Statistics and Compliance

Data
Started a new statistics course. I feel statistics to be highly offputting, and doing this course I understand why. There is so much categorization! Data can be qualitative/quantitative. Measurements come in levels. And then a list there. And as I furiously scribble this down to try to remember, I wonder why this is so. That is, why so many lists and classifications. I will try to work out a way of presenting this in a more fun way.

Physical
Actually, this week I cheat. I decided to take a break from my quest to find the origins of exercise recommendation to read an article on the compliance issue. The article, The exercise–affect–adherence pathway: an evolutionary perspective, is really a psychology article. Compliance is a big problem- it is extremely hard to convince people to exercise. The article tries to answer "why do people not like exercising?" And come up with way to increase exercise adherence.
Why do people not like exercising? In a word- lazy. If no short term benefit, then people won't do it (which is why, they say, cognitive convincing won't work). And then they write a lot, and come to the conclusion that to increase adherence there should be a direct benefit.
This was my first psychology article ever, so I should be more tolerant, but wasn't this rather an obvious conclusion? It isn't new that if people like exercising, they will exercise. And it also isn't new that a possible path to convicing is to make activity a necessity. And it really isn't even close to new (just read one of the old articles from the 90s I posted previously) that an example of activity-necessity is walking to work (or, at least, park a block away and walk for a bit). It is possible that in the sea of technical jargon they said something, but I struggle with hypotheses on no scientific basis, particularly when there are so many words that mean nothing to the extra-psychology world. "Negative affective response..."  I guess this would make it qualitative data (people really don't like it) except there was no data.
Interestingly, this article mentioned that "5.3 million people die globally each year due to lack of PA".  (PA-physical activity) I really must read these articles where they make these estimations!