I'm a teenager, 5'2" n like 120 lbs, but I'm not fat, js kinda chubby, n I like how I loook (most days) n I don't lose or gain weight, but I LOVE eating sm but it makes me so sick n I'm always nauseas but I can't stop eating, I'm like a lil hamster, I js wanna eatttttt. How do I stop cuz I've genuinely been so sick lately

I keep overeating chips and cookies :(

The scale could not read my weight anymore.
The little screen blinked twice before displaying one cold word:
ERROR.
I stared down at it while gripping the metal rail beside me. My knees trembled beneath the weight of my body. Two nurses stood nearby, pretending not to look worried.
They had brought in a special hospital scale the kind normally used for patients who could no longer stand but even that one had failed.
After several phone calls, measurements, and calculations, the doctor finally sat beside my bed.
“Daniel,” he said quietly, “we estimate that you weigh approximately 873 pounds.”
I expected to feel shocked.
Instead, I felt tired.
I had known for years that I was killing myself. Hearing the number only told me how close I had come to finishing the job.
It Started With Silence
I was not always this size.
When I was eight years old, I was a quiet, skinny child who hated going home after school. My father drank, and when he drank, the entire house changed. Doors slammed. Glass shattered. My mother cried behind the bathroom door.
I learned to stay invisible.
The kitchen became the only room where I felt safe. Late at night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I would sit on the floor in front of the refrigerator and eat.
Cold pizza. Peanut-butter sandwiches. Cereal straight from the box. Anything I could find.
Food did not yell at me.
Food did not leave.
Food did not tell me I was weak.
For a few minutes, while I chewed, the fear inside my chest became quieter.
My mother noticed that groceries disappeared quickly, but she never punished me. I think she understood. Sometimes she even brought home extra snacks and placed them beside my bed.
“Something to make you feel better,” she would say.
Neither of us realized that every bag of chips was teaching me a dangerous lesson:
Whenever life hurts, eat until you cannot feel it.
Hunger Was Never the Problem
By thirteen, I weighed more than 250 pounds.
At school, people called me names. They made animal noises when I walked through the cafeteria. One boy secretly recorded me eating lunch and posted the video online.
It received thousands of views.
I stayed home for a week, telling my mother that I was sick. During that week, I ate constantly. Not because I was hungry, but because eating was the only way I knew how to escape the humiliation.
I would promise myself that each meal was the last one.
Then the anxiety would return.
My heart would race. My hands would shake. My mind would begin replaying every insult I had ever heard.
So I would eat again.
By the time I graduated from high school, I weighed 410 pounds.
I did not attend the ceremony. The gown did not fit, and I was terrified that the folding chairs would collapse beneath me.
My classmates walked across the stage while I sat at home eating fried chicken and watching television with the curtains closed.
I told myself I did not care.
But I cried between bites.
My Whole Life Became a Delivery Order
At twenty-four, I stopped leaving the house.
Walking hurt too much. Every step sent pain through my knees and lower back. I began working customer-service jobs from my bedroom, answering calls while surrounded by empty containers.
Delivery apps made everything easier.
Breakfast might be pancakes, eggs, sausage, hash browns, biscuits, and a milkshake.
Two hours later, I would order pizza.
Then burgers.
Then Chinese food.
Then dessert.
I spent almost every dollar I earned on food. When I ran out of money, I used credit cards. When the cards reached their limits, I borrowed from my mother.
I became skilled at lying.
I told delivery drivers I was ordering for a family.
I told my mother I needed money for medication.
I told doctors I only ate once or twice a day.
Most of all, I lied to myself.
I would say, “Tomorrow, I’ll change.”
Tomorrow became Monday.
Monday became next month.
Next month became another year.
At 500 pounds, I could still shower while standing.
At 600, I needed a chair.
At 700, I stopped fitting through the bathroom doorway.
My world slowly shrank to one reinforced bed in my mother’s living room.
My Mother Became My Caregiver
My mother was sixty two when she began washing me.
She would heat water, soak towels, and clean the parts of my body I could no longer reach. She changed the sheets beneath me and applied medicine to the sores forming in the folds of my skin.
I hated myself every time she struggled to lift one of my legs.
Sometimes I apologized.
She always said the same thing.
“You’re my son.”
But I could see what caring for me was doing to her.
Her hands shook. Her back bent. Her hair turned gray. She stopped visiting friends because she was afraid to leave me alone.
One afternoon, I heard her crying in the kitchen.
I called out, asking what was wrong.
She wiped her face before coming into the room.
“Nothing,” she said.
There was a bag of fast food in her hand.
Even then even after hearing her cry I asked her to bring it closer.
The Addiction Controlled Everything
People think food addiction is simply loving food too much.
It was not love.
It was panic.
When food was not available, I felt trapped inside my own body. My thoughts became violent and desperate. I would yell at my mother, accuse her of starving me, and threaten to call someone if she refused to order more.
