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.