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.
Sometimes nothing was burning.
A little while ago, I put out an episode called The Fire Extinguisher. If you heard it, you know the picture. Nobody loves their fire extinguisher, and somebody in you grabbed it every time because something real was burning. And the question I left you with was, what was burning, honey? What did you actually need?
And someone wrote back to me a thoughtful, honest note, and she pushed back. Hello, Pami. I wanna tell you I love pushback. It keeps this work honest, and her question was so good that it became this episode. So this is from Pami. Here's what she asked, more or less: Can't someone just be physically hooked on the food itself, on the quality of it and the quantity of it? Does it really have to be some deep psychological thing? Because I'm not sure it does.
And my answer is yes, you're right. Sometimes nothing was burning.
Let me tell you why I mean that all the way down. There's a book I respect called The Pleasure Trap by Doug Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, and their idea goes like this. For nearly all of human history, food was scarce. Calories were hard to come by. So when an early human found something rich, honey, fat, a ripe fruit tree, the body said, "Yes, more, now." That wasn't greed. That was the program that kept our ancestors alive. Find the richest thing in your environment and eat as much of it as you can because the famine is always coming.
Now look at the environment we actually live in. Somebody took fat and sugar and salt and concentrated them past anything that ever grew on a tree or walked on four legs. Scientists have a name for this kind of thing, a supernormal stimulus, something engineered to be more intense than anything the original wiring was built for. And that ancient program sees it and says exactly what it was designed to say, "Yes, more, now."
Your mind knows there's no famine coming. Your mind has a full refrigerator and a grocery store down the street. But the body's accounting was written a very long time ago before the mind's. The body doesn't know the famine isn't coming, and this applies to any food. Food and not food.
Lisle described one more piece, and I think you'll recognize it. When the rich stuff becomes the normal stuff, it recalibrates the scale. An apple starts to taste like nothing. A plate of vegetables reads as punishment, so the pull feeds itself. Researchers are still working out exactly how this plays out in the brain, so I hold the details loosely. But the experience of it, most of us have lived it.
None of that needs a wound. None of it needs a trigger or a feeling or a story from your childhood. Sometimes a cookie is doing exactly what it was engineered to do to a body doing exactly what it evolved to do. And can I say what I love about that? It's the very thing I've been saying all along. You were never broken. You were biological. That's not a psychological claim. That's this claim.
So I'm not gonna argue out of the chemistry. Keep it. It's real. But here's what I notice after a lot of years watching my own reaches and walking with a lot of you through yours.
The pull is constant. The reaches aren't.
The same food sits on the same shelf at two in the afternoon and at nine at night, and it doesn't win every hour of every day. If it were only chemistry, it would win the same way all the time. It doesn't. So the question that interests me isn't which theory is true about me. It's smaller and closer than that. When the pull wins, where did that reach start?
And in my experience, there are at least four honest answers. All four are real, and none of them is a flaw in you.
Sometimes it's habit. The couch, the show, the hand in the bowl. No feeling at all, just a groove worn smooth by repetition. You sit down, your hand goes. Habit doesn't answer to insight. It answers to environment. You don't have to understand a groove to change it. You move the bowl. You sit in a different chair. You take a different way home that doesn't pass the drive-thru.
Sometimes it's physiological. You're underslept. You barely ate earlier in the day. It's been a long stretch without real fuel. A body out of rhythm will shout for the fastest fuel it knows, and it is not being dramatic. It's being accurate. No amount of soul-searching fixes what a nap and a real lunch fix.
Sometimes it's a self-care deficit, a whole day with nothing pleasant in it, no rest, no beauty, no company, nothing that was just for you. And at the end of that day, the richest thing in the kitchen is the only care on offer anywhere in the house. That's not weakness. That's a shelf with only one thing on it. Remember the question from the book, what if a treat actually treated you well? A deficit night needs care, real care, not more discipline.
And sometimes it's an alarm, the fire extinguisher. Something was burning, the loneliness at nine o'clock, the too-much day, the thing nobody's asked you about in months. Sarah Peyton calls it alarmed aloneness. That's the night of "What was burning, honey?"
Different nights, different origins, and each one answers to different help. A habit needs a new groove. Physiology needs food and sleep. A deficit needs care. An alarm needs company.
And here's where so many of us get tangled. We hand every reach the same answer. If your one tool is try harder, you'll throw it at all four, and it won't fit any of them. And if your one tool is what was burning, you might ask it on a habit night, come up empty, and decide you're doing the inquiry wrong. You're not doing it wrong. It was just the wrong question for that night.
So here's the practice, and it's a gentle one. When you think of it, and it's fine if it's afterward, standing in the kitchen with the evidence still on the counter, just ask, "Which one was this? Habit, body, deficit, alarm?" No grading, no verdict. You're not building a case against yourself. You're collecting data the way a good detective does. And after a few weeks of noticing, most people start to see their own map. Oh, my afternoons are body. My evenings are alarm. My weekends are habit. And now you know where to aim your help.
One more thing because it ties the whole picture together. The pull and the alarm aren't rivals. They multiply. Picture the pull of that engineered food as a hum that's always there at about the same volume. What the hard stuff does, the depletion, the aloneness, the too-much day, is lower the price of giving in. The same brownie pulls just as hard on a calm Tuesday afternoon as it does on the night the house went quiet, but it wins at nine o'clock, not because the brownie got stronger, because you had less left to meet it with. That's not your character giving out. That's a nervous system that carried a full day.
So you don't have to pick a theory of yourself to be free. You don't have to decide whether you're a chemistry person or a feelings person. You get to keep every one of your facts. The engineering is real. The genes are real. The pull is real. And you get to get curious about the hours when the pull wins and the hours when it doesn't. That's where the information lives. That's where the help can actually land.
And to the person who wrote to me, thank you. You made this room better by being honest in it.
You were never broken. You were biological. And some nights, that's the whole story.
I wanna say one more thing before we go. Pami was not talking about biological or bioengineered substances. Pami was talking about whole foods, and that's a podcast for another day. Hope this made sense to you.
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.
