And this is why we do this work in company, not in hiding, because the real answer to alarmed aloneness isn't a better tool on the shelf. It's fewer fires, and the fires get smaller when the load is shared. James Coan's research on what he calls social baseline theory keeps showing us the same beautiful thing. The brain registers burdens as lighter when someone is with us. The hill is literally easier to climb with a hand to hold. The kitchen catches fire less often in a house where you're not alone.
So that's the work of this season, not making food your friend. I will never ask you for that. Not pretending the struggle wasn't real. Just this, making you not your enemy, retiring the prosecutor, thanking the one who reached, not for the mess, but for the loyalty, and then sitting down next to her and asking what was burning.
You were never broken. You were biological. There was an alarm, and there was a part of you that answered it the only way it could, and both of those things makes perfect sense. Now, together, slowly, we get to answer the alarm differently.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening with me.
Thanks for walking with me today. Everything I make lives at transformwithsonja.com. Until next time, with love and light, Sonja.
