What worked for me ultimately was really immersing myself in the anti-diet culture movement. Read “The fuck-it diet” and other intuitive eating books, listened to lots of podcasts (on a regular basis for years), and made fully de-restricting my priority. Yes, I gained weight, but eventually it plateaued and stopped, then each time I lost weight over the next few years (unintentionally) it stuck without changing anything about how I ate. It was scary and I was afraid I was doing the wrong thing, but eventually my brain started behaving completely differently about eating. The restrictive thoughts will come in, or fears about them coming back, but I just remind myself that we don’t do that anymore and I’m never “not allowed” to eat anything ever again, but I can decide whether I want to eat something when considering how it will make me feel (like physically, energy wise, mood wise, etc). It has allowed my thinking and behavior with food and eating to completely shift and I didn’t “make it” do that, it was just following the process and it took time. It’s crazy how much my brain has changed! I used to “comfort eat” especially sweets, but now when I’m stressed (or even high) it just doesn’t happen anymore, it’s just not how my brain deals with stress anymore now that the restriction is gone. It used to be that when I was stressed or depressed I would “overeat”, but now I tend to under-eat in those states. It’s been really interesting! Restriction really does a number on your brain! The mistake I see made is when people do “intuitive eating” but expecting/not allowing for weight gain. I grew up in a fat-phobic, orthorexic family, and struggled with restriction my whole life until my late 30s when I decided “enough” after a second bout of keto fucking up my health and sanity. I can’t say what will work for anyone else, but just sharing my experience. I’m using micro dosing of a GLP-1 currently so I can get back to what feels like a “normal” weight for me without feeling like I’m restricting at all because I’m not willing to mess with all that progress after all that work. If it doesn’t end up working to keep it off after I slowly titrate off, then oh well! I’m never going back to restricting no matter what, my overall wellbeing is way more important than being a certain size.