What's different now is that I've done a lot of self-reflection. I now realize I have an eating disorder driven by a dopamine response to tasty foods, but unlike other people, my inner thoughts are similar to addicts, I presume, where my brain is deciding to binge the food that triggered that reward until I get stomach pains, which then nullifies the dopamine reward, so only then I stop eating. I've also learned the signal I get when I've had enough to eat and learned to not ignore it.
I've also realized that I stress eat, and particularly when I'm feeling down, probably to try to get temporary feelings of happiness as self-medication.
Losing weight is fairly straightforward once you get the hang of it, but keeping it off is less so. That's the most difficult aspect to manage about my life: to try to avoid excessive stress and general periods of unhappiness, so that I don't start using food as a source of dopamine, but since a lot of stressors are external, I feel like they're outside of my control, so my general strategy as of late has been to replace the source of dopamine to not be food related.
For example, exercising not only helps with losing weight, but it also curbs my appetite so I can fast during lunch without exercising much will power. More vigorous exercise induces runner's high, so it benefits both the efforts of losing the weight and the attempt to switch sources of feeling good.
Lastly getting satisfaction from shipping code is a productive replacement for the satisfaction I get from eating foods. That one is more tough to implement because eating provides immediate gratification, while shipping projects is a long endeavor usually. To counter that, I set bite-sized (ha) coding/learning goals for myself that I can complete fairly fast. That keeps my mood up for a bit.
Hopefully my experience will encourage others to reflect on their own reasons for gaining weight and try to address the root cause, not just the side-effect of increased weight.