[jlawson]

Not being obese has basically nothing to do with "working out". It's all about diet. Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor.

To your question - Lots of them. I'm (relatively) wealthy and I don't want to diet. But I do it anyway because it's worth the short-term suffering for the long-term gain. It's a super obvious good mid and long term investment with a great RoR.

Parent commenter had the causality reversed. Being poor doesn't make you fat; high time preference makes you both poor and fat.

i.e. Someone poor with low time preference won't stay poor for long. The kind of person who stays poor in America for years and years is generally the kind who also has too high time preference to stop eating a full bag of chips every day.

[Zababa]

> Nobody worked out before 1960 and nobody was fat (and lots of people were poor). Nobody in India is fat and nobody work out and they're largely poor.

What percentage of the population had desk jobs before 1960? Standing/moving all day burns a lot of calories, I would assume enough so that you don't put on a few pounds each years which can lead to obesity in the 40s. Of course that's not all the population, some are obese before being teen. But I think that's still an important part. You can't outrun your stomach if you eat a surplus of 2000 calories each day, you can if you eat a surplus of 200.

[watwut]

This is not really true. The amount of physical activity you do absolutely influences both your shape and your health.

Also, we do have more sedentary lifestyles then typical 1960 person. Just in terms of how much you walk during the day, we are already not moving.

[Paul_S]

You have moved the goal posts. Exercise has a positive effect on health, yes. It does not have an effect on whether you're fat. That is down to food intake. That is what the poster was actually saying.

[watwut]

It absolutely does. As proven by people who stopped doing sport without changing diets and then gained weight. As proven by people who started doing sports and then over time lost weight - without any effort to change food (or even without conscious effort to modify their weight).

Also, I said "influences both your shape and your health". I did not moved goalposts.

[kreeben]

Of course exercise has an effect on whether or not you are obese, because if you spend more calories than you absorbed through eating, you will loose weight. Exercise is a way to spend calories.

[adwn]

Although technically true, it's much easier (and quicker) to gain X calories than to lose them via exercise. So if you're overweight, your number one priority is to control your diet. Regular exercise is important for health reasons, but not to lose weight.

There are exceptions. If you're a professional cyclist, for example, and able to output several hundreds of Watt for several hours, 6 days a week, you'll quickly lose weight through exercise. But that's not actionable advice for regular people with a full-time job and a family.

[watwut]

If only thing you will do is to control calories, you are pretty much guaranteed to get into the yoyo cycle of loosing/gaining weight. Majority, like almost all, people who only focus on calories stop performing in their lives, becomes tired/sick, give up and gain weight.

If you are overweight, if your concern is not purely temporary esthetic, focusing on calories control is receipt for long term failure.

Also, the exercise is not done only so that you immediately spend some calories. It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism. All these affects you calorie consumption long term.

High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.

[adwn]

Yes, that's great, exercise is important for your health, I already mentioned that. Doesn't change the fact that you generally won't lose weight through exercise, but through a change in diet.

> It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism.

Those effects are negligible compared to eating, say, 20% less. In particular because exercise makes you hungry, and if you don't control your diet, you'll regain the lost energy through increased appetite afterwards. So again, yes, please exercise regularly, but that alone won't make you lose weight.

> High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.

Uh, yeah, that's exactly what I wrote: professional athletes are an exception, and their case doesn't apply to regular people.

[jhgb]

> and nobody was fat

So the baroque ideal of beauty was a contemporary fantasy?