Why am I so overweight? Help me to understand

[PomegranateVase]

I’m 3.5 stone overweight (over the top end of the ideal weight to height guidelines), but would be around 5 stone over the lowest end of the guidelines, and I’m a size 16-18.

I cook from scratch using fresh ingredients everyday, including lots of vegetables and broths. We typically eat lots of healthy Japanese food that I cook from scratch at least 3 times a week, and only eat meat, chicken or fish around 3-4 times per week.

5 days a week I do a 20 minute brisk walk.
Twice a week I walk for 2 hours at moderate speed.
3-4 times per month I walk for around 3 hours at moderate speed (so around 9-12 hours walking - in addition to the above).

I drink 2 cups of coffee daily with a little milk and 1 sugar, as well as 3-4 cups of tea with 1 sugar. I also drink sugar free squash, and only very occasionally treat myself to a sugar free fizzy drink.

I drink 1 or 2 bottles of wine per week, eat one share size crisps packet to myself, and eat a few biscuits.

A typical weekday looks like this:
•Avocado on 1 slice of sourdough toast with a coffee
•1 Nature Valley snack bar and a coffee
•Baxter’s carrot and butter bean soup with 1 slice sourdough toast and butter
•A couple of biscuits
•Homemade Japanese vegetable, tofu and noodle soup.
•3-4 cups of tea and squash.

My best friend is a size 14 and it as overweight as me. She drives everywhere and never walks and doesn’t do any form of exercise. She eats lots of processed foods daily, also takes sugar in her hot drinks, drinks the same amount of alcohol as me and eats 1 large fry up breakfast every week.

Another friend is a size 10-12 and eats lots of pasta and processed foods, drinks about the same amount of alcohol as me and walks probably about the same amount as me.

My thyroid is functioning normally.

I fail to understand how I’ve become so overweight by leading this lifestyle.

Please can you give me any advice or tips on how I can lose weight as I feel my diet is quite healthy already.

Could something be wrong with me medically if I am this overweight?

How old are you ?
I have read that women post menopause doing sedantry jobs and not doing training for Iron Women level exercise, need far fewer calories than the recommended 2000 a day.
I‘m on the jabs, as in order to eat under that amount I need to suppress my appetite and the weight had dropped off.
I went on holiday last year with my two very slim sisters. They difference in their eating to mine which on paper I would have thought was similar, was stark.
Spend time with a slim person and copy what they eat, adopt their hobbits
It was an eye opener for me I can tell you!

It's very simple calories in v calories burned. From what you've written, it looks like you're consuming too many calories per day along with not enough exercise. Your current exercise would likely be ok to maintain weight, but it's not enough to lose it. 20mins per day walking isn't enough to get from obesity down to a healthy weight, you'd need to do significantly more than this, in terms of steps, you're probably doing about 2000 steps in 20mins, but for it to make a difference with your current diet, you'd likely need to do about 12K steps per day.

You'll need to cut out alcohol, the biscuits, even just reduce to half a biscuit if you really want a little treat, reduce your sugar in tea to half a tsp. Cut out the fizzy and sugar-free drinks, they are full of sweeteners instead which are unhealthy.

Try downloading MyFitnessPal, start logging your daily calories, you'll soon see that you are eating too much to lose weight.

I remember wondering why I was struggling to lose weight when I was obese, and it was only when I actually started using MFP to log and track my calories that I realised I was eating way too much. As soon as I realised, I made changes and lost 5 stones, that was in addition to upping my daily exercise.

I know where you're coming from: I have a judgy and hectoring tone, which pisses people off.

But you know and I know that as a society, we do eat way too much meat, to the extent that we are doing mass deforestation and herding animals into sheds and have perfected the assembly line of intensive farming with shite animal welfare.

Excess is not necessary. People in general just don't consider where their food, clothes, money comes from. Sometimes it's just easier and more satisfying to ram the message home, like what the hell are you doing people, open your eyes.

TBF, Toby carvery actually serve pretty modest sized pieces of meat.

That recommended 2000 is a load of rubbish also so I think it catches many people out. My maintenance calories are around 1450 a day so I would be putting on a load of weight on that, around 1lb a week. The TDEE calculators are really helpful (and probably eye opening for many).

I have to eat around 1000 cals to lose weight.

OP replied earlier in the thread.

I don't think you're wrong to think that many people eat worse than you, eat more than you and exercise less than you. You have an averagely healthy diet overall by the look of it. But, annoyingly, it's not a level playing field and some people can naturally 'get away with' far more than others.

If you're starting point is overweight then it's harder.

If you're short it's harder. (I think a lot of short people massively overestimate what they need ot maintain/lose. When I mentioned that the logging app I'm currently following gives me 1000 calories a day my tall friend was horrified and concerned - until I told her that my BMR on an inactive day is only about 1350 calories! Being under 5ft 1 is so annoying, it's not like your appetite is magically smaller by being 6 inches shorter than others!) The 2000 calories for the average woman advice has a lot to answer for. I need 20,000+ steps and a high intensity dance class to burn 2000 calories in one day. Almost never happens and my average is 1550-1700 a day.