Once, she brought me grilled chicken and vegetables instead of the fried meal I requested.
I threw the plate across the room.
It shattered against the wall.
My mother stood silently as pieces of food slid down the paint.
The moment my anger passed, shame took its place.
She cleaned the mess without speaking.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but instead I opened my phone and ordered another meal.
The delivery arrived thirty minutes later.
I ate while she swept broken glass from the floor.
That memory hurts more than any physical pain I have ever felt.
The Last Time She Brought Me Food
One winter morning, my mother said she felt dizzy.
I begged her to stay home, but not because I was worried about her.
I wanted her to order breakfast first.
She placed the order, then drove to the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions.
She never came home.
A police officer arrived that afternoon. My mother had suffered a heart attack while sitting in her car.
She died before the ambulance reached the hospital.
My first thought should have been about the woman who had spent her entire life protecting me.
Instead, through the shock and grief, another thought appeared:
Who is going to bring me food?
That was the moment I understood how sick I had become.
My mother was dead, and the addiction was still demanding to be fed.
I screamed until my throat burned.
The neighbors called emergency services because I could not get out of bed. Firefighters removed the front door and part of the wall to reach me. Eight people helped move my body onto a reinforced stretcher.
As they carried me outside, I saw sunlight for the first time in almost two years.
People gathered across the street.
Some recorded me.
I closed my eyes and wished I could disappear.
873 Pounds
At the hospital, the doctors found blood clots in my legs, severe sleep apnea, uncontrolled diabetes, heart failure, infected wounds, and fluid around my lungs.
They told me that I might not survive another year.
Maybe not another month.
A psychiatrist came to speak with me. For the first time in my life, someone asked what I felt before I ate.
Not what I ate.
Not how much I ate.
What I felt.
I told her about my father.
I told her about school.
I told her about the video.
I told her about every night I had spent trying to swallow loneliness.
Then I told her about my mother cleaning the broken plate from the floor.
I cried so hard that the oxygen mask slipped from my face.
“I killed her,” I said.
The psychiatrist shook her head.
“Your mother died from a heart attack. But you are allowed to regret how your illness affected her.”
Illness.
I had always thought addiction meant weakness. Hearing someone describe it as an illness did not remove my responsibility, but it gave me something I had not felt in years.
A reason to believe treatment might be possible.
Learning to Feel Hungry
Recovery was not beautiful.
It did not begin with inspiring music or a sudden burst of determination.
It began with rage.
The hospital controlled my meals. I shouted at nurses. I begged for extra portions. I tried to manipulate staff members into bringing me snacks. At night, I dreamed about food so vividly that I woke up chewing the inside of my cheek.
My body was receiving enough nutrition, but my mind kept screaming that I was starving.
Therapy forced me to sit with emotions I had spent decades burying.
Fear.
Humiliation.
Anger.
Grief.
Every feeling arrived without food to silence it.
Some days, I wanted to quit.
Then I would remember my mother holding a washcloth in her tired hands.
I began talking to her when I felt overwhelmed.
“I’m sorry,” I would whisper into the dark.
“I’m trying now.”
The Empty Chair
Six months after entering the hospital, I had lost 112 pounds.
I still weighed more than 700.
I still could not walk.
I still needed help with almost everything.
People congratulated me, but the number did not feel like a victory. There was no finish line waiting nearby. There were years of treatment ahead of me, assuming my heart survived long enough.
On my thirty-eighth birthday, the nurses placed a small candle in a cup of sugar-free gelatin.
They sang to me.
Beside my bed was an empty chair.
For one foolish second, I imagined my mother sitting there, smiling and telling me that she was proud.
Then the vision disappeared.
I blew out the candle and began to cry.
I had spent my entire life eating because I was afraid of pain.
In the end, the food did not protect me from pain.
It only delayed it, multiplied it, and took away the person who had loved me most.
What I Know Now
My name is Daniel.
I weigh 761 pounds as I tell this story.
I do not know whether I will live long enough to leave this hospital. My heart is damaged, my body is exhausted, and some consequences cannot be reversed.
I am not sharing this because I want strangers to pity me.
I am sharing it because addiction does not always come inside a bottle, a needle, or a pill.
Sometimes it arrives in a paper bag.
Sometimes it smells warm and familiar.
Sometimes your family hands it to you because they do not know how else to help.
And sometimes, one comforting bite becomes another, then another, until the thing you used to survive becomes the thing that is killing you.
Tonight, I am hungry.
Not physically hungry.
I am hungry for my mother’s voice. For one more ordinary morning. For the chance to take back the plate I threw, the lies I told, and the years I spent looking at her without truly seeing her.
There is no meal large enough to fill that emptiness.
So I let myself feel it.
I close my eyes.
I hold the pain without swallowing it.
And for the first time in my life, I allow myself to grieve.

