What the title says. I want to know what the best exercises to lose weight are. Whenever I search I get conflicting opinions, so I thought you guys might know better.
EDIT: damn, you lot really came through with a ton of good advice! Thank you! Looks like eating healthy is the most important thing.
TBH, the thing that was, far and away, the most successful in me finally losing weight was not focusing on exercise, but on diet.
I spent most of my life overweight, and while I was never an extreme case (I was probably borderline obese at my worst), the time in which I was at my heaviest was also the time in which I was exercising more than I ever had in my life. That didn't work, because my diet was so shitty.
I'm not a believer of any diet that tries to do caloric restriction through portion control if the same unhealthy, calorically dense foods are still being eaten. Maybe it will work in the short term, but highly unlikely in the long term, IMO. If your body is telling you that it's hungry, there's probably a good reason for that.
In this sense, the thing that I saw far and away the best luck with (and still mostly follow to this day) was a whole foods plant based diet (also, :im-vegan:). Unprocessed plant foods, in most instances, are going to be a lot less calorically dense than animal products or processed plant foods. Intuitively, this makes sense to me too--fiber is in abundance with many plant foods, and is also very good at providing bulk in your food while also keeping you feeling full for a longer period of time and mitigating the chance of overeating. Seriously, you will probably see a notable difference just by going from white pasta to whole-grain pasta. And by focusing on less calorically dense foods, this should naturally lower the number of calories you're eating.
Though I'm not gonna lie, if you go all-in at once on this diet, it's probably going to suck for a few weeks--at least, that was my experience, until my tastebuds started adjusting over time and I increasingly got cravings for genuinely healthy foods. Now it's something that's pretty second nature to me, and I'm not even 100% compliant and never was (though the vast majority of my calories are still from unprocessed plant foods). I'm sure one could still see a lot of benefit just from mostly adhering to it. And I never feel like I'm starving myself either, and find it pretty easy to maintain a healthy weight--and I say this as someone who only does pretty light exercise.
TL;DR: Eat more :bean: