@fatfatfat I don't know if you are still reading this thread. It has made me so angry I've been tempted to throw the laptop across the room a couple of times and its not even about me.
In your OP you say "Eating (and drinking) has become the thing I do, it's my absolute favourite. And obviously the more weight I've put on the worse it's got. None of my clothes fit. I don't go to places. I don't see people. I won't have my photo taken. All in all I am miserable as fuck ... so why the fuck can't I stop eating!?"
I hear you.
When I went to the GP and said this exact thing to them, they told me to cut out butter, get a smaller plate to serve my dinners on and go to parkrun. Yep. That i'll do it 
If I could apply will power to the situation and sort myself out I wouldn't have the problem.
All the well meaning advice I have suffered through. The idolatry of breakfast as a cure for binge eating, the low carb, high carb, vegan or meat only eating plans. The diet groups. The amazon self help paperbacks. The random exercise dvds I would watch once whilst eating toast.....
No diet worked for me, exercise of many sorts didn't work for me, counselling didn't work for me (cbt or psychotherapy x 4 different people) (and actually there is very little peer reviewed clinical evidence it does work for binge eating).
Overeaters Anonymous sort of worked for me, in that it relieved the need to eat when I went to meetings and worked the steps hard and at least they understood the powerlessness over food which God knows, no-one else does but it never got rid of the problem at root (to be fair it doesn't promise to, it offers you a reprieve one day a time whilst you are working the program only) and 2 young dc made it impossible to do 3 meetings a week plus sponsor etc it didn't work. In my decade there I can count the number of morbidly obese people who got down to a healthy weight and stayed there on 1 hand. Thats not to say it didn't offer me some relief, but not a cure iyswim)
In the end what worked for me was accidentally hearing a piece on radio 4 woman's hour about breast cancer and the host, jenny murray, who had previously had breast cancer said to the surgeon being interviewed 'I must sort myself out and lose my weight as I know its bad for me having had breast cancer' and the surgeon said 'well, no, actually you probably wont be able to. The clinical figure for someone who has a BMI over 35 being able to lose weight successfully is 1 in 430 for women. Long term recovery is generally not achievable because physiological changes happen in the body to make long term weight loss virtually impossible. You need to have surgery'
I looked it up and its true, at my BMI the figure for women was 1 in 677. Here is a link to the study.
It is, in my opinion a monstrous disgrace that the NHS is offering slimming club referrals, gym memberships, telephone counselling and the like when it knows from its own highly respected 30,000 patient study that there is virtually no chance of it working for almost anyone whose BMI has got to that point. The only thing that has been clinically proven to offer a long term solution is bariatric surgery because the disordered Ghrelin producing cells in the stomach need to be removed.
I had never for one second considered having surgery. I mean, the problem was with my desire for food, not my body. I hadn't realised that there was a physiological reason why when other people get full they lose interest in food and that just doesn't happen to me.
Germany and France have roughly the same population as the UK at 70million give or take. The UK does 5,000 bariatric surgeries a year, France and Germany each do 50,000 because they have the moral integrity to be honest about the fact that it is the only treatment that is successful for obesity. That's 45,000 more people in each of those countries being given a chance each year.
A couple of years ago the BBC made a documentary about this issue with the nhs head of bariatric surgery at University College Hospital London. It is on if you want to watch it. I did and it saved my life. 8 stone down, normal BMI, I formed a little private whats app with everyone who had surgery in the hospital with me that week....all at a normal weight.
And why did it happen? Did years of comfort eating train my body to crave the food? Did it come about because modern processed food is poison to certain people? Was it my childhood trauma? Is it antibiotics messing the gut up? Maybe all those things, maybe none, I really don't know. All I know is the operation sorted out whatever had happened to me physiologically, and now I have the energy to slowly come to terms with the emotional issues in my life as I'm not dying of morbid obesity 30 years early or constantly trying to stop eating.