[adrian_b]

All the things enumerated by you are indeed essential for a long and healthy life.

Nevertheless, none of them will prevent you to become overweight. Only controlling your diet can enable you to control your weight.

Being overweight is guaranteed to cause health problems, especially at an old age. For example, my father could not take a certain cancer medication that had very good chances to prolong his life by 4 or 5 years, because he was too overweight. He also had a type of renal cancer that appears much more frequently at overweight men.

For most people, exercise can prevent gaining weight with a poor diet only when it is done during many hours every day, which is something that only professional athletes or movie stars can afford to do.

An adequate diet will prevent gaining weight even in a couch potato.

I have verified this in my personal experience, because I have been overweight during many years, despite doing a lot of exercise.

Only after I have altered my diet and I have begun to measure the amounts of everything I eat, I was able to return to an appropriate weight. Now I can increase or decrease my weight at will to reach any desired value, regardless if I also exercise or not.

[horstmeyer]

Yeah, diet is at least 70% and exercise at most 30%. Unfortunately.

[gubernation]

If you come down with some severe health issue from mildly starving yourself for many years you will never attribute it to the starvation. That's part of why anecdotal success stories are mostly worthless, they're laden with agenda and unfalsifiable.

[adrian_b]

Starvation is never necessary for weight control.

This is why there exist official recommendations for an adequate daily intake for proteins, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, for anyone to be able to plan a diet that does not lead to starvation.

Experiments on humans are difficult, so it is not known with accuracy which are the best daily intakes. For example some believe that a daily intake of 0.8 g of proteins per kg is enough, while others believe that a daily intake of 1.2 g/kg would be better.

Even when choosing the maximum daily intakes for all essential nutrients that anyone believes to be adequate, the corresponding energy intake is much less than needed by a human.

So the control of the weight can be done by adjusting only the daily intake of carbohydrates and/or fat that are eaten additionally to a diet that is complete for the other nutrients.

When the daily intake of energy is less than necessary for maintaining the current body weight, one will be hungry all the time, but with an adequate diet there is no starvation that could cause health issues.

Just skipping over meals, without a plan of how to ensure that you eat enough of what matters, could cause real starvation and health issues.

[gubernation]

Amazing response, thank you. This really opened my eyes, I might try IF/TRE now.