My struggles with weight and food/ where should I go with my body?

So to start off I’ll explain from the beginning. So I have always been a chubby kid for the most part. I am 5’6 and in middle school I weighed 140-166 lbs. Once I got to high school due to social problems and stresses people were causing me I stated stress eating and weighed 177. People noticed my weight gain and were talking about me negatively and gossiping about me. I was criticized for everything and for the first time in my life I was determined to lose weight in order to have people like me. So I did. I went on a pretty extreme diet if only eating 1200 calories a day. In 6 months I had gone from 160 something to 123 lbs. but even then nothing was enough as people kept criticizing me even more than they had before. It was like I was happy with how I looked in photos and how I felt physically but people wouldn’t let me enjoy it with their constant hate and on top of it my extreme diet was super hard to keep up with and my metabolism was super slow. The only way I could go to the bathroom was by either eating more than 1200 calories and eating the amounts of food I ate when I weighed in the 160s or taking laxatives every week. Not all the bullying was about my body and how I looked but about 30%-20% of it was. Eventually I just couldn’t take it any more and I changed to homeschool. Just two weeks later the quarantine and covid hit the world. I had no one to impress anymore and all I had was pain, loneliness, and a love for food that had been repressed to the extreme. Over all the months of quarantine I couldn’t stand going out or speaking to people in my family due to my weight gain. I felt embarrassed to see people after they had congratulated me on all the weight I had lost. But I have been seeing family more and learning to accept myself because in reality I really am not that FAT to be feeling this way about myself and I feel happy eating food and my appearance never really bothered me before people started commenting on it. I currently weigh 170-185 lbs and I’m not sure where I should go with my body or health. I could either lose weight again with a calorie counter app or just stay at this weight and workout and build muscle when I fix up my backyard and start using my multifunctional gym. Technically I am overweight at the weight that I am but if I turn fat into muscle I shouldn’t be too “unhealthy”. My Apple Watch says I burn on average 300-600 calories just from walking so I am usually a little active. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions or advice? If so comment them down below and thank you for your time.