geocolon, this is a great question and each of us finding our own answers is, I think, crucial to maintaining loss and staying with our WOE in the long term

I relate to what you said in your post. I was a fat kid and when I first lost weight, around age 19, I was pretty horrified by how men suddenly treated me--like a piece of meat--so I understand that sense of feeling safer in an overcoat of fat. I regained some weight after a professor molested me--no big mystery there, eh? The only cure for this fear is my slow (and recent) recognition that I can pick and choose my friends, that I can say no, that I can see shallow or crass or aggressive behavior on a man's part as a great big red flag saying, "stay away from this person." So I'm seeing both their actions and my responses more as a gift than a threat. Whooda thunk?

I've come to believe that metabolism is as important as psychololgy, and that there may be no deep dark reasons for getting fat beyond, "we ate like everyone around us and this is what happened"--at least for some of us.

I'm not one of those folks, though. I started gaining weight at age 5 or 6 and I think the reasons were two, both associated with my mother going to work for 50-60 hour weeks. For one thing, that left me alone with a 12 year old violent sibling who hit me a lot--I honestly think I got fat in order to get bigger and have a better chance to defend myself. Also, I was left alone in my home every afternoon and Saturdays, too. I truly did start to eat for comfort....carbs still bring that temporary sense of comfort and abating loneliness (though in the long run, they do neither). Maybe I even was angry at my mother for abandoning me and ate to punish her--even then I was aware she cared a great deal about dieting and keeping thin herself; my eating clearly bothered her (though not enough to quit buying junk food! -- lol)

The task for me as an adult is recognizing that those were good strategies then--I was doing the best I knew how as a little kid and honor that--but that they are no longer strategies that work for self-protection or for self-comfort or for expressing anger. I have other, more appropriate ways to deal with such feelings now, and I implement them. Carb cravings now alert me that I may well be repressing one of these emotional reactions--fear, loneliness or sadness, anger--and so once again I can view something (the cravings) I once saw as a major hassle as, instead, a gift.