[saberience]

Exercise will help. It's Physics, it's not an opinion based thing that works for some people and not others. It's energy in vs energy out. If you simply eat less calories then you exercise/use, you WILL lose weight.

I don't get this weird thing people do where they act like their bodies don't follow the laws of conservation of energy.

[hackingonempty]

It is of course true that caloric input is a thermodynamic limit and restricting it sufficiently relative to caloric expenditure will cause you to lose weight. (Lisa, in this household we obey the laws of thermodynamics...)

However, not all calories are the same, metabolism is dynamic, and the brain is complex and exerts a powerful influence over behavior.

Increasing exercise will make you hungrier and most people are simply unable to resist this and end up not losing weight. It is why there is a common saying that "you cannot outrun your fork." Restricting calories generally is difficult in today's environment with plentiful calorie dense food everywhere. People don't cook as much as they used to and restaurant meals have more calories than ever.

AFAIK GLP-1 drugs work because they calm the minds desire to eat which is baked in deeply from millions of years of our ancestors struggling to get sufficient food.

[Aaargh20318]

The problem with exercise is that our bodies are quite efficient with their energy usage. A few minutes of ‘calories in’ takes many hours of ‘calories out’ to burn.

You can’t really exercise enough to offset the food you can eat in a day, even if you somehow were able to dedicate all your time to exercising you would still have to limit your food intake.

Add to that the fact that exercise is mind numbingly boring and you have to conclude it is not a practical solution at all.

[buck746]

More importantly we have decades of irrefutable evidence that diet and exercise alone are about as effective as abstinence only sex education. It's great there are people that can just decide to eat less, but it's foolish to assume that can work for everyone.

It's odd how people act as tho there's a "moral argument" against using a tool to help reach the goal. It feels a lot like the argument that "morals are from religion", as if you need god to know that murder isn't really a productive activity (unless you work in a slaughterhouse).

I wish American money could go back to having "mind your business" printed on it instead of "in god we trust", it was a huge loss to all of us when that garbage was passed. It was also a huge loss when everyone just decided to go along with saying "taxpayer money" instead of saying "public funds/money", but slippery psychological slopes are everywhere.

[Aaargh20318]

> It's great there are people that can just decide to eat less, but it's foolish to assume that can work for everyone.

More importantly: I don’t want to eat less. I want to eat more. There is so much amazing food.

[tayo42]

You can pick better activities for exercise. You don't have to run on a treadmill

[hackingonempty]

> You can’t really exercise enough to offset the food you can eat in a day, even if you somehow were able to dedicate all your time to exercising you would still have to limit your food intake.

People racing the Tour Divide, a 2700 mile solo unsupported bikepacking race through the Rocky Mountains, lose weight when riding their bikes 18 hours a day for 2-3+ weeks straight. They describe being unable to choke down enough food even though what they are eating is very calorie dense. Hotdogs, burritos, burgers, pizza, a pound of gummies every day, chocolate milk and ice cream when resupplying, McDonalds where they fill their hydration bladders with PowerAde, anything they can get their hands on quickly when they arrive at a small mountain town which frequently has nothing more than a gas station.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/tourdivide/posts/24754803527...

Obviously not a practical solution as you say but they do exercise enough to offset the food when eating as much as they can.

[phil21]

Great? When I worked landscaping I would plow through 2-3 double quarter pounder meals every lunch break. And then a dominos pizza or three when I got home for dinner. Plus a gallon or two of full sugar soda throughout the day, and snacks.

It’s not practical in the least for the average office worker to outrun the fork. It’s just silly advice and pointless to even bring up. When it takes an hour or more of treadmill work to cancel a single donut you don’t need to think about it any longer than that.

You exercise for health. Not to lose weight. Until you are at the margins and can consistently create an extra 100-200 calorie deficit by walking for an hour every evening or whatever.

My three gym days a week don’t do much for the scale. Those are for physical and mental health. The weight part is in the kitchen.

[dghlsakjg]

It's physics that you just need to go a certain speed to put an object in orbit.

That doesn't make it an easy thing to do.

Fat people are aware of diet and exercise. They aren't stupid.

Until you have been chronically obese, or helped someone that is chronically obese, you don't understand that it is a deeply rooted subconscious issue, not a physics issue.

Fat people don't want to be fat, anymore than depressed people want to be sad. But something in their minds or bodies makes it non-optional. Pharmaceutical interventions change that thing.

When people - in their millions - say that this is the only effective thing, you could, I dunno, believe them. Or at least believe the pharmacological/medical science, which is, to circle back, all just physics.

[SpaceNugget]

They said exercise doesn't help them with reducing the feeling of hunger. I don't know why they thought it would, because generally if you do a lot of exercise you get more hungry not less hungry, but regardless, you are responding to something that wasn't said.

[crooked-v]

Exercise will burn calories, yes. But my life doesn't fit the several hours of exercise a day, every day, forever, that would be needed as an already-small person to burn the 1000+ excess calories a day my body is constantly hungry for.