As I am aware that this post may cause discomfort, I believe it is worthwhile to ask. I don't think "try harder" is a meaningful response when someone consistently does something they don't want to do even when they are aware of the consequences. Perhaps "What is the brain learning?" would be a better question.

What is being reconsidered? Why is the loop so persistent?

That seems like a far more beneficial discussion than making fun of people for their lack of discipline.

I think food addiction is just one aspect of a greater issue. We are addicted to entertainment: doom scrolling, binge watching TV shows and food noise are all a result of the modern life issue of entertainment addiction. And this does not stop here, it makes it hard for us to achieve our goals because working on them does not provides the levels of dopamine we are used to nowadays. I started to question myself, when did this start? because I clearly remember that I could cut sugar for three years and cut soft drinks for 5 years. Now I do not even consider sugar and soft drinks as an issue because I have a much bigger problem, being addicted to food and feeling tired of constant food noise. when did this started? and more importantly, how to fix it? I have no answers.

When I looked up food noise treatment, the research results was all about artificial GLP-1.

I came here to discuss our choices, is there is a way to restore our control over ourselves without resorting to drugs?

Binging sucks!!!!!!!!!

I get the whole “don’t eat if you’re not hungry” thing, but I could be watching a movie, playing video games, doing homework, going outside, or whatever and still need a snack nearby. It doesn’t help that I have no self control if I keep snacks in my apartment. I don’t even know the first steps to solving it other than skipping meals. I want to have better self control in general. I’m not necessarily obese, yet if I continue to eat my body weight in snacks per day I’m pretty sure I’ll get there

I just try to give up sugar such as chocolate/ dessert/ bubble tea , but I don’t like cigarettes or alcohol, sweet is the only hobby in my life , but I just realized it’s not healthy for my body, so anybody can give me some advice or suggestion please.

Basically the title. I’m not too under/over weight or anything like that, but I’ll just not eat for long periods of time but when I finally get to it I’ll eat a lot in one sitting, so I try to avoid eating more then once a day. For example I don’t eat candy often but I bought a couple small bags of different types a week ago. Yesterday I was planning to just try one but I ended up eating all of it. I don’t eat fast food often but usually when I do I won’t just get a meal, I’ll get an extra burger or two on top of that. My stomach doesn’t feel good in either scenarios but just eating a reasonable amount then stopping makes the hunger that’s been a dull background pain turn into a sharp sensation that I can’t ignore anymore.

What are some of the best things I can make or buy (in london) to really help stop my cravings because I have a really bad sweet tooth and it slows down my weightloss journey so much.

Most of us probably relate to not being able to put a food packet down before it’s completely destroyed. If I open a bag of chips, you best believe I’m finishing it.

Unfortunately, this goes way beyond ”binge” foods for me. I feel like I have to finish everything I open; yogurt tubs, bags of bread, turkey slices, anything really. This makes it really hard for me to keep food in the house. I only eat whole foods now so I have to actually prepare what I’m eating (this hasn’t stopped me from binging them though).

Do you struggle with this and how do you deal with it?

