This is something most weight loss plans ignore. When I have a pleasant food experience, I'm not satisfied. I want to experience it again either right away or in a little while, usually much too soon. My body doesn't have time to burn the calories off. When I diet, I just resist that urge. I keep careful track of what I eat. I exercise more. Eventually I get sick of it and revert to the much more comfortable original mode.
When I read about people who say they're trying to smother their pain or deal with old parental abuse, I think it's a load of bs. You can sit in a dark room without eating, you can drink or do drugs. We choose to eat. We might think about old slights and beatings, but that's just normal. Everybody does that when they're brooding and I'll bet thin people brood too.
It's all an excuse to indulge in food, drugs or whatever. Parental abuse, bully abuse has nothing to do with being fat. Being fat is all about wanting to reexperience good sensations and that's why exercise, common sense and deprivation eventually fail. People get sick of exercise. They get injured or their just isn't enough time to run that many miles. Deprivation works at first because the dieter enjoys the reward of seeing the pounds come off. They want to feel that thrill again and believe that it will work forever. Eventually they hit an appropriate weight and they realize they have to eat light for the rest of their lives just to stay thin. It seems like a gyp. There's no more dramatic weight drop for a reward. It's just maintenance. It might be healthy to be slim but the drama is gone.
The reason why there's a worldwide surge in obesity is modern life. Easy availablility of food. All kinds of devices to save us from physical labor. Modern marketing that preys on weaknesses and chain restaurants that have evolved like reef lifeforms into moneymaking predators.
The only solution is to... go back to that really horrible existence when there was more starvation and restaurants served less tasty food and made you wait half an hour for your order, when you had to go inside and sit down and then go back and work in a forge or the fields. Back then they kept us alive with the promise of progress and a better, easier life. They didn't tell us we'd get fat. Even if they did, we thought that would be great. It is kind of great to be living now with computers, tv, dvd's to suck us in. It's just that it's so hard to deprive yourself of what you really want - more tacos.