"Exercise is a good thing but as a way of losing weight it's problematic, we are very efficient at converting food to work and muscle."
No it's absolutely equivalent to dieting the difficulty is doing enough of it to lose a large amount quickly. As I mention earlier I lost 35kg by keeping my intake ~2300 cals and upping my exercise to quite a large amount - not possible for everyone I know. I now measure all exercise in calories which not only keeps the arithmetic simple but concentrates the mind wonderfully when about to eat almost anything - this meal needs 15 miles of walking to be calorie neutral.
BTW if we were very good at converting food to work and muscle a lot of people would be star weightlifters. What we are good at doing is storing excess energy as fat. Dieting depletes all body stores : glycogen, fat and lean tissue/muscle. That's another good reason not to lose weight just by dieting.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
