I wanted to take a minute to travel between fear and forgiveness...
Some background, because I do really think this is all pertinent.
My mother was an angry woman. I was 12 when she took me and my brother aside and told us that they were getting a divorce. It completed about eighteen years later, and by that time I had compartmentalised both my parents - dealing with them as if they were totally disconnected people, and I had to advise my father that he should simply pay everything that was being asked, because my mother really just wanted the fight.
I then spent some more years trying to persuade her to forgive him, then after he died, realising that the focus of her anger just shifted to other family members. I had a vague sense of her anger coming from fear of looking inward, but I had no tools to figure it out. Later, for the crime of having my own child and therefore having someone in my life more important than her, I found that I had become the target.
Much later on, it often became almost a code, a safe phrase, if I was having an argument with my wife, and she said "that's not you talking, that's your mother" - I learned to take a step back and really question whether I was being fair.
My mother would make accusations that were difficult to deal with - she once directly accused me of causing her cancer - but it wasn't about anything anyone had done, it was a way of making sense of how she felt.
I came to believe that she was suffering from borderline personality disorder, but all of that is a sideline - she was angry all the time at someone, you just tried to make sure it wasn't you.. that was all I knew, growing up, but I always felt as I grew into an adult that this was a weight she would carry around until it got too big for her.
When I became a parent myself, I had to choose the emotional safety of my wife and child, and they never met. My mother died when my daughter was about 10.
To some extent, I felt that my role as older brother was to keep my younger brother out of the firing line. The saddest thing was that he was the only person who went to her funeral - she had driven everyone else away, and this in a relatively small community in Scotland, there were hundreds of people who knew her. Not one person. She had specified in her will that I wasn't welcome.
Anyway - all of that is still just an aside. I've made my peace with it years ago. The important thing as far as we are all concerned, is that she had T2DM listed as a secondary cause of death on her death certificate. In first place was Malignant Cushings disease.
Malignant Cushings disease is basically what happens to you if you are angry all the time, and the weight gets too much for you to carry. Your stress hormones are turned on fully.. all the time... it's essentially like mainlining sugar.
A chunk of my adult life has been focused on not going the same way - I used to recognise the same kind of learned responses (thus the, "it's your mother talking" comment) - and learning to be kind - to myself and to others, and to not react to criticism by trying to destroy someone.
I recently told my daughter - "you know, your mother is such a good person, she gave me the strength to start to forgive myself for being me"
Dealing with that - day by day turning around the grip of anxiety and self-dislike (loathing sometimes) takes effort and it's a thing you can slip up on, or easily find you have gone backwards on.. but every now and again, you can look back and see that you have come a long way.
I see this whole eating game the same way..