I cannot stop eating

Alright first please excuse my messy writing my thoughts are always disorganized but i will absolutely do my best making this as coherent as possible. This also might be long.

*TLDR I’m struggling with a life long eating disorder due to childhood food insecurity, abuse, and mental illness causing me to get up to 290 pounds where i spent 4 years gaining and losing 20-60 pounds over and over resulting in a lot of loose flabby skin and as soon as i got a handle on everything i got pregnant and breastfeeding is making me insatiably hungry and i can’t stop eating.

I (F26) am at a loss at the moment. My whole life my family struggled with food insecurity. I’m talking multigenerational poverty in the southern United States. I was a relatively healthy looking kid for the most part i was thin but not really active as i struggled with fatigue a lot as a child which later led to my diagnosis of a disability. I also didn’t have access to sports for a long time as my mom was a mother of 5 who worked full time. She was also in back to back domestically violent relationships with mine and my siblings fathers (we all have different dads) so no one really spent time out side of the house except me to occasionally spend time with my paternal grandmother.

We moved houses a lot and my mother always portioned meals and snacks so overeating want a problem when i was younger. At my paternal grandmothers house she never had food because she was a nurse and so she ate a lot of grab and go meals so often we’d eat out at dinner and got fast food but most of the time I’d just eat ramen noodles when staying with her. She also spent a lot of time in bed so i learned how to cook at 6 by making her meals and bringing them to her.

Around 2008 things got really difficult for my entire family and even though my mom had escaped the domestically abusive situation we got foreclosed on our home and lived for 4 months through the winter with no water and electricity and my family survived sharing a pack of baloney a day which wasn’t a lot of food for a family of 7. Subsequently this same year was my first time spending a summer with my wealthier aunt in the New Jersey suburbs. I gained so much weight that summer that it made my mom angry. Everyone talked about it there were whispers and many rude comments to my face about it which was a stark difference in attitude as i was always considered so cute and everyone wanted to “keep me”

I was now the fat kid at school, the kids became really mean to me even though they all wanted to be my friend a year prior. Even though the food situation at home didn’t get much better i didn’t shed the weight. We did move to a new house and things got better in terms of stable housing with functional amenities sometimes my school lunches were still my only meal of the day and i would come home and steal fruit off the trees of my neighbors homes to eat. At night I’d chug water if my stomach hurt. When i hit puberty i did thin out a bit but genetics caused me to have large breasts and hips very early on and so i thought i could cut back on food and it would make me smaller. It didn’t, not in the way that counted for me.

But being thinner meant more friends and that was a very nice change until i went back to New Jersey and gained 20 pounds. I gained 20 pounds every year i went so from the first year of middle school i was 140 pounds to 180 pounds by the time i graduated middle school and of course that meant that i lost friends and the bullying started again and my body developed faster than i could comfortably handle despite eating less throughout the year i never lost a single pound even when i did eventually join sports.

We lost our home my freshman year of high school and i spent the second half of the school year homeless so i couch hopped all year before i moved in with my grandmother. I couldn’t keep myself fed and neither could she. She was both physically and emotionally abusive so i didn’t even try to cook anymore because she hated the smell of cooked food and didn’t like anything moved. If we did grocery shop i had to walk so i stayed fairly active including just walking around after school to avoid going home. I was 200 pounds my freshman year and because i was struggling so bad in school i got sent to live in Jersey with my aunt and uncle.

This was so stressful and difficult for me i actually gained 90 pounds in two years living there. I binge ate so much food and since no one cooked i ordered as much Chinese food, pizza, sushi, wings, etc i wanted. and in the 5 years i lived there i experienced so much abuse my hair started falling out and i was so sick all of the time i could barely function. In my senior year of high school i starved myself and threw up as much as i could or took laxatives to change this but i eventually lapsed putting back on the weight after i began my bad eating again.

I graduated and got a scholarship attend a couple of universities but my aunt made me decline all so i could help take care of my elderly great grandfather. So i got a job to pay for community college. I didn’t have a car at the time so i took multiple buses (about an hour and a half trek each way) to get to school, I’d go to work after classes do the grocery shopping after work and then come home and clean the house so my days were full from 6am to 1am most days. I would often cry and eat ice cream as an outlet but i was a whopping 290 before i decided i needed to lose weight.

I changed my diet and got a gym membership in 2019 and lost about 30 pounds before the pandemic hit. I took it as an opportunity to move back to my hometown where i lost 20 more pounds by doing drugs like ecstasy, coke, and LSD. After some traumatic events The drugs put me in a long term dissociative episode that spiraled into a depressive episode where i put all the weight back on and then i had an contamination OCD episode where i stopped eating due to fear of being poisoned. I dropped 40 pounds again and as you could imagine i began getting really saggy loose skin from the constant fluctuations of my weight.

Thankfully this led me to find real joy in making healthy meals and cooking/baking from scratch and as i went to therapy and got another gym membership my relationship with food began healing in a way that made me very proud. I got married and unexpectedly four months later i got pregnant. Pregnancy on top of disability was hard and i lost most of my mobility and so i began eating out for most of my meals. By the time i was 6 months postpartum i was back up to 285 pounds.

I exclusively breastfed and still am breastfeeding and I’m always hungry. I can’t stop eating and when i try i get hunger pains like real hunger pains. I moved to England and got down to 250 but i just cannot seem to stop being hungry. I feel like I’m going to struggle with this forever. I’m walking 4/5 times a week about an hour to sometimes 5 or 6 hours depending on the day. I’m active with my kid even if I’m in pain or struggling. But I’m gaining weight again and i feel like I’ve failed. I’ve always wanted to be a healthy weight and i feel like i keep hitting roadblocks.

Anyways sorry for the long rant i just don’t know who to talk to about this.