When comparing ant asian country to the US we should always keep physical activity and portion size in mind. A single cookie here in the US is massive and you always drive around just to get that cookie in the first place
There are 3 options in order of effort: eat the next snack from a pack in your hand, decide and stop eating the cookie that is in the pack; get another pack to continue eating.
It requires more effort to get another pack and that biases towards the “stop eating” outcome. If packages are large the the easiest action is continue eating.
Dieting as a bachelor presented challenges. Your frozen meals and pizzas are often one size that's too large or small. Your recipes are not going to be calibrated for one person, one meal, one sitting. Literally, every can in my pantry is too much soup or fruit to prepare for a single meal...
Restaurant eating makes portion control so difficult. Delivery, doubly so. The only recourse is to find a place that has tapas, appetizers, small plates that can be likewise doled out.
And yes, I am certain that food is engineered to foster addiction and dependencies. It's right there in the slogans, yes? "Once you pop, you can't stop!" "Betcha can't eat just one!"
Dinner plates have gotten huge, historically speaking.
This shouldn't even be a remarkable POV - the industry has been open about it for decades[1]
My diet would verge on the definition of extreme by most people given the lengths I go to avoid UPFs, additives and microplastics but that doesn't mean I don't like eating. If I have a bag of chips I'll easily gorge the whole thing before even making it back to the couch so keep them out of the house, out of sight and out of mind.
Snacks are truly a sin - they're just seasoning sprinkled on empty calories, engineered to deliberately leave you not satiated. Such a waste to blow your calorie budget on them while also eating a laundry list of chemicals - I'd rather hold off and eat more pasta or steak at dinner.
And if I really can't hold off, there are plenty of easy snacks you can prepare at home like eggs or toast. "a slice of buttered toast" is rated pretty high as a final meal...
An apple, banana or nuts also does pretty well if you can deprogram yourself from the conditioning of the snack industry.