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?

Sugar in drinks, wine, crisps and biscuits and lack of movement at a glance.

Basically, and you know this, it's not a headscratcher, it's calories in being more than the calories out. There is so much confusing information out there, try to cut out everything processed for three months and see how you're going then.

Eating too many calories for what your body needs. Track your calories for a week, then look to be in a deficit, this is the only way you’ll loose weight.

yep, your second and third paragraph are totally irrelevant to your weight.

You could substitute the sourdough for eggs and tomatoes to go with the avocado in the morning.

I know what I cut out when I was thin. Bread and cheese. They are my vices and I have very little willpower round them. I would say bin the biscuits and wine as they are not nutritious and will mean you don't lose any weight even if your actual meals are ok.

It was easier when I was younger to only buy, prepare and eat healthy food for myself. Now with a family who are troughing all sorts it makes it doubly hard to be virtuous!

You have said you drink 1-2 coffees and 3-4 teas, every day, each with a sugar. That’s 4-6 teaspoons of sugar every day, before you add wine and biscuits. You are taking in huge amounts of sugar daily. Cut out all the drinks and get used to water. I squeeze a bit of lemon in for some flavour.

Im a sugar addict and haven’t cracked it, so very sympathetic…. But you can’t be surprised at being overweight when you are dosing sugar 6-8 times a day?

Like I was because you were eating too many calories that you weren’t burning off. Simple as that!

That’s quite a lot of wine. I’d knock that on the head for a start. It’s just empty calories and has no nutritional benefit. Losing the sugar from your tea and coffee would also help. I drank tea with sugar when I was young then gradually reduced the amount. Now I couldn’t tolerate any sugar or sweetener in tea.

Your meals sound quite healthy but you haven’t mentioned portion sizes. People are often eating much bigger portions than they need to.

Fasting can be helpful. I generally don’t eat until late morning or lunchtime so that is a ‘fast’ of about 16 hours since my evening meal the night before.

Also exercise: I recommend lifting some heavy weights two or three times a week.

Came on to say "well it's obvious" but lots of pps have got there first.
You don't do any strenuous exercise, you drink a lot of wine, you have sugary coffees and you snack on crisps and biscuits.
Happily though, as your main meals sound healthy you could turn this around fairly easily if you reduced the sugar, cut the booze and did some exercise.

Also put 6 spoons of sugar in a cup to see what you are consuming per day then increase it to 42 spoons to see what you are consuming in a week through sugar in hot drinks alone (and 168 spoons for a month!)

Is that 1 bag of crisps a day??
Obvious issues are the wine, crips and biscuits.
Also portion size??

the only way is to log everything you eat in an app like nutra check (everything ie the milk for your tea) over a long period ie a month and see what your weekly average comes out at.

these WIEIAD are never accurate- you’ve written your best day, nor the day there was birthday cake, a meal out, popcorn or the movies or a croissant hastily grabbed for breakfast.

when you have your average calories over a month find out your TDEE and see how little you would be eating if every single day you could only have say 1400 calories. It’s eye opening.

That's really quite a lot of wine for one woman to have to herself.

Cut out the wine and biscuits. Have larger meals so you don't need to keep snacking.

People think if they have tiny healthy meals, everything else is fine and you can "afford to have a treat". Actually you should have large healthy meals so you feel sated and don't need to snack

It'll almost certainly be the volume of food you're eating.

There have been so many threads over the years asking slim people what their normal daily diet looks like, and a huge number don't eat breakfast because they're just not hungry for it.

Also, anyone slim I've ever worked with, lived with or gone on holiday with, I've noticed they tend to have naturally smaller appetites.

And walking (while great for circulation and joints) is just a basic thing that humans do, yet today we all seem to think it's worthy of mention.

Only drink water
Cut out all or most sugar and carbs
Do proper weight loss exercise (45 minutes a day - get out of puff for 30 minutes of that 45 minutes)
Count calories religiously - every single thing you put into your mouth gets counted
Stick to 1300 calories a day made up of mainly protein and fruit/veg

Do this ^ for 6 weeks , following it to the letter. Weigh yourself weekly
Report back 🙂

Your main diet isn’t too bad, if you were just eating that you’d be fine. But then you add on a share bag of crisps, biscuits and 1-2 bottles of wine each week, plus you don’t really do much exercise only walking.

There’s around 700 calories in a bottle of wine, so 1400 extra calories each week if 2 bottles of wine before the other extras.

