Great thread! Great to read your experiences.
I've lost a signigificant amount of weight and went from obese to the upper end of "normal" BMI over the last few years.

The strange thing about it is that it was and still is so easy on the one hand and so hard on the other:
"All I had to do" is make healthy choices and be active. Eating 3 to 4 meals a day, not eating sweets, picking up cycling, running, HIIT.
And the weight came off.

I still have to think about my food choices every day, every meal. I enjoy being active, and I am very active, but it doesn't regulate my appetite. I am always hungry. I could always eat more. If I have open access to food I shouldn't eat, it will end in a binge. In fact, sometimes I can't avoid binging, so eat unreasonable amounts of vegetables and salad so that the binge won't affect my weight. I have to be alert when I go shopping, because what I have at home, I WILL eat. If I am not at home where I have control over my food choices, I often can't stop eating when I should or eating the wrong things.

The strange thing is that the same people who judged me because of my weight before, mostly family members, keep forcing food at me now, even though they know how I struggled. They often say "now that you have lost all that weight, it won't hurt" or "you can eat what you want because you are so active" - which just isn't true. People often don't want to hear the truth (especially people who struggle with their weight themselves often just want to hear about an easy fix). I have learned to throw out food that I shouldn't eat and to get back on the wagon if I fell off.
But like Limewave, I constantly feel just one step away from regaining my weight.

I think it is clearly an addiction. It was significantly easier to stop smoking than to eat right. It's like being addicted to heroine, just that unlike with heroine, you can't just stop eating. You have to constantly keep the balance between nourishing your body and hurting yourself with food.
Food is so much more complicated than just eating when you are hungry. There are so many occasions where it is a social norm to eat and to eat certain things, to a degree that it can be an insult not to eat.
I think to people who don't have the problem, my struggles to manage foodintake will sound obsessive and unhealthy. And while I am fully aware that my relatioship with food is unhealthy, I have to manage it somehow, and obviously much more restrictive than people with a normal relationship with food.