> It takes a lot of exercise to burn off excess calories, and virtually no effort to simply not consume them.

> and virtually no effort to simply not consume them.

I don't think this is true. The executive function required to manage the dopamine cycle that food generates is incredibly taxing. I honestly think this is a result of our food systems being incredibly optimized to drive purchasing decisions...

Separately, this reminds me that I should eat some veggies.

Exercise moderates negative feelings and hormones and often causes people to maintain a better sleep and diet routine. Everything in life becomes easier with a light/moderate regular exercise routine. It's inseparable from diet.

I agree, but we need to stop with the one thing. A decent diet is important, and so is cardio. And, so is strength. A person will lose a % of muscle/strength each year after age 50 or so. The higher base you start with the more strength a person will have as they get older, which helps prevent falls and other old age issues.

This is only true to a point. When I was cycling 20 miles 5x per week, I literally couldn't eat enough to avoid losing weight. (This was not a problem, I've never been thin.)

Yes, when I switch into training mode, the fat melts off in short order (I've never accumulated more than 20 pounds of unwanted mass, and when I did it was following a broken leg and 2 years spent largely sedentary)

In the past I've toned my training down due to exhaustion, not from the physical output but from having to constantly be shoving calories down my throat.

This is very common among endurance athletes. It's extremely difficult to consistently recover from a 1,000-2,000 calorie deficit every time you do a weekly long run or ride. Glycogen reabsorption is optimally effective for only a relatively brief time period post-exercise and there are upper limits on your rate of glycogen resynthesis.

You can't outrun a bad diet, but a bad diet can give you the runs.

Switching to carnivore diet gives you 2lb/1kg weight loss a week without any exercise and any feeling of hunger or weakness (assuming you are overweight).

While you can't easily burn off excess calories, a good amount of muscle mass can significantly increase your metabolic rate as well, so there are effects from repeated exercise beyond just calorie consumption.

Citation needed because “significantly”. Studies I have seen in this (not my field) indicate that the effect is measurable, but basically negligible.

The ancestor comment saying to do cardio is right. Strength training is also important for health, but for different reasons (motor function, bone density, etc.). The act of strength training also burns some calories, regardless of resultant muscle mass.

Yes, I do have a citation : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2931407/#!po=8....

Every extra kg of muscle is estimated to contribute 21kcal/day to the RMR. If you put on, say, 15kg of muscle over a few years (quite doable if you are very sedentary and have low muscle mass), that's an extra 300kcal/day. Add in 30 mins of biking a day, and say 100 cal from strength training on average, that's a good 600-700 calories per day!

Bad diet, as in Mcdonalds every day and lots of sugar, is going to be bad for you even with exercise, but thats because you probably aren't getting the nutrients that you need.

The big issue with diets is that people eat too much carbs, and if you aren't burning those carbs for energy, this is where problems happen. Healthy regiment of exercise will help greatly with this, giving you the option to eat tasty foods with carbs and maintain a good weight without any problems.

> You can’t outrun a bad diet.

It gets even worse, when the obese try to outrun a bad diet they not only fail but they often injure themselves in the process.

It always pains me to see obese people out on the trails beating themselves up in an obviously misguided but respectable effort to lose weight.