I'm assuming of course that you are "normal". If you are allergic to peanuts they are of course worse than a cookie. If you are diabetic cookies are bad.
It's not like I live off McDonald's or anything. But I'll be overweight, change only my exercise habits, and notice big changes in body comp on the timescale of a couple months.
So clearly I'm out-exercising my evidently-bad diet.
IDK. Maybe it's different with this kind of functional exercise vs 30 minutes on the elliptical or whatever.
IMO, especially when one has snacks fully stocked, it's easy to 'forget' that you ate something.
One big breakthrough for me was reading Arnold S. "encyclopedia of body building". There's a lot of physiological tips and also very practical advice.
I'm sure you can get it from anywhere, but for me this was a big change. Sizing the reps, the workouts, the weights helped a lot in trying to make progress. Additionally endomorphic bodies need different excercise and I was doing too much ineffective cardio for months with few results.
Weights changed my results within a few weeks.