If you're peri menapause or older it's harder.

I know people who are all three of those and have tried for years without success. Which is really shit. There are some hormone specialist nutritionists out there. I know someone who has been seeing one and has gone from a size 12/14 to a size 6/8 since the start of the summer.

OP I haven’t read the full thread but people are right that you are eating too many carbs and not necessarily exercising, this 8s just daily movement. Before you make any changes, I would say keep eat8ng exactly how you have been eat8ng, keep all your habit but start tracking the calories. What you need right now is to understand where your calories are coming from so that when you make changes, you are eating the right things that will make an actual difference to you. If you love your coffee with sugar, by all means have a bit of it, but you need to know how many calories you are adding so you can adjust somewhere else. You really need to up your protein here, it will keep you fuller for longer, use a lot of veggies to bulk up your meals, you don’t have to go hungry but it would be helpful to replace your snacks with protein rich foods. Just because you eat healthy things it doesn’t mean they don’t contain a lot of calories and ultimately this is what causes the weight gain. Build your calorie awareness first and then start making small changes, you will feel the difference.

Nah that amount of walking is fine. It's most likely the wine.

Op, my hudband and i have accepted that in middle age we simply cant have any extras like crisps/biscuits/sugar in tea without putting on weight.
In order to maintain a relqtively high bmi of 24.8 or so i eat similarly to what you describe without the sugar in tea/biscuits/nature valley bar/crisps and wine. It is hard to accept, but i simply can't get away with extra and when i do for example over christmas, despite being v moderate i have put on a few pounds.

"A typical weekday looks like this:
•Avocado on 1 slice of sourdough toast with a coffee
•1 Nature Valley snack bar and a coffee
•Baxter’s carrot and butter bean soup with 1 slice sourdough toast and butter
•A couple of biscuits
•Homemade Japanese vegetable, tofu and noodle soup.
•3-4 cups of tea and squash."

Things that leapt out at me:

1. Very heavy on the carbs - which metabolise to sugar
2. I would not call Nature Valley snack bars healthy. Read the pack, it's just short of 200 calories, 8.3g fat and 11.3g sugar. They emphasise the fibre and 'natural' to draw your eye away from that.
3. How much butter? (I am guilty of using far too much, which is why I ask)
4. Biscuits are always high in sugar and fat.
5. Squash - read the label, what's in it? Consider having just water.
6. Wine is empty calories which metabolises to sugar
7. Crisps are high fat and usually high salt too, encouraging you to drink more (wine?)
8. Lots of coffee and tea - how much sugar in them?

So your diet is high in sugar and fat, low on protein and fibre.

Fat is not necessarily a problem, we need it, but best to be unsaturated (butter is saturated). Cook with oil, not butter. Do you really need to butter bread with soup? (My DH does, but I grew up not doing that. I did not feel deprived!)

The sugars in your diet need to be addressed, you're eating them every time you eat. Having sugar so often can make you crave it more, so look to drop it out at some meals. Drop the snack bar and biscuits, replace with fruits, which will up your fibre. Even moving from a couple of biscuits to one biscuit and a banana/nectarine/plum/satsuma would be a start.

Breakfast - would avocado and scrambled egg work for you? That change would drop the carbs, replace with protein, which your diet seems low on to me. The soup is pretty low on protein, even switching to lentil soup would up the protein. I wonder if having more protein for lunch would stop you wanting biscuits later as a snack?

You cook from scratch every day - but there's an awful lot of processed food in your typical weekday. Processed food are formulated to be ultra-palatable, encouraging us to eat more (and BUY more!) - so it's never a bad idea to try and remove them from your diet as much as you can. So - homemade soup (you can make a batch big enough for 5 lunches in one go) and no biscuits/snack bars.

Gosh. Everything you listed is quite fine for normal person. People havw snacks and drinks and are not overweight 🙄 contrary to mn belief, carbs are also not an enemy unless you have specific medical issues.

Healthy and not high in cal doesn't mean same thing. You can have healthy balanced salad and it can be 1000 cals.

Just look at size of your portions, try to workout calories of them and you can quickly cut some cals out AND keep fun stuff. Eg. Less whatever is mostcals on a plate, bit more veg.
And that is how you keep it as well instead of on and off and on and off.

It’s calories. It’s almost always calories in vs calories out. Do you have an active job? 20min is walk a day with a sit down office job is not a lot of movement or exercise. You need to track your calories to work out how much you’re actually eating.

Really good advice. Sorry to be pedantic but as it sounds like OP is not knowledgeable in this field I will just pick up that a 3,500 kcal deficit or surplus will approximately equate to a gain or loss of one pound, not one kilogram. 1kg is 2.2lb and needs a deficit of approx 7,700 kcal.

Your only issue is your not actually tracking calories.

To lose weight you just need to be in a calorie deficit. You'll read loads of misinformation and people arguing with what I'm saying but it is 100% the only thing you need to do to lose weight. Exercise is great for a healthy heart and body but won't help you lose weight, if anything it'll make you hungrier and it's then harder to stay in a calorie deficit.

