Saying exercise can help you reach your calorie deficit is fairly misleading. Yes, exercise burns calories, but even a hard workout is a small part of your daily calories spent at best.
And if you do find yourself in circumstances where you're burning a significant enough amount of calories on a daily basis (say, a highschool water polo player treading water for 3 hours a day, working out to somewhere between 1000-2000 calories), then it just builds bad eating habits, because you get used to eating too much.
The only real long-term solution to weight management is not wanting to eat too much. Willpower controlled diets work on the short term, which might be fine if an individual's level of desired consumption is sufficiently close to their daily caloric needs, but are doomed in the long term.
25-30 minute jog is about 200 calories buried. That can amount to 7-12% increase depending your body size. This is not small or insignificant amount especially for the amount of input work done.
Small boosts add up to big changes. It's always still about deficit.
it's four oreos. or two slices of cheese. 200 calories a day is significant long-term, but it's also trivially easy to eat that much without even thinking about it.
