Yes but then you have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. When something happens (e.g. you are busy in job or you get injured) you no longer can exercise as much as you need so you start gaining weight.
Fundamentally using exercise to lose weight is long-term unachievable because it is unpredictable. Losing weight via diet is much simpler you just eat less, there isn't anything that would objectively stop you from following diet, where as simple incident or scheduling issue can prevent you from exercise. Exercise is fundamentally wrong tool for managing weight.
Exercise is for building muscles, diet is for managing weight.
I can’t agree with this enough. From 2000-2012, I was a part time fitness instructor and I did heavy cardio at least 10 hours a week without fail. I also trained for half marathons later on. I was easily burning 3000-5000 calories a week and I could eat anything and not gain weight.
As soon as I stopped, my weight ballooned. Even when I started eating less, I still can’t get my eating habits in sync with my reduced (3-5 hours a week) exercise schedule. I’ve been consistency about 15-20 pounds over my personal ideal weight.
Besides, my body can’t handle the type and frequency of exercise that it could in my mid 20s to mid 30s.
I think the confusion here is understanding that my point was exercise is to assist with weight loss and not be the primary thing to induce weight loss. If you use it as the primary tool for your weight loss you will fall into the trap that you did anything that disrupts your exercise causes your weight loss to reverse.
If instead you used diet as the primary tool and exercise has the supplement when the supplement falls away it's easier to adjust the diet to compensate. For example a moderate exercise of 30 minutes or so a day can burn an additional 200 calories a day that's 10% of a 2000 calorie diet. If you're in a situation where you cannot exercise cutting out an additional 200 calories is a relatively small amount of food.
Humans are very good at throwing everything into one bag and expecting it to remain forever. Your example of your high amount of exercise to induce weight loss is an example of this. It works but it's also very short-term because it cannot be maintained. I almost like him this to exotic dancers as a profession. It is a good way for a relatively low skill person to achieve a high amount of money in the short term. For example they could go to college and pay for it in cash. But often times the returns are so great it's a difficult to see that this cannot last forever. But as with the body cannot exercise at a high level for ever exotic dancers cannot remain profitable forever. This is why these are tools to allow a short-term process to evolve into a long-term sustainable game. Earn a large amounts of cash when you're young and viable to invest in a education with a future payoff or invest in another long-term payoff. Exercise to supplement your dieting, but the main goal should be evolving your diet to adjust to your caloric needs because that is the long-term.
Fundamentally using exercise to lose weight is long-term unachievable because it is unpredictable. Losing weight via diet is much simpler you just eat less, there isn't anything that would objectively stop you from following diet, where as simple incident or scheduling issue can prevent you from exercise. Exercise is fundamentally wrong tool for managing weight.
Exercise is for building muscles, diet is for managing weight.