This thread has been a safe and supportive place for people to share. I certainly hope that it can remain that way.

Not everyone is at the place where they can connect the dots and see how much of their adult behavior is rooted back in childhood. Not just about eating but other behaviors as well, positive and negative. Some people just can't see it, others just don't want to see it, yet it is a psychological fact. Psychology is a science, whether we like it or not.

Not everyone has a fear of being thin or views fat as protection either. However what I believe we can see in everyone's post is an unhealthy acting out with food at different times in our lives. What I see in everyone's post in one way or another are attempts to cope with life and emotions through food. Weight gain or weight loss is only a symptom, not the problem or solution itself. The question is, then where is the problem rooted?
Some care about that answer, others only want to be thin. I believe for those who want to get thin and STAY thin we have to know. I also believe knowing what is at the root of my problem I will gain better understanding of how NOT to sabatoge myself.

Some things we humans are just born with, like a fear of falling for example. Other things like feelings of deprivation, laziness, shame, etc. are learned behaviors which means something happened to set them in place. We can be reacting to things that aren't even happening anymore, they simply happened years ago. Ironically, we can create situations to recreate those feelings for the simple reason they are familiar to us, even though harmful or painful.

I finally connected the dots when it came to weighing myself. I was doing it rather compulsively and had to stop. Why was I doing it? For me, I'm a perfectionist which means I judge myself harshly. When I don't want to hear that perfectionist nagging me in my head I will flip into procrastinating. If I do nothing, I can't be judged, right? Flip sides of the same coin, not wanting to be judged even by me. Without realizing it at first I was using that scale as a means of deciding how perfectly I was doing when it came to my weight. If it was up, I was a failure and the shame statements would rush through my head. Which of course can easily lead to eating to soothe myself, then shame sets in doing that. So now I put the scale away and only step on it one day a week. I can't deny the psychological fact that people who live with perfectionism/procrastination as adults felt judged as children. As if love was measured depending on performance.