No, no, no.

The correct exercise is critical for many people to lose weight. Why?

Weight lifting and some HIIT exercises help you build lean body mass, which will raise your metabolic rate. Many people have "poor metabolisms" because they have less lean body mass than expected. Weight lifting in particular will also help you protect your muscle mass as you lose weight.

If you do not lift weights when you lose weight, you will lose a lot of muscle, which will tank your metabolic rate. When people talk about losing weight, they really mean losing fat. If your goal is to lose fat, you need to weight lift.

Beyond that, exercise can help with leptin. Many overweight people have leptin issues, which causes them to overeat, which makes them even heavier, which makes their leptin ever worse. It could either be too little leptin or a lack of sensitivity to leptin. Regardless, leptin is the hormone that signals satiety, and if this hormone is out of whack, you will overeat.

Either way, this is not a good situation.

Recent research says that exercising 300 minutes a week can help people reverse this leptin issue. I have been doing this myself, and it has been a key way that I have been able to get my hunger levels under control and help me lose more than 50 lbs.

Here is a write up about the study: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/well/move/to-lose-weight-...

You should not exercise with the mindset of burning calories. You should exercise with the mindset of building lean tissue, with increasing your cardiovascular fitness, with increasing your mobility, and with helping to get your hormones into a good place.

But please exercise. If you do the right exercises with the right mindset, it can help you lose weight and keep it off.

Yes, you can't outrun a bad diet. But you also will struggle to beat poor leptin levels too.

Five hours a week is no small investment. Focusing on calories/kJ in < out is much easier as it can be done incrementally, such as by not eating past a certain time of day, leaving out especially high sugar snacks, etc. There is no getting around obesity being a dietary issue.

That said, it's definitely not an either/or situation.

GPs point is that exercise can help with those things: if you feel less hungry (because of leptin), you fill eat less calories or fewer snacks (or healthier ones).

I really wondered why this was the top comment on HN. Its just wrong. (And you are right - "Exercise does not lose weigh"). In fact, the body adapts to your lifestyle. And while running can burn alot of calories at the beginning it gets less once the body adapted.

Its simple to lose weight. Eat less. Lots of "people" advertise their programs but at the end its simple as that. Eat. less.

See my other comment, but exercise can be a critical way that people both lose weight and maintain weight loss. Losing weight is relatively easy, but maintaining it is hard, and exercise can be critical to the latter.

You need to stop thinking about exercise as burning calories. Exercise can be critical in getting hormones, particularly leptin, back to a normal function. Exercise, particularly weightlifting, can help build muscle and prevent muscle loss from losing weight.

Eating less is not the secret. That's to reductionist.

The secret is altering your energy balance.

You can alter your energy balance from a combination of diet and exercise, and the way you handle both will further impact your energy balance. Your hormones will also play a critical role in your ability to maintain this as well.

Getting good sleep will also be critical for altering this energy balance and setting yourself up for weight loss. People who don't get 7-9 hours of sleep a night aren't going to be producing enough human growth hormone at night, and they won't be able to recover from exercise or build lean tissue.

I would never, ever recommend someone try to lose any significant amount of weight without weightlifting. It's a fool's errand.

Yes, you'll lose the weight by eating less, and in the process you may end up having half of that weight loss be muscle mass. Now your metabolic rate is in the gutter, and you have set yourself up perfectly for a rebound in weight.

If you want longterm weight loss, exercise and eat well. Try to get at least 10,000 steps a day and then aim for 4-6 days a week of strenuous exercise.

How long have you been exercising and how many people have you trained?

I’m always wary of essays like this one. People figure out how to manage their own bodies and somehow extrapolate their lessons to all humans.

The only people I've met who have lost weight and kept it off effectively cut crappy carbs a lot, and included an exercise regimen. The actual dietary and exercise specifics varied a lot per person, as did the ordering (I know someone who lost 70 pounds via keto, and only on hitting his goal weight did he add exercise in, as well as loosen his diet and macros), but those were the consistent attributes to anyone who took weight off and kept it off for > a year.

I've also met plenty of people who yo-yoed just by "eating less", which is what the grandparent comment was claiming. No change of -what- they ate, no inclusion of exercise, just tried to calorie restrict. They'd lose weight, possibly a lot (depends on the person)...and invariably plateau, get frustrated, and put it back on.

Obviously this is not a random sampling, but there's definitely a pattern that emerges if you look at how people who have lost weight took it off and kept it off. And there's also definitely a pattern if you look at the people who have lost weight and regained it. "Eat less" is not helpful advice (which is what the parent post was responding to). It's not entirely wrong (exercising, as per the parent, helped them eat less at meal time. Restricting carbs also helps people eat fewer overall calories too), but it's not particular actionable as formulated, and it reduces weight loss to a "willpower" problem, which study after study has shown is doomed to fail, and also leads to all sorts of negative feelings along the way.

Eating less as a dieting strategy in general doesn't work long term because it relies on willpower, a limited resource.

Any dieting strategy which doesn't involve eliminating sugar in liquid or edible form and replacing it satiating foods isn't going to work long term.

I tried to lose some weight with strict calorie counting once. ~1400/day.

No loss in about 60 days, with zero cheating. I also started doing a lot of cardio at the same time (bike riding, running). No help there, either.

Gained a ton of fat fast when I stopped and went back to eating normally (for me).

Yeah, I'll stick to weight lifting. Dieting (past a certain point, anyway) fucks up my metabolism.

These kind of comments without more context really serve to confuse the situation. If you only ate 1400 calories a day (a brutal challenge for lots of people) and you didn't lose weight it's because your BMR is 1400.

So.. are you 5'2" female or a 6'3" male? 1400 is (potentially) appropriate for one and brutally low for another. Gained fat FAST after eating more? Well sure if you went from 1400 to 2800 and your BMR is 1400 that's gonna make anyone gain weight. Faster than your normally would because your metabolism changed based on your previous input? That doesn't track with conventional knowledge.

I was holding steady with probably a 3k/day diet before that. Abs visible, full-on six-pack if I had a really active week (went swimming a lot in a Summer week, stuff like that). Down from ~4k/day of pure junk food in high school (trim figure and maintained that just fine at that rate, TYVM—I do not know what teenagers do with all those extra calories, it's like magic). Not an athlete, so no Michael Phelps routine doing anything, just young-person metabolism and a lot of weight lifting.

I did the diet to try to make the ol' abs pop even more, the idea was that I'd get down to where I wanted to be fast then ease up a little and hold there (diet's the main thing that matters, everyone says, after all). It backfired badly. Two months of constantly feeling hungry, to no benefit. I'm sure my metabolism was on the way down anyway (early 20s at the time), but that diet killed it dead in just a couple months.

Weight lifting continues to be more effective for me than it "should" be according to common wisdom, even if I'm not doing enough to pack on more muscle. Whatevs.

[EDIT] Incidentally, I wish dieting worked as well for me as all those online calculators say, because I find it a lot easier than working out. Takes negative time, for one thing, and costs negative money. It's great.

Was it weight training or cardio? I suspect they are not equal when it comes to weight loss. I do a lot of cardio and while it makes me feel good, it doesn't trigger much weight loss. Weight training in my experience does help.

My anecdotal experience as an obese 40 year old who recently started strength training - my appetite has somewhat increased, but I still end up eating less than when I was sedentary.