Nutrition:
You need to know what you are eating. Keep a food journal, written or use the app MyFitnessPal. Begin by logging, don't worry about how much you are eating at first. Seeing what you eat in a day will help you immensely.
After a week or two of solid logging, you can set a daily calorie goal for yourself. For fat loss, this will mean eating fewer calories than you burn. To estimate the amount of calories you will need to create this deficit, multiply your weight by 10-12 if you're sedentary, 12-14 if you're moderately active, 14-16 if you are highly active.
Ideally, the bulk of your diet should be foods without labels. Each meal should be built around a protein source, and your starchiest, most carb heavy meal should be after you workout.
Precision Nutrition has a helpful infographic on portion control:
Precision Nutrition has a helpful infographic on portion control:
NEAT:
You need to walk and stand as much as possible. This stands for "Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis," or "lifestyle calories." These are calories that you burn from walking, standing, doing chores, not sitting on your butt. NEAT is the component that most directly affects your daily energy balance. This means if you want to burn a few more hundred calories a day, you should work on standing and walking more, not killing yourself on a spin bike.
Cardio that you enjoy and doesn't hurt you is all well and good, however it isn't necessary for fat loss. The only time I would recommend 'expedited NEAT' is when someone cannot fit more walking or standing in a certain day. For example, if you sit in a car for 10 hours, doing some elevated cardio (walking on an incline on the treadmill, climbing stairs) might be warranted to make up for the steps you missed.
Speaking of steps, get a pedometer or use the health app on your iPhone. Aim for 10,000 steps per day. You can get these steps walking around at home or pacing at your job, you don't have to get them all outside.
Strength Training:
You need to lift heavy, with good form. Watching what and how much you eat and increasing your NEAT will help you to lose weight, strength training will help ensure that that weight is fat. In order to stay strong while in a caloric deficit, you need to force your body to hold onto its muscle mass. In order to look more defined, you will have to build some new muscle mass. Just to clarify, all muscle is lean mass, muscle doesn't make a person look 'bulky,' People who have a very muscular look have worked very hard for this, it won't just happen to you.
Doing high reps with light weights or performing fancy, complicated exercises is not going to cut it, or make you cut. You need to perform exercises with the potential for progressive overload, and increase in the load/intensity over time. Lifting moderately heavy weights will force your body to build and preserve its lean tissue. The body responds to stimulus and adapts. Lifting weights provides a big stimulus, your body will adapt to this stimulus in a big way, by favoring your lean tissue.
Squatting, deadlifting, and pressing are the tried and true weighted exercises that will allow you to lift the most amount of weight. Pull-ups, Rows, push-ups, dips, and leg lifts are the staples in terms of body weight exercises. You need to learn the intricacies of how to perform these exercises and then increase their load over time. I suggest you get a coach, take a CrossFit foundations course or read Kelly Starrett's book Becoming a Supple Leopard to understand the positioning and technique of these movements.
Squatting, deadlifting, and pressing are the tried and true weighted exercises that will allow you to lift the most amount of weight. Pull-ups, Rows, push-ups, dips, and leg lifts are the staples in terms of body weight exercises. You need to learn the intricacies of how to perform these exercises and then increase their load over time. I suggest you get a coach, take a CrossFit foundations course or read Kelly Starrett's book Becoming a Supple Leopard to understand the positioning and technique of these movements.
There are many other ways to get your resistance training in. For example, you can take CrossFit, gymnastics, weightlifting, inversion based yoga, aerial arts classes. I provided the aforementioned exercises because learning them is the most concise way to strength train. Once you understand how to do them, you will have these simple (yet sometimes slightly complicated to learn) exercises for life, all that will change is the amount of weight that you are lifting.
Recovery:
You need to sleep and have a low level of stress. Sleep is facilitates fat loss by regulating hormones, hunger signals and helping lean tissue grow and recover. Make sleep a priority, get on a regular sleep schedule, learn to wind down at the end of the day. Being stressed will make your body perform like it is in a time of famine and peril. This means it will be reluctant to get rid of its most easily accessible energy source: fat. Nothing is more annoying when you're under pressure than someone telling you to "chill out." All I will say on the matter of stress is live for yourself, control what you can, don't worry about what you can't.
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These are the 4 burners on the stove of fat loss and body recomposition. If you turn down one of these burners, the others will have to be turned up to compensate. If you ever reach a plateau, picture your burners and ask yourself which one needs to be cranked up a notch.
