Like: car dependent suburbia. If you don't grow up walking to the shops with your parents, walking to the park to play, walking to school, cycling to school, walking or cycling to work; if your only exposure to movement is mandatory exercise at school which is unpleasant, what does that do to your lifelong views? If your environment doesn't have anywhere interesting to walk to, or any sidewalk to walk on, what does that do?
Like: If your parents and family never moved except to get to the car, what kind of early mental expectations does that set you up with? Children try to imitate their parents, if the parents alway groan and complain about having to walk anywhere, that's some kind of lesson.
Like: Livestrong.com says "The average restaurant meal is four times larger than it was in the 1950s. Similarly, the size of American-manufactured dinner plates has increased nearly 23 percent, from 9.6 inch". If you habitually eat out at restaurants and they gradually feed you more, more sugary, food, but you still have the "clean your plate to be polite" mentality, what does that do?
Like: where did this idea of "healthy food" come from? "Health" isn't something in food.
Like: where did the idea that cooking is "a real chore" come from? Can't one grow up to find preparing food a relaxing joy, an interest, an everyday part of life? Or learn to spend less time on it, e.g. meal prepping?
Like: "I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life" - Where does that behaviour come from? That's learned from somewhere, it isn't innate to cavepeople to have food on hand just in case life gets stressful, it's likely some family or community cultural habit where others might not do that.
I think it was Paul Lutus in a Reddit AMA, someone asked him if he baked much when living in a cabin in the woods, and he said he found it difficult to resist eating baked goods so he just didn't make them or buy them. That kind of discipline is much easier than buying them, having them nearby, and trying to resist eating them every moment forever.
> "Sure but if I could have changed it I would have."
Perhaps you can't, there are suggestions that becoming obese screws up your body forever, so it burns less fat (e.g. prefering quicker feeling of tiredness to reduce movement, rather than breaking the laws of thermodynamics), holds onto fat more strongly, distorts feelings of hunger and satiety and food cravings. UK comedian Ed Gamble who lost a lot of weight jokingly commented about thin people "if you don't think about food, what are you thinking about literally all the time?". It's possible that wasn't joking and years of obsessively thinking about food engrained that as a pattern he will be stuck with for the rest of his life, when always-thin people can forget about food when thinking about other things.