It is very simple. There are 8000 calories in 1kg of fat. If you want to lose 10 kg you'll need to burn 80,000 calories through deficit, either through diet or exercise.
Personally I find it easy to live on a strict diet and limiting alcohol intake to once every few weeks
There goes that simplicity then. How do you pick one? How do you stay on it? How do you decide whether to switch, when to switch and what to switch to? How do you motivate yourself to try again once you've failed? And on it goes.
How do you pick any activity that encourages you to burn more calories than usual?
I would expect that comes down to finding something you enjoy doing.
Exercise and eating well is a way of life. If your life dictates you do neither, you will get fat. I don't really understand how its complicated. You just do it for the benefits.
Personally I eat chicken and veg 5 days a week (with occasional carbs when I train), train for 3 days and climb once a week. I also mostly hit my 10k steps per day.
They have no willpower. You are the only person who controls what you eat everyday. If you are in stuck in an office you need to block out time for exercise.
How can there be any other excuse?
I know people who look great and eat entire cakes each day but they do 4 hours of high intensity exercise everyday. I can't do that as I am fundamentally lazy and only exercise/diet for vanity.
IMO you have an oversimplified view of this based on limited experience. You have abstracted away the diverse and complex reasons this doesn't work for everyone behind the excuse that people make excuses. It's not so simple. People are different; their circumstances are different; we can't just write them off by blaming them for being obese or addicted.
Yeah, the same way you tell heroin addict or an alcoholic to quit today. Many of those people know they want to quit and they "re-affirm" daily but it's just constant struggle for them which is very difficult or impossible to win every hour, day and week. When people ask for help with weight-loss most of the time they need something that makes the struggle manageable.
I drink alcohol recreationally. I can't imagine being addicted to it. I don't even know how alcohol cravings feel like. I can stop at any moment without wanting more and I can and often go months without a drink. Still I wouldn't ever tell an alcoholic to just decide and re-affirm it daily to stop drinking. I know the problem is deeper than that for alcoholics. It's high time we start treating people who overeat and can't stop similarly.
This 'just try harder' approach doesn't work for everybody. For one, an affirmation might feel strong and decisive when you first make one, but it can simply lose its hold as the novelty wears off. You can say the words to yourself but they'll begin to seem more and more hollow. I don't see how this is a choice.
This isn't so much "just try harder" as a mental approach which worked for me when "eat less" didn't. You look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and instead of just saying "yuck I'm fat", you say "I can control this by choosing what I eat." You open the fridge mid-morning for a snack and you think to yourself, "do I want to eat this more than I want to lose weight?"
Affirmations only start to seem hollow if they're not backed up by action. The first time you say "I can control this" it does sound hollow. After the first day when you've eaten healthily and chosen not to snack, the next morning it'll sound a bit less hollow. After a week you'll actually feel in control. It gets better, not worse.
Of course, a crucial part of this is eating healthily so that you're not starving. Some protein, a bit of fat, and limited low-GI carbs, along with fresh fruit and vegetables. If you have a handful of potato chips for breakfast then of course you're not going to be able to stop yourself scoffing the rest of the packet by mid morning.
As a system matures it is easy to see common code and abstractions. Don't blame the previous guy.
Don't be tempted to start a new shiny clean system. This almost never works (unless in demise cases) and you'll be playing catch up with features on the original system for the next 10 years.
As others have said. You have to write tests, this will cover your back and you'll understand the codebase back to front once you have -
Testing/Interfaces/Simplify/Naming.
Remember, all the business logic is there. At least you don't have to do the hard part... this is a cleanup operation.
Personally I find it easy to live on a strict diet and limiting alcohol intake to once every few weeks