Someone tries to throw a rock through this restaurant’s window, guy catches it mid air with his beer still in hand.
Adventurer1080: Most fitness people will tell you to eat fewer calories than you take in to lean out and lose body fat. Typical advice is to eat 250 fewer calories per day and burn 250 calories through exercise for a total deficit of 500 calories/day. You’ll have to find your BMR using an online calculator to find out how many calories you burn just doing nothing. Then you can subtract from that as well as build a diet plan.
To qualify this, most people will tell you to eat high quality foods and avoid junk food. At the very least this will allow you to avoid easy calorie accumulation and stay full and satiated. There’s all kinds of beneficial effects from eating high quality foods that’ll aid your progress.
If you want to build muscle you must eat more calories than you burn so just up the calories by 250-500 per day while committing to some type of strength and conditioning program.
If you don’t really care about all this and your body is in relative equilibrium, meaning you tend not to gain or lose weight (while maintaining the same body composition) and stay the same throughout the year, then I would recommend just exercising more through a strength and conditioning program. This will naturally stimulate your hunger drive and you’ll eat accordingly.
You can start with calisthenics if you want. Bruce Lee said to master the basics before doing anything else, meaning Pushups, squats and crunches. Just do high volume workouts and work up from there.
turqua: I’d recommend picking up a martial art such as boxing or kickboxing, but assuming the gym is the road you wanna go down in:
Step 0: Realise it is about having a better lifestyle, not a perfect lifestyle. You can perfectly fine train in a gym for an hour and eat a fat burger afterwards. It’s better than eating a fat burger anyways and not exercising. Don’t let outsiders talk down on you for not being perfect.
Step 1: Actually be in a gym 3 times a week. Even if it’s only 10 minutes and you just sit on a bench, just get that trip from & to the gym in your routine. And enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it anymore after 10 min, just go home.
Step 2: Do lifting – no cardio. Start doing compound exercises. Bench presses, squats, dips, deadlifts, overhead presses, even pull-ups if you can.
Step 3: Start focusing on your diet. Want to get stronger? Eat more calories than usually. Want to get leaner? Cut the carbs and eat lots of chicken, turkey etc.
Notice how the diet is the last part not the first. Most important is getting your ass in a gym 3-5 times a week. There is really no other secret than working for it. In the beginning heavily focus on compound exercises.
SUEK: Lift heavy ass weights for about a year and a half and eat hell of a lot of chicken while doing it. Then proceed to cut for half a year and lift even heavier weights.
CastinEndac: 1: Squats
2: Oats
spoonybends: Working out burns a lot of calories too, which makes losing weight easier as well. But also don’t get discouraged if you’ve not lost or even gained weight in the first few months. When you start, you’ll make your biggest muscle/strength gains, and muscle weighs more than fat, so just keep that in mind and don’t let the scale be your only metric
firebuzzard: A couple things to remember before you start. First, no exercise routine will beat a bad diet. Second, for a transformation to stay, you have to make it a part of your daily routine and your habits.
My recommendation is to start with small changes for the first month. Maybe eating a smaller lunch and walking every night or heading to the gym every day for a short light workout. Clean the carb-rich food out of your pantry and make a commitment to not buy more. Keep your new routine for at least 21 days to get your new routine to become habit.
At that point, make small tweaks to layer on some additional changes. Join a fitness class like yoga to get some group support. Focus on eating more cleanly as you implement changes. Remember to take it slow so things become habit. Do workouts you enjoy.
Once you start seeing changes in your body and others start commenting about it, it’ll get easier. Snowball effect, so to speak.
Oh, get a physical from your doctor and fill them in on your goals. They may have some input to help keep you from getting injured, which can really screw up a routine and set you back.
koolkeano: Short answer, eat less move more. The quickest way ( if you don’t get injuries) would probably be weights.
panda-slap: I think you can do it in much less, depending on where you start. Look at Livestrong (the fitness site). Good information and free workouts. Also, generally low carb will get you leaner over time. Look for the sugar in everything.
judethedude: Start working out. Try a 5×5 push/pull/legs routine to start. Whenever you feel like getting leaner, add in the cardio (I do burpees throughout the day). Eat well.