It is of course true that caloric input is a thermodynamic limit and restricting it sufficiently relative to caloric expenditure will cause you to lose weight. (Lisa, in this household we obey the laws of thermodynamics...)

However, not all calories are the same, metabolism is dynamic, and the brain is complex and exerts a powerful influence over behavior.

Increasing exercise will make you hungrier and most people are simply unable to resist this and end up not losing weight. It is why there is a common saying that "you cannot outrun your fork." Restricting calories generally is difficult in today's environment with plentiful calorie dense food everywhere. People don't cook as much as they used to and restaurant meals have more calories than ever.

AFAIK GLP-1 drugs work because they calm the minds desire to eat which is baked in deeply from millions of years of our ancestors struggling to get sufficient food.

The problem with exercise is that our bodies are quite efficient with their energy usage. A few minutes of ‘calories in’ takes many hours of ‘calories out’ to burn.

You can’t really exercise enough to offset the food you can eat in a day, even if you somehow were able to dedicate all your time to exercising you would still have to limit your food intake.

Add to that the fact that exercise is mind numbingly boring and you have to conclude it is not a practical solution at all.

It's physics that you just need to go a certain speed to put an object in orbit.

That doesn't make it an easy thing to do.

Fat people are aware of diet and exercise. They aren't stupid.

Until you have been chronically obese, or helped someone that is chronically obese, you don't understand that it is a deeply rooted subconscious issue, not a physics issue.

Fat people don't want to be fat, anymore than depressed people want to be sad. But something in their minds or bodies makes it non-optional. Pharmaceutical interventions change that thing.

When people - in their millions - say that this is the only effective thing, you could, I dunno, believe them. Or at least believe the pharmacological/medical science, which is, to circle back, all just physics.

They said exercise doesn't help them with reducing the feeling of hunger. I don't know why they thought it would, because generally if you do a lot of exercise you get more hungry not less hungry, but regardless, you are responding to something that wasn't said.

Exercise will burn calories, yes. But my life doesn't fit the several hours of exercise a day, every day, forever, that would be needed as an already-small person to burn the 1000+ excess calories a day my body is constantly hungry for.