Tried it. Didn't work. Welcome to the unfair universe.

Good thing you don't have that attitude about FAI.

Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn't have anything to do with weight loss.

Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I've read an interesting book that says aerobics don't actually improve your fitness or burn fat.

Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you're doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more... which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.

What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn't dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.

His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)

Anyway, I'm currently experimenting with one of his simpler "beginner" routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I'm only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I've not done it every day this week. I'll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.

I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one's results, and that "tried it, didn't work" isn't a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn't overweight was the time where I didn't have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.

What I've observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.

This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you're not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you're getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate... even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I've had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?

There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they're all simultaneously satisfied, you're not going to get a result.

Simply labeling yourself "metabolically challenged" is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?

Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.