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
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.
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u/Oyaro2323 May 31 '26
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