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It's true that it's "diet and exercise," but even that is not really the best way to specify the solution. Diet is probably an order of magnitude more important than exercise when it comes down to longevity and overall health: if you have a choice between eating healthy and never exercising, versus eating like a pig but constantly exercising, the former will get you 90% of where you want to be, while the latter will get you nowhere.
Telling people to put down the tub of ice cream is, of course, harder than curing cancer. Best we just start mass dumping semaglutide into the water supply and call it a day.
Also life disruptions to your exercise pattern/naturally ageing out will tend to eventually strand you anyways. I was an elite athlete in my youth and have generally been super active. The second I stop working out like a professional athlete I tend to stack on weight as a result of those habits, which isn't really sustainable with having kids/time-consuming jobs.
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The two fit together quite neatly though. Exercise (both aerobic training and resistance training) modulate appetite and result in the body handling insulin spikes appropriately by replenishing muscular glycogen rather than fat. People that pick a sport and compete become much more acutely aware of their nutrition both as a necessity of fueling their activities, but also in shaping their bodies. The calories burned from an endurance sport are themselves quite helpful in providing a buffer to get away with some genuine splurge days. You're just a lot more likely to successfully stay lean and healthy if you participate in a sport than if you try to accomplish it through self-control around food where your only motivation and frame of reference is weight.
I find it darkly ironic that problems exist at both ends of this spectrum: yes, there are obese people, but the number of serious runners (among other sports) with very real eating disorders isn't zero either.
But for most people, more activity and less gluttony is probably better.
If you want to see a wild ass tale of the problems of being too thin and doing too much cardio, Jonas Abrahamsen is currently in the polka dot jersey at the Tour de France and has a crazy story:
You really do need balance in all things. Bike hard, eat well, enjoy life.
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I'm not sure if diet is an order of magnitude more important, so much as it is that it's a lot easier to be 2x off on your diet, producing catastrophic results, than it is to have disastrous results from being 2x off on exercise.
I mostly found it interesting that one of the specific claims for why "diet doesn't work", the specific mechanism mentioned, is insulin resistance, and that lo and behold, exercise pretty much directly fixes that (on top of the other benefits it has). It sort of makes all the arguments about diet, alone, feel like they're missing a huge component. I kinda knew that exercise was important and helpful, but I didn't know before how it very specifically should contribute to the culture war around diet. It was always a bit of an afterthought, an "Oh yeah, it would be nice to exercise, too, but it's more important to get your diet right," but perhaps it should be more prominent and not just sidelined in the discussion.
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