It is important to understand that weight loss is not merely a matter of calories in vs. calories out. It depends largely by hormonal factors, and things that affect our appetite-control center.
It is key that we know how to avoid to push our body into starvation mode, and thus dealing with long-term metabolic damage, due to us simply having starved ourselves to shed the fat.
This means the type of exercise we choose, when wanting to shed fat becomes a critical factor, if we are to succeed long-term. We want to choose exercise that helps to support our fat-burning hormones and not cause adrenal fatigue, while providing a natural appetite suppressant effect - so we don’t binge and don’t feel hungry (thus NOT starving ourselves).
If we constantly feel hungry, we are not doing it right and we will struggle with yo-yoing, because our body will do everything it can to fight starvation (lowering our metabolic rate).
In a study published in the Journal of Obesity, researchers investigated the hormonal regulators of appetite in female runners and walkers to see which group was more likely to overeat following a 60-minute workout. Walkers ate 50 calories more than they burned during exercise, while runners ate 200 fewer calories than were lost during exercise. Runners also had higher levels of peptide YY in the body — a blood hormone that suppresses appetite. Walkers, on the other hand, had no increase.
This appetite suppression among runners is key to understand the fat-burning effect of running over walking.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to run, if you absolutely hate it, but you do need to get your pulse up to exhaustion point (i.e. engage in High-Intensity-Training) for 20-30 minutes approx. 3 x weekly. However, also remember that longer is not better: longer will typically lead to adrenal burn-out in time, especially for females, so keep it short and simple. In combination with 2 x 45 min. weekly weight training sessions to increase lean muscle mass and resting metabolic rate, this is the best combo for lasting weight loss. And do not sit for more than 1 hour without getting up to move - that really destroys any weightloss efforts: the sedentary hours on end.
Read the full study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22619704/