I don't have chest hair, thank god.
My skin is already all shiny after a bike ride; that's why I take a shower. XP
When I started riding, I weighed 155. In two weeks I weighed about 142, and now I still weigh 142 but my body shape is changing. Bigger legs, smaller gut. My food intake spiked up, but now has gone back down. My posture improves drastically when I ride my bike; any ab exercise and even push-ups seems to make me naturally stop slouching and stand up straight when I walk.
Dieting won't do that. Your metabolism will change, you'll become slower, less energetic. It works great for vegetarians, who become immensely sickly the vast majority of the time; many who I've known are successful pescatarians or poultrarians or whatever they want to call themselves, eating fish or chicken. The very few pure vegetarians I've met are extremely vocal about the health benefits of vegetarianism; but when I did my digging ages ago, I found a lot of anecdotes from people who have horror stories about getting massively sick (hence my fish and fowl eating type), as well as documented studies that reveal that a large percentage of the population that tries vegitarianism completely fails it even with "proper diet" (beans) and supplementation, and even worse for vegans!
Your body gets sick if you don't give it what it wants. It's just that simple. If you "successfully" reduce your calorific intake, you'll become slow, weak, tired, enough that you can keep your output below your input and stay fat. If you become more active, you'll eat more; you'll eat more than you put out some days, and less other days. Your body will continue to operate efficiently, though, because it's used to varying loads, and it stores up what it can to handle it.
Sure, making a daily ritual of eating an entire cheesecake will turn you into a giant jiggly blob; but other than that, you're far better off when active than not. I am still eating pizza, but my intake is limited: where I'd eat a whole 8 inch pizza before, I'll eat half of it now. This is not because I'm "dieting," but because eating the whole thing makes me sick. My hunger patterns have changed; I get hungry at different times, but I get less hungry. Before I started cycling, I would eat the whole thing over 2 hours; after I started cycling, I'd eat the whole thing in an hour and start looking for more food; after 3 months of high physical activity cycling, I'm eating a lot less food overall, and now can't get the whole thing down without sickening myself.
If I decided I wanted to get rid of the lard on my belly and just diet it away, I would have become extremely sick. Hungry all the time, weak, tired, probably in pain as my muscles and joints deteriorate from malnutrition. When I started exercising, I needed the extra food, even though it was three times as much as I normally eat. At this point, a lot of muscles have grown: legs got bigger, arms are bigger, blood vessels everywhere, heart is stronger, everything is denser besides being just larger, the works. It's no surprised I suddenly ate a lot more and then stopped eating so much. I needed the protein and the sheer food mass for structural support, and now I don't need all that anymore.
Chocolate, ice cream, and pizza are kind of addictive due to ... chocolate ... sugars, and fats. I loathe ice cream, and only occasionally stock it, and it takes forever to eat it all; it's cold and I gain more energy from hot foods. But I get how the mechanism works. Consumption of sugars and fatty foods is typically higher than necessary due to a complex endorphin reaction in your brain: it's literally a scaled down version of cocaine. Despite all natural regulation, you will over-consume these things.
Given this, my only "diet" has ever been to "not guzzle purified fat." Healthy, unhealthy, whatever. I eat a full English for breakfast, with bacon and black pudding and eggs and bread and mushrooms and a tomato and baked beans, all fried in lard and butter. You know what I don't eat? Half a dozen donuts and a half a pound of Jimmy Dean sausage with 85 grams of saturated fat in it. Believe it or not, my breakfast is far better... also it won't leave me hungry in an hour and looking for a box of Honey Buns. Also my grandfather used to pour bacon grease (from a pound of bacon) over his pancakes ... let's not do that.