Wine , a bottle = 700 calories
X 2 = 1200
Sharing bag crisps = 5-600
Biscuits = 60-100 calories each depending on type
Sugar = 387 calories per 100g
Rough estimate 3000 empty calories per week-this is why

To lose/ gain 1kg per week is around x 3500 calories
Also " cooking from scratch" doesnt mean you dont put on weight, check portion sizes also
Ready meals are pre portioned so sometimes its easier to keep track.

Too many carbs. Also those 'healthy' bars like Nature's Valley are no better than a chocolate bar. You would be better off eating a couple of squares of very dark chocolate. Wine is also highly calorific, plus walking, although great for fitness, doesn't really burn many calories.

Healthy food ≠ low calorie. Many foods you eat are nutritious but energy dense. Then there is portion size, and add snacking/calories from drinks on top.

I would suggest weighing and logging every single thing you eat over the course of 3-4 weeks to get a clear picture of calories and macros. It may be eye opening. Use an app such as My Fitness Pal or Nutracheck.

Also calculate your TDEE for a sedentary lifestyle to get an idea of where you need to be to maintain at your target weight / or cut to lose weight.

If you don’t measure it you can’t manage it. It will be a pain weighing and logging every single thing, but you should be able to stop it once you know where you are going awry.

I cut the milk and sugar from tea and coffee decades ago. It was a few weeks of "urgh", but it quickly passed. Now I can't take tea and coffee other than black no sugar.

You don't even need to eat as little as 1300 if you cut carbs and eat clean.

I really can’t reply to everyone individually, but thank you so much to you all for your replies, they are really helpful.

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.

Lots of people have pointed out the snacking and wine. I know obviously these things are bad for me, but I genuinely would’ve thought that with my diet being quite healthy that I could get away with eating and drinking these - and certainly not making me this overweight.

Someone pointed out that the alcohol and snacking is adding 4000 calories per week!!! I’m shocked!

Also, I really thought my diet was very healthy (apart from the snacking and alcohol), and I’m shocked to read that I’m eating too many carbohydrates, especially as sourdough is a healthier bread. I genuinely thought it was a reasonable amount.

I have a very stressful and quite senior job and I feel a real need to treat myself to the alcohol every week, and the snacks. I really need help to try and break this cycle and look to other things to look forward to.

I’ll start with half a spoon of sugar and try to wean myself down to no sugar.
Start eating one slice of bread less per day.
Reduce my alcohol intake to 1 bottle of wine per week, with a view to gradually reducing it to 1-2 glasses per week.
Swap the biscuits and Nature Valley bar to nuts and fruit.

I really do need to exercise and I’m actively trying to see where I can fit this in around family commitments and mine and my husband’s work schedules. I may have to exercise at home rather than the gym, but I can’t motivate myself.

You’re drinking around 20 units of alcohol a week. Kindly, this is far too much. Plus the snacks and minimal exercise, that’ll do it.

Do you have a fitness tracker watch? You also need to understand calories. My body (weight/height/age) only uses 1,500 calories a day without exercise. It’s nothing - especially if wine, crisps, sugar in tea etc is involved. I appreciate your base calorie burn will be higher but do you know what it is?

It's very simple, you're consuming more calories than you burn. You need to work out your TDEE and count everything you eat and drink to plan to consume below your TDEE and you'll lose weight. Of course WHAT you eat is also important but that's mainly to ensure health and increase satiety. It still comes down to calories.

You are having almost 700 calories a week just from the sugar in your teas and coffees.
A bottle of wine can be anywhere from 650 to 850 calories so 2 of them a week another 1500 calories.
A share size bag of crisps is around 750 calories.
A single biscuit can be anything good from around 75 calories to 150 cals as you say you have 2 a day you can add another 1400 cals minimum per week.
There's 50 cals in 7g of butter. Thats the size of one of the little portions you get in a cafe. Most people would have more than that if spreading it at home so say 10 g of butter a day adds up to 560 cals a week. A nature valley bar can rage between 95 and 200 cals so there's another approx 600 to 700 cals for your week days.
Just what I've listed above comes to 5500 calories a week. It takes about 3500 cals over what your maintenence weight needs to gain 1lb of fat. So if you are getting the calories that your body needs from your meals nlbefore you include what I've listed above you will gain weight. Depending on what height you are then you could well be over eating approx 800 cals a day. It really is that simple. It is amazing how all the little bits and bobs like a biscuit, an extra tea with sugar or a handful of crisps add up. I would be willing to bet that what you have listed dosent tell.the full story. There will be an extra biscuit here and there.
The only exercise listed is walking. Walking that amount isnt going to do much other than help you maintain the weight you are at.