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I don't know if my diet was bad, but I've outran it several times. The way I gain weight is by ceasing to exercise, not by compensating for burned calories through increased appetite, or by weird metabolic shenanigans my body is supposedly pulling.
I don't have a conclusion here, but all the "exercise doesn't help that much" takes run counter to everything I experienced.
I think people say this because to the average sedentary person. "Exercising" means jogging for 20 min, 3 times a week. And it's true that just doing that doesn't burn a whole lot of extra calories. An actual long distance runner who's doing 100 miles a week can of course eat a lot and stay slim
I was once a jogger, like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee. Even then 100 miles a week would have sounded whack (wouldn't you have to run a marathon 4 days per week to do that?!), I was doing a bit more than double of your example of an average Joe. OTOH I wouldn't say I was eating "a lot", but I was allowing myself a decent amount of vices like beer and various sweets. "Slim" might also be in the eye of the beholder, I'm happy with "not fat" usually.
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I honestly think it's more of that "biology is complicated" problem. The way people exercise today is artificial; nobody was doing much of running marathons or three times a week visits to gyms in the past (except for certain people). You 'exercised' by manual labour and general work in keeping house or running a business, plus walking nearly everywhere. From Chesterton's autobiography:
People like that walked where they couldn't take buses, and if you read Jane Austen novels (I know, going much further back) the young ladies think nothing of walking miles to visit friends or go see the sights in a nearby town.
So I do think for most people, yeah - being moderately active is enough. For some people, if they want to lose weight (as distinct from toning muscles or increasing fitness), they need to do a lot of exercise. And for some people, like yourself, weight will drop off once you exercise but pile on when you stop, even if you're not eating more or being extra-lazy. Individual bodies respond individually.
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Exercise has one slim benefit that I sometimes see mentioned: if you put on muscle that way, the resting metabolism of muscle is higher than that of fat, so the fat loss doesn't stop the second the exercise does; you also get a "free" hundred calories a day per pound of muscle you can maintain.
But for me the biggest benefit is one I've never seen discussed: for some reason my body doesn't seem to "fight me" against exercising the way it does against dieting. If I burn 500 calories on the treadmill one day then I've burned 500 calories and that's done; even the immediate feeling of tiredness quickly goes away and I feel more rather than less energetic over the long term. But cutting 500 calories of food in one day leaves me somewhere between "ravenous" and "awful lethargy". I can't seem to lose much weight via dietary portions (rather than via the easy choices: no liquid calories, avoid sugar, etc) without using a calorie counter app to try to carefully thread the needle between "not eating less" and "my brain feels like it's starving".
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