The article pretty confidently states that exercise has been found not to help with weight loss per this study

But if you click through to the actual study…they specifically excluded all athletes from their samples, and all of these exclusions were from the “high human development index” areas. They also excluded any samples from people with diseases except obesity, which was kept.

I haven’t really had the chance today to read this too carefully, but, wouldn’t that paint a pretty distorted picture?