> They need to live more active lives.

When I become more active, I also become more hungry due to the extra energy consumption. The net effect is little weight loss and more often than not weight gain. While being physically active is beneficial to health in many ways, it does little for losing or maintaining weight, at least for me.

deficit = tdee - intake

Active life = higher TDEE which means you can eat more food while still maintaining same deficit.

Exercise also stimulates digestion and triggers a hunger response in many people. This is why exercise without diet often fails to result in weight loss.

People overestimate calorie burn from exercise.

For example, a lifting session may burn 200-300kcal and then they'd think they've burned a lot, so they will end up eating 500kcal back.

so as a result there is no deficit there.

Exercise typically doesn’t cause people to eat because they are confused about estimating caloric expenditure, it causes them to eat by inducing hunger.

Even people who track their calories perfectly often eat when hungry because it is the most basic of human instincts and our brains and bodies are wired to respond accordingly.

Higher physical activity does not always boost hunger, it can have hunger suppressing effect too.

>Even people who track their calories perfectly often eat when hungry because it is the most basic of human instincts and our brains and bodies are wired to respond accordingly.

Many people can track calories, hardly any of them are tracking calorie burn and no the ones from your watches or displayed on cardio devices aren't correct.

Many times the eating more issue you are seeing is because average guy may estimate that 1 lifting session burns 800-1000kcal. How do i know? i've asked random people in gym this question.

Obesity also doesn’t affect everyone. But within that group, we’re typically talking about the people who do tend to have more eating triggers than people who are not obese.

It is hard to accurately calculate the calories burned in a lifting session but the ability to count calories has little to do with the causes of obesity. Even if a person could count them perfectly that doesn’t mean they are capable of manipulating the numbers to meet their goals.

Unfortunately the reason many live sedentary lives is indirectly a result of broader societal conditions. The trend towards a more sedentary society is not a coincidental individual failing of millions of people. It is because our economies and our built environment contributed to it.

Yes. Our ancestors walked everywhere, all the time. Most of us now live in a place where there is almost no place useful you can walk to in your daily life. To get anything done, you have to drive.

If you live in a place where waking to get your daily life needs met is possible, good for you!

It's great to be active, but there's more to it than that, namely that our modern world has highly engineered our food to be highly energy-dense and incredibly appealing. So the root cause is an evolutionary mismatch with our environment, which has diverged incredibly from early humans. Expecting an individual to overcome won't generally work, since their brains are simply wired for it. Sure there are some people who can simply choose to ignore the fast food place at every corner and go to the gym via willpower alone, but they are exceptional in their brain's capacity for executive control.

Personally, I look at GLP-1 agonists akin to wearing glasses. Some people are just born without the ability to regulate their appetite in accordance with our society, but there is a tool / prosthetic to change that. That said, it's not one or the other, it's always great to be more active.