People need to understand what activity / exercise really is. The desperation of the medical establishment to get people to do ANY exercise meant the general advice is watered down.

It's the doom of the statistical distribution. Good outcomes are defined in relative terms on the bell curve, not on absolute performance which exercise is actually suited for.

In days of manual labor jobs and lots of walking, people likely burned 1500-4000 calories more per day than sedentary modern lifestyles. I can imagine farmers back in the days of 12-hour days of physical labor may burn 5000 or 6,000 calories. A pound of fat is 3500 calories.

Meanwhile, people that are generally following some 20 minutes of exercise five times a week, regimen of the medical establishment are likely really only burning about 300 to 400 calories tops in those 20 minutes sessions, if they even do that.

For the sake of argument, we're going to ignore the basal metabolic advantages of people that are burning an extra 1,500 to 3000 calories per day and the stimulated muscle growth that comes with it.

People back in olden days just on activity were burning a third to a half a pound extra of fat per day in terms of energy.

Meanwhile, modern people who "exercise" are burning maybe a tenth of a pound. Only when you get to "athletes" that are "training" do you get to the calorie burns that people's lives used to entail.

So it's important to keep in mind when people say exercise is ineffective in weight loss that they really are talking about very minor amounts of added activity by by modern medical standards.

Exercise is extremely effective at limiting weight if you get to what I call the 1000 calorie Hammer, where your exercise is adding an extra thousand calories or more per day to your activity. And you're simultaneously not going nuts on your diet.

A 1000 calories is a considerable amount of activity. For a 180 lb man, that's 4000 yards of swimming, 7 miles of running, or 25-30 miles of biking.

If you are a 120 lb woman, increase those distances by 50%. Most people consider those loads to be exercise obsessives, but practically that's what's necessary in order to employ exercise as a usable means for weight control and surviving the corn syrup world we're in