Good question.
My belief is that people are not understanding, nor even trying to understand, WHY they overeat. Most people are in denial or uneducated and, for some reason or another, that seems to be ok with more and more people.
Eating is a drug of sorts. (Notice that I didn't say 'food' is drug...although some foods such as chocolate appear to have specific addictive qualities.) Anything and everything can be turned into an addiction, if you allow it. What's important is understanding why a person is eating so much more than the body needs.
It's essential to count calories. It's critical to watch fat intake. It's important to be aware of the amount of ingested simple carbohydrates. But none of these things can happen unless one is willing to admit that they overeat and that they are overweight. Better eating habits can't be developed until one is willing to admit that eating is a replacement for unmet emotional needs.
Personally, I think there is resistence to facing these issues because we've turned our society into a culture of fast answers and instant gratification. Most, especially children, have no idea what it means to (a) wait for something, (b) discern the difference between wanting and needing or (c) exert or relinquish control in meaningful ways. This is expected in children. These are things a child has to learn. But babies are being raised by babies these days, or, at a minimum, being raised by adults who have been part of an instant gratification society their entire life, so when it comes to imparting ideas of being patient, putting off gratification and learning appropriate self control, the parent is not fully equipped to teach their child these lessons.
The ramifications of this sort of thinking are showing up everywhere, most specifically in weight issues and in credit spending. The resultant behavior comes out in the form of entitlement. Everyone feels entitled to have whatever it is they think they want, be it a new iPhone, a new car or huge stacks of food. The entitlement attitude is a result of advertising being shoved at us from every angle in every possible environment. Advertisers tell us and we really convince ourselves we NEED to have everything, and that it SHOULD be ours.
Until we stop needing so much "stuff", including stuffing ourselves with food, we will simply become more and more bloated -- bloated bodies, bloated credit bills -- minds bloated with all sorts of supposed remedies for undefined emptiness.
(Incidentally, overeating is only one aspect of weight issues. Anorexia and bulimia must be included in this conversation because those, too, are issues of control and gratification.)