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Comment by kec | Hacker News Reader

Exercise is great for general fitness and can give you a slight edge in a calorie deficit but has little impact on weight loss in general. If you want to lose weight by far the easiest and most effective thing you can do is to get your diet under control.

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I've lost significant weight twice (~20-25 lbs). Once was purely diet with very little exercise, and the other way was way more exercise, but less diet control.

The first way made me feel tired and light-headed, and not that great overall. The second way (high exercise, a little diet control) took longer, but also makes me feel 10 years younger and pretty much as healthy as I've ever been.

My personal experience is that establishing a good exercise routine helps with the diet a lot. If you're pushing yourself fitness-wise, you start to notice the impact diet (and sleep) has on your performance and select for foods that won't make you miserable during your workout.

Yeah, working out regularly makes me think twice about ever drinking enough to get even a minor hangover. Plus, a good exercise routine inspires a good diet because after all that time and energy working out, who wants to mess it up?

Thank you! Though anecdotal, it is super helpful to learn about your experience like this.

For whatever is worth, I had similar experience. The thing, calories deficit means you are passive, tired, irritable, have problem to focus. So you are less effective at work too. How bad the irritability is for others I understood only when someone else was dieting and turned into someone constantly angry.

In addition, if you diet only, it is very easy to cause yourself annemia or other health issue. It happened to me and it actually affects life a lot. Most of sources talk about what you should not eat, but very little about how to recognize you are missing something or overdoing it.

> If you want to lose weight by far the easiest and most effective thing you can do is to get your diet under control.

Easy is the wrong word. Getting your diet under control is the hardest part of losing weight. Most effective, absolutely. Simple, yes, easy, no.

I’ve always found exercise to be a motivator for getting diet under control. Periods of low exercise correlates with bad eating. Building back the routine makes shifting diet much easier.

When I'm getting regular exercise everything else just kind of falls in to place. My appetite works properly, and I move towards my healthy body weight eating whatever I feel like eating.

Same! Periods of low exercise correlate with lower moods for me and lower moods mean less will power which makes keeping my diet in check tougher. The opposite is also true.

I agree. Whenever I decide to lose weight, I've always found that turning both the knobs(diet & exercise) at the same time in the beginning is overwhelming and doesn't work for me. I have to get into a routine for one of the two first before focussing my attention on the other. Usually, it's exercise first. Wonder if other people have same exeperience

Sure, but if you exercise and don't control your diet, you'll end up still fat but with more muscle underneath. Which isn't exactly the goal.

Getting my diet under control is contingent on getting my appetite under control. It's mediated by my sleep levels, stress levels, how much exercise I'm getting, what types of calories I'm eating, what time I'm eating them, and my microbiome. It's so disingenuous to say "Just eat less". If it was that simple, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic.

However, exercise is very important ingredient if your goal is health rather then aesthetic.

It’s probably important in either case.

Yes, especially if you have passive lifestyle. But it is not all that much how many calories you burn, but about what it does to your body in general.

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