My understanding is that the metabolic rate slows down to compensate for the caloric loss from exercise

The only consistent way to enter a caloric deficit is to diet, which is very hard for the obvious reasons

The main effect of diet is that more muscle can slightly increase your BMR, and the other health benefits of being in shape. It does also increase calorie loss from activity at the margins, even if it's a pretty small effect. (maybe 100-200 more per day etc in my experience.)

None of this will help much without the diet, but it's not useless.

Technically yes but not for the reason you think.

Muscle and fat are metabolically active, which means they burn calories just to stay alive. If you lose fat, guess what? Your body doesn’t need as many calories to survive.

Another factor is the calories you burn not exercising. We burn calories all day, even when we’re not exercising but when people are dieting they tend to have lower energy so the don’t move around as much.

So yes, technically metabolical rate slows down but it’s not some conspiracy against you. It’s a direct result of losing fat.

That’s why some people lift weights while dieting to build muscle at the same time they’re losing fat. Personally, I haven’t had a huge issue with caloric restriction so I’m doing a more intense diet in the short term, then cooling off once I get to my goal weight and switching to more weigh lifting.

I would like to add that exercise also helps you to influence where you lose weight. Your body will often choose to lose muscle mass when you are running a calorie deficit. If you lift weights you are stimulating muscle growth which helps to shift your body to lose weight through fat loss.

That's certainly part of it (and people should absolutely exercise, regardless of their weight/metabolic/body fat goals, to be clear) but my understanding is that your immune system also reduces its activity level after increasing your level of physical activity, reducing caloric expenditures, as do a few other bodily systems

Losing weight is done in the kitchen, not the gym.

In fact exercise makes you crazy hungry, which sabotages tons of people's weight loss efforts.

It's better to lose weight, learn how your body and calories work, and then start implementing gym work.

I can't imaging losing weight consistently without exercise. Diet is most important. However even for the most obsessed of us counting calories is difficult to get right all of the time. Muscle mass consumes calories and exercise creates a deficit. Both provide margin that help account for calorie counting mistakes. I find that exercise forms a virtuous cycle in dieting. If I go on a 500 calorie bike ride that's 500 more calories I can eat that day.

That's not quite what I am saying. You need to learn about calories and build a proper intuition about them before really getting into exercising. Otherwise you end up easily out eating what you burn.

I have known way too many people who regularly exercise but still cannot lose weight. The problem they have is that thry burn 500 calories exercising, and then go unknowingly eat 900 calories because they exercised.

You need to learn how to handle hunger. To control your own urges. Once you do, dieting becomes easy, the only part that sucks is the low energy and irritability.

Intermittent fasting is a great teacher in this regard.

I’ve actually found running decreases my appetite.

While you are running or just in general? The former makes sense, but the latter is weird. Telling an obese person to run also makes orthopedic doctors cringe. Swimming or strength training are a lot safer for their joints. I personally find regular running makes me super hungry for anything and everything. Making sure what is at hand is healthy is critical for me.

It’s normal for people to feel less hungry after an intense run. Not everybody, all the time but it’s normal.

You’re stuff about obese people and joints isn’t relevant to this discussion on hunger.

You pay $100 a month but the fine print is you have to show up everyday and work out!