What exercise is best to aid weight loss?

Brisk walking for a minimum of an hour a day.

It is almost all diet but yes exercise is important too or your metabolism slows right down to conserve energy. Remember that you are evolved to be a famine survival machine. Diet creates the "famine" but if you don't exercise then the body will do everything to avoild burning fat. Exercise should be a 50:50 mix of strength work and cardio because strong muscles burn more fat. This can mean putting on a small amount of weight at the start if your new muscles start building faster than the fat is burned but long term the result will be more weight off, and easier to keep it off.

My point is that the same volume of uscle weighs more than fat.

In your shoes i would do hiit (incorporating resistance work) and pilates.

I have always been into exercise, but gained a lot of weight a few years ago and have spent the past couple of years losing it and getting back in shape.

By the way, I'm a living example that diet is more important than exercise for losing weight. At my heaviest (and I was heavy), I ran over three hours per day but also had a cake-making hobby!

My trainer (excellent and highly qualified) thinks that cardio (like running, cycling) is not the best use of exercise time but I enjoy it and think it helps a little with my weight loss so still do it at moderate to high intensity three or four times per week for 40 minutes to an hour.

I do agree with my trainer and the physio (I had an injury and needed serious rehab) that strength-training and functional work (bodyweight stuff) has been particularly effective. I also do yoga and pilates for mobility and targeting auxiliary muscles that are often neglected in weight-training. Building muscle has increased my fitness a lot and as a result, I can exercise more and at an intensity where it does aid weight loss. I also see evidence that having more muscle burns more calories.

All that said though, you can't go wrong. The physio, doctor, trainer all say that the main thing is to move. As another commenter already said, do whatever you can continue to do. When your fitness increases, you'll find you can do more. Don't feel like you have to achieve an Olympic level of training right now. Just get into the habit of moving more. Good luck.

as pp say.

any exercise will be good.
it's best to do a mix of cardio and strength. but 'the best' exercise is what you actually enjoy and keep wanting to do.

Strength work and upping the protein within your calorie limit will help you build muscle. If you have more muscle, you burn more calories when resting than you would without. That said, about 90% of weight loss is down to diet.

Weight bearing exercise is really important as we age to counter natural muscle wastage and for women it's doubly important for bone density.

Agree with both of the above. Try a few things until you find the thing or things that you enjoy and want to stick to. The great bonus for me with exercise was that it helped with weight loss in an unexpected way. The more exercise I did the less time I had sitting around and this led to less time for snacking 😁

When you say weight loss, do you actually mean that the most important thing is a smaller number on the scales? Or is it to be slimmer/lose fat/fit into smaller clothes?

I agree - the best exercise to lose weight is one you can maintain as a long term habit.

As you say.. it’s almost all diet.

What there is good evidence for is that building an exercise habit significantly increases the chances you will keep the weight off, because it means you no longer have the lifestyle that caused you to gain weight.

So rather than splitting the tiny differences between types of exercise, I would focus on building exercise habits that you can maintain. It’ll probably take some experimenting.