Exercise powerfully contributes to your overall health but it isn't the primary mean by which calories are kept in equilbrium. Worse, your body compensate by reducing basal metabolic rate and other mechanism. So it's an uphill struggle.

Changing your diet will have much greater bang for your bucks and much 'easier' to do.

I'm no expert but don't you have that backwards? Dieting will lower your basal metabolic rate, whereas exercise will increase it. So you burn energy exercising, and you burn more energy when resting, and if you gain muscle that also raises your BML. From my own experience it's just way easier to exercise my way into the shape I want than it is to think about my diet. I get a little fatter in the winter and I lean out again in the spring as I get back on my bike. Just easier to modulate that side of the equation, for me.

I can't see the logic in declaring one side of an equilibrium equation to be secondary. Both sides are obviously of the same importance.

Execise is health hygiene, its not a diet plan. This is obvious when you look at how hard it is to not eat a snickers bar vs how hard it is to burn off a snickers bar worth of calories via exercise. What you are talking about above is maybe a twenty pound seasonal discrepancy, it's not what most fat people are dealing with (also a quarter of that twenty pounds is just excess water you probably shed in the first week of adding back increased activity in the summer)

I don't see the explanatory powers of the irresistible Snickers, since they are universally available and the same price everywhere.

Its easy to not eat a snickers. To burn a snickers off through exercisw you are looking at a half hour to an hours commitment in the gym depending on what you are doing. You can override what most people call a weekly exercise plan with a couple snickers and a few fancy coffee drinks

Ah I see. I had the sense of what you meant backwards.

Yah, sorry, I was also short for time to the point of extreme brevity but not to the point of delaying responses until I had more time for this whole thread. I should have also given the example of t he ideal male BMI being 18-25 so call it 22 and over 30 BMI being obese which, on a 5'10" person (pretty average for a male) corresponds to roughly 154 lbs vs roughly 205 lbs for a 50 lb spread. It's not the 10-20 lb spread that is probably seasonally normal. Trying to reverse that with just exercise is a gargantuan task, it's primarily diet that will reverse something like that (but you definitely should still exercise, it does all sorts of good things for your body on a reasonable schedule with reasonable recovery periods, especially resistance training, which is more true the older you are)

That one large Baskin Robbins Chocolate Oreo Shake has 2600 kcal and to burn that amount of calories, you'll probably need to go for a 3-hour run. And I imagine not a lot of adults have the time to go run for hours to keep up with their high-calorie diets.

I've heard that keeping a calorie intake diary is an effective way to lose weight. I also had pretty good results with it personally by setting a calorie target in an app and sticking to it.

Are there more Baskin Robbins in McAllen than in San Jose?

I see people in SF walking around with some Starbucks abomination or another, every day.

A donut is about a half hour of jogging. If a Little Rock breakfast is like the rest of that neighborhood most of the sedentary thin thin state people I know wouldn't be able to keep it down.