In my personal experience, diet worked much better than exercise. I can only talk from personal experience because every body is different and what works for some won't necessarily work for you. Anyway take what you will from my story...
I was always a fit guy and played rugby fairly seriously, ran, and spent many hours in the gym. as a young man I always tried to get bigger and stronger, so ate a lot and trained a lot. When you train hard you can be pretty indiscriminate about what you eat too. Problem was once my knees gave in and I could no longer run and had to give up sport I never really recallibrated either my diet or my image of myself to suit. i went from being about 95kgs of seriously buff strong guy to 105kg of fat middle aged guy in the space of a couple of years. Each time I got on the scales I was always "yeah I'm 100kg, but I'm an athlete so it's mostly muscle" until I saw a photo of myself and went "holy shit, I'm fat".
So first thing I did was I kept a spreadsheet and just wrote down everything I ate for about a week, without embellishing or trying to kid myself. Then I made lots of sensible changes to that diet. I mean the easy things - I cut out drinking a can of soft drink with dinner, and replaced snacking on a pack of chips with fruit. Instead of fast food for lunch I ate sandwiches. And that was about it. No exercise - no crazy diet, just cut out a bit of shit from my diet and I started dropping about 1-2kg a week. After that I made more changes - My meals were generally either pasta or red meat. In fact that's about all I could cook - though I really enjoyed cooking and did a mean steak or roast lamb I had never really cooked fresh fish. I tried to eat fish for 1 or 2 meals a week and have one vegetarian meal too. I cut out heavy creamy pasta dishes for healthier recipies and stopped cooking for 4 when it was just me and the missus. Again none of these things seemed like sacrifices: having a nice piece of well cooked salmon instead of a pasta dish was actually much nicer. I guess I had to think about food a bit more, picking up fresh fish on the way home from work instead of eating frozen shit for example. But since I enjoyed the meals anyway it seemed no big deal.
Cost wise fruit, veggies, and fish are more expensive and more inconvenient than fattier stuff, but I did save a bit on cutting out the junk food, so it wasn't too bad. I kept up consistently losing about 1kg until I'd dropped about 25kgs, with the only excercise being a few push ups and sit ups each night. Oh I forgot beer. Another plus from quitting rugby was getting out of the beer drinking culture. That definitely saved a few calories. That all happened about 2 and a half years ago and the weight as never come back because my diet has never reverted back to beer and fast food.
TL;DR: make small dietary changes to cut out some calories by not eating as much crap. Weight loss won't be dramatic, but as long as those changes are positive you'll stick to them and not put the weight back on.
I was always a fit guy and played rugby fairly seriously, ran, and spent many hours in the gym. as a young man I always tried to get bigger and stronger, so ate a lot and trained a lot. When you train hard you can be pretty indiscriminate about what you eat too. Problem was once my knees gave in and I could no longer run and had to give up sport I never really recallibrated either my diet or my image of myself to suit. i went from being about 95kgs of seriously buff strong guy to 105kg of fat middle aged guy in the space of a couple of years. Each time I got on the scales I was always "yeah I'm 100kg, but I'm an athlete so it's mostly muscle" until I saw a photo of myself and went "holy shit, I'm fat".
So first thing I did was I kept a spreadsheet and just wrote down everything I ate for about a week, without embellishing or trying to kid myself. Then I made lots of sensible changes to that diet. I mean the easy things - I cut out drinking a can of soft drink with dinner, and replaced snacking on a pack of chips with fruit. Instead of fast food for lunch I ate sandwiches. And that was about it. No exercise - no crazy diet, just cut out a bit of shit from my diet and I started dropping about 1-2kg a week. After that I made more changes - My meals were generally either pasta or red meat. In fact that's about all I could cook - though I really enjoyed cooking and did a mean steak or roast lamb I had never really cooked fresh fish. I tried to eat fish for 1 or 2 meals a week and have one vegetarian meal too. I cut out heavy creamy pasta dishes for healthier recipies and stopped cooking for 4 when it was just me and the missus. Again none of these things seemed like sacrifices: having a nice piece of well cooked salmon instead of a pasta dish was actually much nicer. I guess I had to think about food a bit more, picking up fresh fish on the way home from work instead of eating frozen shit for example. But since I enjoyed the meals anyway it seemed no big deal.
Cost wise fruit, veggies, and fish are more expensive and more inconvenient than fattier stuff, but I did save a bit on cutting out the junk food, so it wasn't too bad. I kept up consistently losing about 1kg until I'd dropped about 25kgs, with the only excercise being a few push ups and sit ups each night. Oh I forgot beer. Another plus from quitting rugby was getting out of the beer drinking culture. That definitely saved a few calories. That all happened about 2 and a half years ago and the weight as never come back because my diet has never reverted back to beer and fast food.
TL;DR: make small dietary changes to cut out some calories by not eating as much crap. Weight loss won't be dramatic, but as long as those changes are positive you'll stick to them and not put the weight back on.
