Tabitha Farrar has another great video on Fear of Weight Gain, and how the fear is the problem, not the weight. I loved her example of finding times in your life when you've been afraid and done the scary thing anyway. We know how to do that with sports, public speaking, the first day of school, new job. We push through as if we're not afraid and then good things follow. It's the same with eating more or gaining weight. Acting as if we're not afraid of weight gain (action first, then our brain changes), we become not afraid of weight gain.
For me anyway, now that I'm no longer afraid, I enjoy my food a lot more and I'm able to eat according to my real needs instead of eating mindlessly or rebelliously. This has resulted in food peace and effortless weight stability. Fear resulted in food chaos and daily weight drama.
There are so many common fears: This is the wrong approach. I'm just overeating. I can't eat without instructions and rules. I'll be judged. My body is not ok. I should fix this by restricting.
It's important to identify those fears, to recognize them as your eating disorder voice (aka, the problem) and address the fears themselves. If you treat them as fact ("Oh, no! I'm not ok. Everything is wrong!") then your behaviors will go right back to restriction, rebellion, and obsession. Nothing changes.
I think I posted about this before, but there was a time when I saw my shadow on a wall and didn't recognize my own body. I had boobs and hips and thighs. Previously, I'd been built like a crawdad, and now I was seeing this Jessica Rabbit situation. WTF? Restrict-o-brain was hyperventilating, but logic tells me that healthy adult women are supposed to have curves. The buttless, boobless, thigh-gap, stick figure is not an option for most of us without a raging eating disorder. Expecting to look like that while not restricting is nuts. Judging ourselves harshly for not looking like that is nuts. That IS the disorder talking. It's diet culture propaganda. It started to make me mad. I wasn't an ethereal waif who lived on sunshine and air and wore a size nothing, but I felt that I should be. Where the hell did that come from? It's not even what I actually want. I want to be strong. I want muscles and curves. I want freedom. I want to freaking eat! But I've got this brain helpfully telling me I'm doing it wrong, basically no matter what I do. The miracle happened when I quit believing the painful stories about what it all means, not when I "optimized" my eating in some special way.