As party invitations fill our calendars and chocolate ads take over our screens during the holiday season, temptations to indulge can feel omnipresent and all-powerful. But this year a neologism is taking over social media that puts a name to this kind of distraction: "food noise."

This trendy term could transform the way people see weight loss, turning what for decades has been an internal battle of willpower into an external problem with biological and psychological roots that scientists are only beginning to understand.

Contributing to this shift is the widespread adoption of weight loss drugs like Ozempic. Given the way these drugs work, it's not surprising that they quiet thoughts about food: they imitate the hormone GLP-1, which makes people feel full, in addition to slowing the emptying of the stomach and increasing insulin production to control blood sugar. As a result, many users report fewer urges to eat something sugary, fast. They fixate on food less, and so they're less vulnerable near the dessert table.

But the reasons people have grasped onto the term "food noise" to describe what was once considered a mere test of willpower are more complex. Dr. Travis Masterson and Daisuke Hayashi at Penn State University published the first study on food noise in the journal Nutrients last year, recommending that medical professionals adopt the term to describe an increased susceptibility to eating cues, "leading to food-related intrusive thoughts and maladaptive eating behaviors."

While responding to cues to eat is normal -- in evolutionary terms, those who find food are more likely to survive and pass on their genes -- people who struggle with food noise experience a state "where it has become problematic and maybe difficult to overcome those feelings and thoughts," Masterson said.

Hayashi, who is conducting research into the viral spread of the term on TikTok, said "food noise" took off last year, around the time when GLP-1 drugs were beginning to be prescribed more widely after many versions were approved by the FDA for weight loss in 2021.

While the name itself is new, "food noise" correlates with nutrition scientists' ongoing research into "food cue reactivity," which looks at the way people respond, mentally and physically, to food. For those experiencing food noise, that means getting excited or distracted by the thought of food and obsessing about the next meal or snack. While taking a GLP-1 drug, "people say they were surprised to find out that constantly thinking about food and obsessing about food was not 'normal,'" Hayashi said.

This approach to eating and overeating is a massive departure from the usual weight loss script. Dieting or abstaining from overeating has long been considered a task for the individual will. If you give in to a frosted sugar cookie or three, you've failed because you're weak.

The white-knuckle approach is at its least effective when it comes to weight loss, according to Roy Baumeister, a psychologist and leading researcher on -- and defender of -- willpower. In his 2011 book on the topic with John Tierney, he writes, "Never equate being overweight with having weak willpower." Willpower is not best understood as a mystical inner power for overcoming vice. It's physical and biological, like a muscle that gets worn out through use. Ironically, the mental effort required to resist a slice of chocolate cake drains the brain of the glucose -- sugar -- it needs to make good eating decisions, and makes you crave... more sugar.

Baumeister offers some personal solutions for strength training in self-control: don't try more than one behavior change at a time, pre-commit by telling yourself that you won't have dessert at the office party before you walk in, and work to form habits that make healthy eating automatic so that willpower only has to be called in for emergencies.

But he admits that these personal hacks have their limits. Food noise and the biological effects of GLP-1 drugs show that external factors play a large part in the way people respond to food.

"Historically, controlling one's food intake has really been understood by society as a matter of willpower," Hayashi said. "If you are a person who overindulges, people might say you have low willpower. It's an error to believe that problems with food are a matter of willpower." Masterson and Hayashi point to advertising, genetics, emotions, stress levels, social settings, and the ability to pay for pricier healthy food as just a few factors that affect how likely someone is to overindulge, even against their will. "All of this acts in synergy to cause the rise in obesity," Hayashi concluded.

Healthy eating advocates have pushed for system-wide regulatory solutions to some of these external problems. One prominent advocate is the nominee for the secretary of the Health and Human Services department, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His "make America healthy again" program promises to remove sugary drinks and food with additives from school lunches, cut agriculture subsidies that make high fructose corn syrup and refined wheat flour artificially cheap, and remove questionable chemicals from processed foods popular with children.

Some of these sweeping goals are admirable, some impractical. Similar efforts have been tried in places like the U.K., where a recent attempt to limit the sale and advertising of "HFSS" ("high in fat, sugar, or salt") foods met with mixed results as large food companies simply reformulated their products and tweaked their marketing campaigns. Regulatory attempts like these reveal that salutary intentions and the realities of the market do not always align, and cast into doubt the feasibility of wholesale revolution in a food supply dependent on unhealthy food. But more importantly, they don't get to the root of Americans' problems with weight.

While avoiding weight gain has long been considered a matter of personal willpower alone, the rise of food noise shows that New Year's resolutions are never enough: first we have more to learn about how eating, and overeating, really work.

Hannah Rowan is managing editor of Modern Age magazine and a 2024-25 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.