Exercise is tricky. If you do no exercise at all, you get really sluggish and tired all the time as your metabolism slows down, which then requires further caloric restriction. This works (especially, it seems, in a time/place that feels like winter, as the cold and darkness coupled with the lethargy seems like it maybe downregulates hunger), but it's really hard because now you have to barely eat at all.

If you exercise a bunch, you burn energy exercising and you also upregulate your metabolism significantly, giving you a higher calorie budget -- but you also really, really heavily upregulate hunger. If you exercise enough that the calories burn "matter", you're likely to feel the need to eat way way way too much.

Doing "just enough" exercise that you don't become sluggish and lethargic is probably the right place to be purely from a weight-loss perspective.

But in my experience, the hard part about losing weight isn't really anything other than "the amount I have to eat to not feel miserable all the time is too much"

Diets do work, in that if you want few enough calories, you will lose weight. They "don't work" because asking someone to spend months or years continually in escalating misery generally eventually results in noncompliance -- and if your body tells you that it wants 2500 calories per day and you go on an 1500 calorie diet to create a 500-calorie actual deficit to lose about 0.8-1.0lb/week, you're go to feel really really hungry 24 hours a day.

Some folks report that if they force themselves to eat less after a month or two, their sense of hunger downregulates and it gets easier. Other folks report that hunger remains a constant companion, never relenting until they broke.

I started intermittent fasting, basically eating nothing between dinner at 8PM and lunch the next day at 1PM. The most striking thing is that I eat much less for lunch than I usually do, I'm full very quickly. And the effect continues throughout the day (smaller dinners, less / no snacking)

Had to give up coffee in the mornings because of the milk I put in it and the fact I can't just have coffee on an empty stomach. I have 3-4 cups of tea and 1.5L of water before lunch. Makes me piss like a race horse and gives me an overall "clean" feeling with no real hunger feelings at all.

It's only been 2-3 weeks so too early to say if the diet's any good, but at least there's no hunger / misery / counting calories. Overall pretty easy.

During lockdown, I ended up adopting roughly that eating schedule unintentionally -- just because my routine didn't have a "breakfast" gap.

It did not work for me at all, I gained SO MUCH weight, because by lunchtime I was ravenous and couldn't stop myself from eating way, way, way more than I would have if I split between breakfast and lunch. I mean, it was also a stressful time, so it's hard to compare, but I put on 20 pounds in a few months, after having been stable weight for 5-6 years.

I started forcing myself to get up earlier and have a breakfast of around 350ish calories (basically a bowl of cereal or oatmeal or something with milk), and that allowed me to immediately stop the weight gain, because I removed probably 750+ calories of "excess" lunch in exchange. Still struggling to lose what I gained, but I've been stable for 18+ months since I made space for breakfast.

It's really interesting how individual some of this stuff ends up seeming. For example, I have learned that I can not be a stable weight (at any weight, it seems) if I drink sugared drinks with food. It seems that if I have a sugary drink with my food, I actually feel the urge to eat more food in addition to the calories in the drink, leading to a massive downward (well, upward in weight) spiral. I almost completely cut out sugary drinks from my life when I figured this out. (I now have maybe two or three sweet drinks per month on average. I haven't lost any weight this way, but I have regained stability).

I am a firm believer that the real solutions to the obesity epidemic are all going to be around helping people control their hunger sensation (be that with dietary changes, coaching and counselling, routine changes, chemistry or other medical intervention). Learning how much you should eat to be the weight you want to be isn't that hard. Spending about a third of your concentration power at all times to avoid the overpowering urge to raid the pantry, on the other hand, is really hard.

I'm glad you found something that works for you. I'm still working on finding it for myself, though I did manage to stop the bleeding at least.

If you're already overweight then exercise is important for reducing insulin resistance. Any resistance keeps ones insulin levels high, which is bad for many reasons, but also increases the feelings of hunger.

I lost 60lbs in about a year almost exclusively based around a large amount of exercise.

My diet was bad and I was eating far above 2000kcal on many days. I just exercised a lot. 1h of fairly intense cardio at least 6 days a week, though I would always round up to the next 10 min mark and do more like 70 or 80 min per day.

Some days I would order pizza or something and some dessert in the evening when I knew this would push me into the 3000kcal range and in return did 2h or 3h exercise routines fairly regularly, often times while eating the pizza.

Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories. Last night I showed my wife a hand with 5 Brazil nuts. That’s equivalent to a one mile run at my weight.

Obviously different things work for different people, but no amount of cardio is going to offset a terrible diet for most people. Caloric deficit and intermittent fasting combined with exercise is the easiest and fastest way (imho) to get your body to start metabolizing fat stores.

> Depending on your weight, an hour of cardio is only 500 or so calories.

That's a massive number of calories! Might not look like much compared to how much is in, say, a bagel, but use a calculator to figure out what your basal metabolic rate is (what your body consumes just you doing nothing, sort of) and you'll find that extra 500 gives you a ton of headroom in whatever your diet is. A week and a half of that would be a solid pound on it's own (yes yes a pound is less calories than 500x10.5, but weight loss is not 1:1 like that for many reasons).

My app and Google tell me running 6 miles in an hour burns 800+ calories.

Mass will affect the amount of calories burned.

Are you at all worried that your eating habits/patterns haven't changed and you are compensating with lots of exercise? It seems to work great for weight loss but at some point you will plateau and maintanance seems difficult that way?

>Exercise doesn't help very much, it's really all about diet.

For me, exercise leads to me feeling pretty crappy if I eat badly/too much and drink alcohol. So the exercise leads to me not wanting to feel like that, which leads to improvement in diet.

I lost almost 40 pounds strictly on following a specific diet with no exercise. Alternated between High fat/low carb and med carb/low fat meals.