My story of binge-eating and addiction

Hello everyone and thank you in advance for reading this!
I'm here to share my story, which I don't consider too drastic or extreme, but negatively affected my life for a while anyways. My goal is for this to hopefully be useful for someone who may currently going through the same or similar situation.

I've always been rather shy and introvert and because of that it was really tough for me to make friends and forget about having a girlfriend. I had poor self-esteem and confidence about myself which would make me quite depressed and anxious. I always wanted to just be normal, like all the other kids, but I was different.

At around 8 or 9 years of age I started to binge-eat on sugar. I would spend entire afternoons at home, after school, eating sugary cookies or whatever had sugar on it, since that would give me the pleasure I couldn't get from anywhere else at the moment. Since my parents were gone because of work, we had a person to take care of us and clean the house too, but she wouldn't really supervise us that much and that's why I would be able to do that.
In a rather short amount of time I gained a considerable amount of weight and then I kind of got obsessed with that. I didn't want to keep gaining weight and add being fat, to all the other stuff that isolated me to people. But on the other hand I didn't want to stop eating sugar because of the pleasure it would give me. I would even simply cut some bread and put sugar on it and eat it like that.
I don't remember exactly how things played out since all this happened a long time ago but I think it was a combination of my parent's help and my fear of getting fat and even more unattractive to people, that allowed me to sort of find a balance. I was able to have things under control more or less. Also the fact that I don't gain weight easily helped a whole lot I'm sure.
So I was relying on food for pleasure from then until not long ago, kind of keeping it under enough control for my weight to not sky-rocket until I decided I needed a change for good. I made that choice because of my present and future health and also because of those who loved and love me, including God. I simply don't want to end up with cancer, diabetes, or whatever disease you can imagine, by the early age of 40 or 50, which would have been the most likely case scenario for me if I kept eating like that.
I simply didn't care about me or my health back then. Not only it was the sugar (and caffeine too) but I wouldn't eat anything healthy pretty much. I would hardly eat vegetables and I wouldn't eat anything raw at all, so no salads for example.

Now after a lot of struggle, I managed to quit sugar, caffeine, and other harmful substances out of my life. I don't have a perfectly healthy lifestyle but it's much, much better than it used to be. I feel way better now, not only physically but also mentally and spiritually and all these effects and results help me to keep doing what I do everyday. It simply works.

Anyways I just felt like sharing this here on the forum. There are a lot more details to tell about this but I didn't want to make it too long. I hope this can help someone, even if just a little bit, and feel free to also share your story or message me to talk about whatever may be going on in your particular situation.

Take care you all!