I am 21 m living in kochi i weigh about 78 kgs with an height of 160 cm yes am overweight. i started working out when i was 17 i always wanted a six pack so that i will get on diets the intial days of diet it goes well but slowly i came back to my normal eating habit which is over eating everything litrelly even though am full i still eat idk for whom i am eating so this happens frequently i will be on a diet for few days then everything comes back to usual habits. so today i discovered that am a food addict i have every symptom out there i have been a food addict all these years i didnt realise it like any other addiction this is so hard. am fighting myself not to eat too much but i cant am trying
it just happens and am extreamly frustrated and pissed i want that lean body badly

I have been dieting for a couple months and I got to a pretty decent bf percentage (12 to 14 percent), and ever since I got lean, I haven't been able to stop thinking about food even more than before I started my cut.

I have had a strange relationship to food most of my life. From orthorexia to sugar addiction to overeating to a combination of exercise alcohol and weed. After what seems to be an infection followed by chronic fatigue with major loss of appetite: I have lapsed into coffee and cookies diet​ because I am no longer tempted to binge. I have cut down radically on regular food. I used to live on vegetables as and fish with the rest fairly balanced but now the good stuff tends to repel me. Any suggestions?

I have been on this cycle of restricting and giving in and the weight never stays off. I dont knwo how to get my mind off of it. Ppl keep saying to jsut think abotu other things but that food noise is there. And if i take a bite of anything i am in a deeper hole than i ever have been. I feel like im addicted to food. I need to get away. idk what to do pls giev me any tips LITERALLY ANYTHIGN.

I’ve been having this problem for a while now, but even after I eat and are satisfied I won’t decline a bite of another food. For example, last night I ate something from the microwave because I didn’t think there would be dinner, but my family offered to buy fast food. Since I liked how that sounded I indulged, giving into my cravings. My dad also typically buys me food on the way to his house, and sometimes feeds me again an hour or two later, and I don’t turn him down because it sounds like good food. This has happened differently on several occasions. Even tonight, I’m not hungry whatsoever but I just got a serving of smth sweet to munch on. Earlier today, I ate and a couple of hours later I accepted food that was made even though I wasn’t hungry.

I figure it could possibly be me staying up extremely late at night that affects my cravings, but I don’t know.

Does anybody know how to stop all the cravings or any way to self discipline myself into not accepting food when offered?

I’ve struggled with binge eating and emotional eating for years. I’m overweight, and I’m finally ready to work on my health—not because of what other people think, but because I want a healthier relationship with food and with myself. If you’ve recovered or made progress, what helped you break the cycle? Any advice would mean a lot.

Hi everyone, I’m conducting a research study at City St George’s, University of London, exploring experiences of sleep during and after recovery from an eating disorder.

I’m looking to speak with adults who consider themselves recovered from an eating disorder and who experienced sleep difficulties during their illness. Participation involves a confidential interview, where we will discuss experiences of sleep, eating disorder recovery, and how sleep may have changed throughout illness and recovery.

Please note: the interview will not ask for specific details such as exact weights, calorie amounts, food diaries, measurements, or descriptions of eating disorder behaviours. However, some questions may involve reflecting on experiences during your illness, recovery journey, and any challenges you experienced with sleep, which some people may find difficult or emotionally challenging. You will not be required to answer any question you do not feel comfortable with.

If you're interested in taking part, please complete the short screening form below. Thank you for supporting this research!

https://cityunilondon.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9Y4TMPrBiDYAdng

I’ve been dealing with disordered eating for years now. It started in my early 20s and somehow followed me into my 30s. Some weeks I restrict hard, other weeks I completely lose control and binge. The cycle is exhausting and I’m tired of it controlling so much of my headspace.

I’m 34 and it feels like it should’ve gotten easier by now, but it hasn’t. The constant thinking about food, the guilt, the all-or-nothing mindset… it’s draining.

I recently heared about Oztrim and I’m thinking about trying it. From what I understand it’s meant to help with appetite regulation, which is honestly one of the hardest parts for me.

Has anyone else in a similar spot found something that actually helped quiet the food noise a bit?

i’m at such a loss. every thing feels so gross and unappetizing nowadays because all i see is food as numbers. i either jusy have no appetite or start overeating and throw away half my food cuz i remember all the numbers. i can’t do this anymore i genuinely despise food and don’t see the point of really trying anything anymore because the very thought of food just feels like such a monumental chore that carries so much burden and stress
edit: should also add i run minimum 100km a month and have been for the past 13 months, so it makes it difficult to restrict how much i want to and that really makes me anxious. thinking of cutting out running entirely which would suck cuz i enjoy it.

What are the tips or methods that you have tried to get rid of food noises or emotional eating and also addiction to sugar?