Diet vs Exercise Weight Loss

You can't outrun a bad diet. Exercise is ~5% of weight loss. Diet is ~95%.

But it's not that simple -- "eating at a caloric deficit" isn't a constant thing. You can eat less, but your metabolism might drop even further, so eating less calories can lead to weight gain, or a loss of muscle mass that is more than made up for by a gain in fat. And plenty of research shows that exercise is, for most people, counterproductive for weight loss because they wind up eating afterwards than the calories they burn. Yes, exercise leads to general better he

You're bang-on. A lot of overweight people go for a walk or a light jog every day and genuinely try. But they only burn a few hundred calories, then turn around and eat a Quarter Pounder with fries and Coke and think they're coming out ahead. You can lose weight by not exercising but eating less than you burn. But you can't lose weight by exercising and eating more than you burn. A pill won't help this.

Of course it does. Or I should say it can. It's burning calories. If calories in are less than calories used, you lose weight. What is true is that it's very easy to eat more calories than you can practically hope to burn off by exercise. The people doing physical labor for 10 hours a day who are still fat are probably eating Big Macs, Fries, and 48oz cokes for lunch and having 3-6 beers after work.

Exercise does nothing for weight loss if you're eating too much. Exercise has health benefits, but weight loss is not one of them for the vast majority of people. People wildly overestimate how many calories they're burning.

That’s not wrong, but as a counterpoint, the only way for me to lose weight is to count calories (intake), whereas just exercising doesn’t make me lose weight (presumably because then I also eat more if I don’t measure and limit how much I eat). So at least for me I’d say that restricting calorie intake is necessary for losing weight, whereas just exercising only helps in maintaining weight.

This is advice people often give, but unfortunately it's wrong. Exercise and working out are useful and healthy, but it's not a sufficient tool for losing weight in most situations. The core problem is that the amount of calories you eat is in the ballpark of thousands, while a workout will burn in the order of hundreds (excluding athletes and such). This along with metabolic adaptation means that it's always easier to out eat what you burn extra. In other words, you can't ou

You need to reduce your calorie intake. The exercise isn't enough to have a significant impact.

You don't lose weight via exercise, you lose it via diet. Exercise is sometimes found counterproductive in empirical studies because it makes you less compliant with your diet, which is much more important.

Cool, but being physically active is not just to lose weight but to gain health. Your heart works more, your lungs work more, they develop a bit more, putting more oxygen in your body and the effects compound over time. So if you can, do both: control calories intake and exercise.