I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
Are you exercising to lose weight, gain strength or muscle, or increase endurance? Those three things are very different. Exercising for endurance works for everyone, AFAIK; and exercising to build muscle works for everyone up to some plateau (which is barely perceptible for women, and some men).
But exercise is not always an effective way of losing weight, because your body may make you as hungry as it needs to, to get you to make up the weight you lost during exercise. Losing weight requires being hungry, and it's not clear that exercising gives an advantage.
For people who have that problem, exercise geared towards building muscle may be a more effective way of losing weight. You'll get even hungrier than with endurance exercise, and eat more, but your body will probably save less of those calories as fat.
For me, if I do something really interesting all day long, I may forget to eat. But then I'm likely to binge just before bed, which negates the gain.
I haven't found low-fat food very useful; my impression is that I eat more of it. Artificial sweeteners make me able to resist drinking soda and juice, but some experiments have shown artificial sweeteners increase weight gain in rodents and people; reasons are not known.
The real fat-builders are soda and juice. Both pack a huge, swift bolus of calories. Many people think juice is "healthy" because it's natural, but it has hella calories. And all sorts of "diet food" and "exercise drinks", like Gatorade and Slim-Fast, are basically flavored sugar and will make you fat.
Some people think fat calories make them fatter than sugar or carb calories. I doubt it. If anything, I'd guess sugar builds more fat per calorie, because fat needs to go through a lot of catabolic and then anabolic processing before being stored as fat. (Your body doesn't just suck up fat globules from the lymph and deposit them into cells.) Somebody with a biology degree should know the answer.
You could experiment with when you eat, what you eat, what temperature you keep the thermostat, and other metabolism-related variables. I know one man who gets a great deal of exercise but keeps gaining weight. Perhaps not coincidentally, he keeps the temperature in his room around 80 F.