Let me rephrase - If you want results, both are needed. Dieting without excercise does nothing to shape the body, just reduce size. Excercising but eating crap like Burger King all the time is like an endless loop - no weight loss, just mass building, but still unhealthy for things like cholesterol, etc.=)

But like I said, it's still not efficient enough. With the right diet and a good jog 6 days a week I could lose about 25 pounds in 8 weeks. I'd say even more, because I have done more, but that's really a minimum number I would bet. 

^^^ its hard to say what the "standard" is for weight loss over time, as most people have different metabolisms, etc. Also, as you get older, metabolism slows down. So what might be 25 pounds at the age of 20, might be more like 10-15 pounds at the age of 30.

Twenty-five pounds in eight weeks?

I'm not a doctor, but I was told by one that the safe rate at which to lose weight (in terms of cardiovascular health) was a rate of about a pound a week, taking into account daily variations in weight. Doesn't losing more than three a week seem, uh, extreme?

You didn't rephrase at all, you just said the same thing all over again and you're still wrong.  Try again.

Just to give you a little bit of anecdotal evidence to explain where I'm coming from, one of my friends weighed 230 lbs.  He said he wanted to lose weight so I bet that if he took a little advice from me that he could lose at least 15 lbs.  So I give some advice based on my own eating habits.  In about 6 months he dropped about 50 lbs.  He weighs around 180 now I think.  He'll need to start exercising if he hopes to drop below that I think, but losing 50 lbs just by changing your eating habits is pretty impressive (also shows just how bad his eating habits were before that...).

So you can say that diet is ineffective by itself or that exercise is ineffective by itself and I can safely say you're full of crap.  Nothing against you personally but I have firsthand experience proving that you're wrong.

I think what bardciverse means to say is that diet and exercise, when used together, are much more effective than either one alone, and probably more effective than the sum of their parts.

Anecdotally: I do weight-lifting, but I am still very underweight because my diet doesn't give me the proper intake of protein and carbohydrates. I'm going to see muscle definition, but I won't be able to bulk up until I am in a position to incorporate a better diet (read: not eating cafeteria food every day).

I think that's what he meant.

Dirka Dirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

:)

I'm sure you're correct that there are more effficient ways to go about weight loss. But it isn't really about efficiency, it's about doing something or doing nothing. Few people get motivated at the prospect of jogging 6 days a week (where I live, jogging outside is a pretty crappy experience for about half the year) or shelling out big money for an elliptical trainer.

Wii Fit lowers barriers to doing something about your fitness with a cheap pricetag and an array of features which help keep users motivated, including stat tracking, virtual trainers, performance feedback, and scoreboards.

I think it's great that you don't need any of this stuff to get motivated about your fitness, but I'm also glad that Wii Fit has helped motivate people close to me to be more active. Wii Fit is currently on its way to being the most-played game on my Wii and I think that's fantastic.

Though most people don't want to spend as much time training as you do (judging by the pic) that still is pretty pathetic...

I dunno, I guess these are 5'4 130 pound teenagers... or are these people older?

Youre presenting the extreme end, where a person lives on junk food. Sure, you're guanteed to lose weight simply by stopping excessive food intake, eliminating fast food and soda. Again, it depends on the person's metabolism as well.

Also, you apparently didn't understand my rephrasing, since you don't think I did. For the average person, who doesn't live on MCDonalds and ice cream, you won't shed weight nearly as quickly with just dieting OR exercising as you will with a combination of the two. This is not wrong at all, as you seem to claim, but I simply think you had an issue absorbing the point. There's an old saying "The last 10 pounds is the hardest to lose".  This is because the metabolism is near its target range, so short of starving yourself, its very difficult to do without exercise. You need to actively burn those calories up with exercise.

So, yes, while youre right about your obese friend, the average normal person needs to do more than just change eating habits in order to reach target weight.

In other words, pretty much what Khuutra said.