I need help.

Do you exercise? I find exercise helps your body reset its set point.

I would highly recommend you find a counselor/therapist who you can talk to about these things. There are surely reasons why you have sabotaged yourself into gaining that weight back - a therapist can really help you look at things from a different angle and ask you questions that you may not have thought to ask yourself, and help you figure out why you've make the choices you've made and how to fix it going forward. There's nothing wrong/shameful about seeing a counselor/therapist - if you find one who you really "click" with it can make all the difference in the world! I've been seeing one for about a year and a half - originally it was pretty frequently, but now it's only once a month, and it REALLY helps having someone outside of my daily life who can be a sounding board and provide a different perspective on things.

If cost is a problem, most cities have low-income mental health clinics and some counselors have sliding scale fees.

Why not focus on the addiction? All behavior has a purpose. What purpose does food serve for you when overeatting? Is is emotional comfort? Emotional eating like when angry, sad, anxious, depressed, etc is about the worst. When you are done eating, if you even bother, the pain is still there so you need more food. then you layer on guilt of eating too much. how can we win doing that? As with most addictions, changing the behavior that we use to cope is the key. If you exercised to cope instead of eating, different results. Easier said than done. And maybe I'm way off track with the addiction angle but you brought it up! keep is simple. Educate yourself on the basics (3500kcal=1 pound) and analyze when you eat, what you eat, why you eat and how you feel afterwards. just do it for a few days to start, this site is great for that. Good luck and if you have any questions, let me know. I can dish it out better than i can take it. But helping others helps me.

Eh, I'm not big on the whole food addiction thing. If everyone who was overweight was a food addict, then weight loss surgery wouldn't work so well because all it does is change your body's physiology. Besides, scientists understand the disease of obesity quite well and there are many physiological causes that they are well aware of.

Basically, our bodies have a set point, a weight that they are comfortable with, and they fight us to stay that weight. Some people, on top of that, are programmed to react to weight loss by not only gaining it all back, but gaining more. Those are the people who diet themselves up to 200, 300 and more.

We know exactly why this happens but instead of doctors and other experts focusing on that, our entire society is conditioned to think of weight gain as a moral failure, a failure of willpower, a character flaw.

I know that I got a book on Emotional Eating and it was very clear by Chapter Two that I wasn't an emotional eater. I got a lot more out of a book by the same author that was about learning to eat "normally". I think having a normal relationship with food is helpful and it's something I'm always working on. Plus, I changed my physiology. Now my body fights me to be under 120 instead of over 200. It makes an enormous difference.

So I say: don't beat yourself up over not being able to do what most people can't do. Instead use what we know about our bodies to work to your advantage and also do what successful people do. Some of those things probably don't cause them to maintain successfully but I figure it's worth trying at least.

These things are:

-continuing to log food even when on maintenance (maybe not every day but once in a while and definitely when the scale goes up)

-daily weighing (or at least every couple of days)

-regular support group attendance (it can be online like regularly posting in the MFP forums)

-don't drink soda, not even diet (there are lots of theories as to why but I don't think anyone really *knows*)

-regular exercise

Speaking of exercise, I know some people who have been successful at getting off more than 30 pound and keeping it off (which is very hard to do) and they aren't doing the 30 min. of moderate exercise that a lot of experts recommend. No, they are training for marathons and triathlons and other INTENSE stuff. They workout a minimum of 5 hours a week, sometimes more, and it's not at a moderate rate, either.

The other thing that seems to work is to sign up for events. That way, you can't slack off on your workouts or you won't be ready. I have a friend who did a half-marathon every month in 2010. Another one does 5Ks at least once a month, sometimes more often. His goal is to cut his finish time by some amount by year's end. I've already got my race calendar full for 2011 and I've even got some stuff penciled in for 2012!