It's really easy to over eat and either gain or maintain weight when you don't actually realise what calories you're putting into your body.

Intermittent fasting changed my life. At 40 I was a healthy weight, by 42 I was two stone overweight and all the old tricks to lose weight didn't work. I was being so good and couldn't shift any weight. I started Intermittent fasting (16/8) and the weight slowly came off - it's a lifestyle change though, as soon as I go "back to normal" the weight creeps back on.

You need a starting point , which is to understand your intake. Track calories for a week - include all meals, every single bite of food, even one chocolate or a bite of something. Include the milk in your tea, and the calories in your squash.

Track absolutely everything over 7 days to get an average of calories. It will help you to identify if you are eating too much, or your portion sizes are too big, or if it's the types of foods. Healthy foods like nuts, avocados, healthy oils can carry a HUGE amount of calories even in a teaspoon, so make sure for that week you're measuring absolutely everything. For spoonfuls of stuff or bits of butter, an easy way to measure small amounts is to put the whole jar on the scales, set it back to zero, then take out what you want, and you'll get a negative number which is how many grams you've eaten.

Also - how are you cooking things? Cooking oils and fats have more calories than you think. Air fryer or oven is your friend.

The most obvious thing to try cutting out would be the wine - high in calories but no nutritional value. Cut it out and see if it makes a difference.

I don't think a couple of biscuits a day is a bad thing, but you'd need to work them into your calorie allowance. Moderation is key in my opinion.

I wouldn't cut carbs, but I'd monitor portion sizes and calories. Information is power. If you work out your individual calorie needs (there's lots of calculators online) you can compare it to your actual intake and see where you can make changes.

Exercising is great whether it's helping to lose weight or not - it will be making you fitter and healthier.

Honestly if you were that bothered, you'd lose the judgy and hectoring tone because as a grown woman, you'll know that it puts people off listening to you.

No one wants to listen about animal welfare. Nothing works: Polite, cajoling, informative, hectoring. The meat trade expands and nothing works.

Since I’ve had kids, I can’t exercise out anymore because I’m a single parent so I found putting on a YouTube Pilates video lasting however long you’ve got (even 20 minutes helps!) was a game changer for getting back into fitness and toning.

What turned me vegan is my vegan friend sending me a photo of her meals and the where relevant the recipe. I always wanted to be able to be vegan but I was like ok but what will I actually eat and that cleared it up. And her food looked lovely! I asked her a few questions to help me with other areas eg milk and cheese recommendations but her meals were the main help.

I think sharing food, recipes and recommendations is the best way to get people to try new things.

"I knew the sugar in my hot drinks was bad - I always used to use sweeteners but the apparent link to cancer scared my family and I so we’ve been having sugar since. I will definitely start weaning myself off now."
I did the same with sweeteners. Have now reduced from 2 sugars in tea to a half spoon. I tried to move to zero but can't quite manage it. It's not the end of the world, and I rarely have anything to eat when I'm having a tea, so I let myself off the hook on that one.

"Reduce my alcohol intake to 1 bottle of wine per week, with a view to gradually reducing it to 1-2 glasses per week."
One thing we did that seems to work is, we decant the wine into a carafe, vacuum the rest of the bottle and put it back in the fridge. That's a hard limit on how much we'll drink that night. We are also using smaller glasses! Accidental, it was more about using the 'nice' glasses for ourselves and not 'saving for best', and these glasses are 125 ml, which used to be a standard pub measure. So I feel I'm getting more wine than I am, because I'm having 'more' glasses.

More like sugar in hot drinks, a lot of crisps, and 2 bottles of wine.

There’s probably a certain amount of sugar in most tinned soups, too.

But I do agree with people’s metabolisms varying, sometimes enormously. Dh used to have a young colleague who had 6 spoons of sugar in his coffee, ate loads, and yet was skinny as a rake. He told me that when he was a child, he would invariably wake up hungry in the night, so his mother used to leave a sandwich on his bedside table every night!

Maybe that's because you come along and hijack people's threads to bang on about it. Maybe start your own thread and that way people who wish to discuss the meat trade and all its issues will come on and discuss it with you. This thread is about someone that wants to lose weight. It's not fair of you to try and derail it.

Prioritise protein.
Your diet is high carb (the sugar in the tea and coffee adds up), moderate fat and low (ISH) protein.
Consider fasting. You can introduce this gradually.
Consider varying your exercise. Giving your body a novel training stimulus should help. At the moment it has become very efficient at walking so will burn fewer cals than when you first started. Add in some strength training if poss. This will burn greater cals and give you some muscle definition. Also, consider adding some slow running into your walks (intervals). Look up Jeffing or start C25K or similar. Low intensity steady state cardio will make your body more efficient at burning fat. Strength/resistance training should burn more overall cals.

Could you start a different thread about this? It’s nothing to do with the issue at hand which is why OP isn’t managing to lose weight.

This is why people disengage from the issue, because campaigners jump unwanted in to other conversations with their hectoring language and dead animal guilt trips.

I understand you feel strongly about the subject but if you start a new thread you can make your point there without getting people’s backs up.