Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Virtually everyone that advocates exercise as a way to lose weight mentions in the same breath that it has to go hand-in-hand with a diet. Something must be wrong with exercise then, because that’s not true of dieting at all. Just dieting will do just fine.
There are more reasons to exercise than just weight loss and there's more to being healthy than just maintaining a specific weight.
This is the worst advice you could ever give to someone who's very overweight.
For overweight people exercise is a complete waste of time, and their bodyweight actually is what matters above all else as far as their health goes.
Telling an obese person that they should do some jumping jacks so their heart will be nice and healthy is just absurd. I see parents doing this all the time (and had it done to me), they get their obese kid running around and encourage them to engage in all these ultra-boring uncomfortable painful "fitness activities" that will never in a million years form into a habit for them. Then they take them home and give them some chicken nuggets for a job well done.
These people are more concerned with the theater of weight loss than they are with actual weight loss, because the theater of it gives them the highest ratio of guilt relief to effort expended.
For those kids, for the rest of their lives, every time they consider trying to lose weight, they'll see visions of running toward a brick wall for an hour without ever getting closer to it, and taking an hour out of their day to go somewhere and move things with their arms until they're sore. "Yeah fuck that", they'll say, never fully realizing that weight loss is really just about passively managing their food intake. Or maybe they'll try, it'll make them completely miserable (like it does for most people), and they'll perceive that as a personal failing and give up both dieting and exercise, once again not realizing that 99% of their goal can be achieved with just the dieting part.
The reality is that as long as you're overweight, your primary health objective should be to lose weight, and the only way to do that is to change what you eat and how much of it you eat over the long term. If adding exercise to that equation adds a 0.1% chance of you giving up, then it's not worth it.
Until you're at a normal weight, exercise is a premature optimization.
