I've been off alcohol and drugs for 2.5 years, and abstinent from compulsive overeating for almost a year. Food was harder to get a handle on than meth, no joke. Quitting refined/added sugar in particular was almost as bad as quitting smoking. (Haven't smoked in 1.5 years either.)

In my experience, compulsive overeating is every bit as much an addiction as alcoholism, smoking, or hard drugs. I saw myself exhibiting the exact same behaviors around food as I did around alcohol (splitting my shopping up between multiple corner stores so none of them would know how much I was eating) and feeling the exact same way about myself (I'm a worthless piece of shit, I'll never get a handle on this, I might as well just dive in and die young).

You might argue that had I not learned those behaviors while being an active alcoholic, I wouldn't have put them into use with food. Maybe. I think that's beside the point. The point is that I couldn't stop even though I desperately wanted to.

In my case I had food problems before I got sober. I hear about people turning to food after they stop drinking (in fact one very well-known program explicitly recommends it), but for me food, booze, drugs, nicotine, and casual sex were/are a package deal. They all hit the same place in my brain, perform the same function for me emotionally, and are impossible to quit on my own.

(Posted anonymously for reasons I hope are obvious.)

Another point is that alcoholics can stop using alcohol and still live. Heroin addicts can stop using heroin and still live. People with food addiction still need to eat to live, which I think makes this even harder.

Another problem with food is that there are too many people writing not scientifically researched opinions on how to lose fat and get more healthy at the same time. After going through a lot of pub-med researches about decreasing my blood triglyceride levels, I found out that I have to get rid of sugar and saturated fat completely, and eat foods with low glycemic index. Still, I don't want to binge, so I found Tim Ferriss' slow carb diet much better than the popular and dangerous low carb diet. All these things may be in the media, but a lot of false things as well.

Now I'm eating eggs without the yolks, red lentils (very easy to make) and falafel (fried in the oven), and my triglycerid levels and weight are changing without me trying to binge at all.

You also need to factor in the available cures. A simple gastric band operation means you can't then die of overeating. But a liver replacement can still be abused by an alcoholic.