An internal debate at every meal

Healthy = happy

No.
Source: my desire to be unalive because life is pain, and burger is mmmmmm
- If you had ever been fat and then lost a lot of weight, you would know that the physical feeling is night and day different. The feeling of being fat is exhausting, your joints hurt, you're tired all the time, it's truly awful. You'd wonder how you could stand being fat. At least that's how it felt for me.
- We aint on tiktok you can say dead here

Or maybe just stop overeating? It's way less about what you eat than it is about how much you eat.

no it's very much about what you eat, if you put a bunch of greens in your food you'll feel satisfied much faster and for longer.

You can always lose weight but you can never get back a missed hamburger.

Immediate vs future happiness

get regular exercise and be both. Literally like 40% of my motivation for staying active is that it lets me eat more.

you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet is the general advise. a snickers bar is 73 calories and to burn 100 calories you have to run a 10 minute mile.
you simply can accumulate calories at a way faster rate than you can reasonably exercise.
- That's a good point but it's also important to note that a Snickers bar has much less nutritional value than the cheeseburger shown in the original image. So if you're training for a marathon or something, you can totally get away with a cheeseburger every night, but not the equivalent amount of snickers (you will feel like absolute shite)
- i think that's technically true but reductive, you will continue to burn calories at a higher rate for quite a while after any reasonably strenous exercise and as you get stronger it becomes easier to burn more calories, thus letting you increase your daily calorie budget.
  I'm not saying that five minutes of cardio will suddenly let you eat 5 cakes, but have you seen the diets that weightlifters keep? with a lot of muscle and frequent heavy exercise you can burn such an amount of calories every day that eating 3 pizzas is a good starter course.
  Also we aren't talking about a bad diet, just eating a bit too much. Of course exercise isn't going to fix you eating snickers instead of vegetables but it will absolutely fix eating one too many burgers.
Wait, what? No one told me about that.

I alternate back-and-forth, so that I'm never truly skinny, nor truly happy.

In Las Vegas, we have a local chain called SkinnyFats that has two menus, a "healthy" menu and a "happy" menu

Switch to things with more protein, it keeps you sated with fewer calories. Count calories, not too torture yourself, but to train yourself to make better choices. Do a few simple strength exercises every day, to build muscle and to stay motivated.

Source: down ~20kg from top weight

Steak is great and it's good for you. I love mine cooked in ghee and heavily salted
- lol except studies are more and more showing that red meat is actually not particularly good for you, and steaks are quite possibly the least ethical thing to eat.

I lost 35lbs eating burgers and pizza. These things aren't mutually exclusive. The fact that people think they are is a testament to how poor health education is.

Bread - processed crap with minimal micronutrients, preservatives and coloring agent (for nice white flour /s)
There doesn't really exist an "healthy" or "unhealthy" food, it's just about your eating habits...
- I would say deep fried Oreos are pretty unhealthy