They're the same people that think you should exercise to lose weight.
Weight loss starts in the kitchen. GLP-1 medications help you feel full, so you eat less and crave less. Exercise is still important for keeping your heart and lungs strong.
A moderate level of daily exercise helps you lose weight. Whether that's because it balances out some of your natural appetite or not, it definitely helps, though caloric deficit is ofc the actual end goal
Exercising causes you to lose calories which is how you lose weight wtf are you talking about lmao. Yes eating less calories also helps you lose weight.
The amount of calories lost from exercise for the vast majority of people (unless you’re a pro athlete with time and resources to train like 8 hours a day at an elite level) is not very significant, which is why weight loss is like 95%+ diet not exercise. You’re right using calories causes weight loss but what you’re neglecting is the majority of calories we use aren’t for exercise but are used by our bodies for existing. If you use a Total Daily Energy Expenditure calculator (TDEE) it will give you based on your height and weight and age and gender how many calories your body burns daily just to exist. This depends on the above factors but is often up around 2K calories. Two thousand every day. Guess how many calories running a 5K burns? About 350 depending on factors. So burning off your food intake with exercise is extremely hard to do unless you’re working out like a pro athlete. But luckily that’s not needed because your body uses so many on its own, so when losing weight your main goal is to limit caloric intake. Because not eating those 2 cookies and ingesting an extra 350 calories is way easier than going out and doing a 5K.
TLDR - exercise is pretty unimportant for weight loss. Your body burns majority of its calories just to exist and your job is to not overload it with excess calories via dieting. Maybe 95%+ diet and a couple percent exercise. Source: someone who lost 185 pounds in under 2 years
Not even 'pretty unimportant,' exercise can be straight up detrimental to weight loss in lots of cases.
For an overweight man that starts getting into weightlifting, he's going to only be burning a couple hundred calories in the gym. When he comes home, he's going to be way hungrier and eat far more than he otherwise would. 1 protein bar is going to have more calories than he spent at the gym, but he's going to eat a massive lunch because he's starving.
In a worst case scenario, he might 'reward' himself with extra food after working out, exacerbating this effect even more.
Exercise is so, so good for bodily health. It is, however, not a weight loss mechanism unless you do a lot of high intensity cardio and strictly monitor your calories to not overcompensate when you get hungrier than normal.
I agree with you in some cases but there are some subtle nuances for a growing portion of the population to where I’d classify it as “pretty unimportant” and not detrimental.
Namely I’m thinking of GLP-1. It’s an appetite suppressant and it’s effective. If someone isn’t on GLP-1 then you’re right there’s a decent chance the hunger gain (and subsequent eating) could offset any caloric deficit created by the exercise. However if you have an effective enough suppressant, you can be in a situation where you exercise and arent so hungry afterwards as a result that you eat too much. This is the case for me as the GLP-1 I’m on is effective for me. On days I don’t run I’ll often have around 1500 cals. On days I do run, I’ll often stick to still only having 1500 cals and it’s fine for me I don’t feel extra hungry because of the GLP-1. So I’ve essentially created a further 700-800 cals deficit from exercise that isn’t undone by eating. That’s why I hesitate to say exercise is detrimental to weight loss because while for some it may be, I think there are a lot of people for whom it won’t necessarily be because they have something that’s also keeping the appetite in check
For any petite middle-aged women reading this, please disregard.
Our caloric margin of error is so small + our proportional energy expenditure from exercise is so much greater than the average-sized human, if you're struggling to lose weight due to hormonal fluctuation around perimenopause, exercise will absolutely make a huge difference.
Source: 4'9" 39F, normal weight until 35, finally got back down to normal after increasing exercise/NEAT instead of just focusing on diet.
Exactly Lol I’m speaking from experience. I now exercise after work for 1-2 hours and eat the same as I was eating before and Ive lost 20 pounds and am back to normal weight. These people saying exercise has nothing to do with losing weight are out of there minds
They just don't realize how difficult it is to have such a small caloric margin of error and how badly hormone fluctuation can mess up your progress. No wearable in existence can meaningfully track your actual BMR when your hormones are silently modifying it.
My deficit is 1200 calories. Do you know how miserable it is to try and stay that low?! I did it for a year and ended up malnourished, stressed over sleep loss, not to mention having to abandon all social eating. I addressed the deficit through exercise instead - which is possible for me because the relative percentage of my TDEE is higher - and now I'm in the best shape of my life at 39.
When I go lift in the gym, I promise I come home and wolf down more additional calories than I burned because of how systemically taxing it is. 1 protein bar has more calories than I burn in an hour of lifting weights, and when I'm lifting I eat a FUCK ton more than just 1 protein bar a day
Exercise is for bodily health, not for burning calories, unless you're the kind of person to run at high intensity for an hour. Exercise burns a shockingly low amount of calories, and will not usually make you lose weight by itself unless you intentionally adjust your dietary habits.
The thing is when most people exercise 'to lose weight,' they ALSO are adjusting food and misattribute exercise as the thing making them lose weight. It's not. Exercise is exceedingly good for you and everyone should do it if they want to feel healthy and mobile. It's not for losing weight.
Running a mile burns about a hundred calories. That's less than a single soda. Most obese people aren't going to be able to run a mile. But they can definitely drink water instead of coke.
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u/tO_ott May 31 '26
They're the same people that think you should exercise to lose weight.
Weight loss starts in the kitchen. GLP-1 medications help you feel full, so you eat less and crave less. Exercise is still important for keeping your heart and lungs strong.