First of all, I'm female. I know that makes a difference.
Now, I have started trying to eat a healthy diet and get exercise to lose weight (though I refuse to say I am on a diet, because I think that sounds temporary and I am trying to find a permanent plan that I will be able to follow indefinitely, not something temporary), but I always read that you should eat right, do cardio, and strength train, but it's so vague.
I will be detailed about what I am currently doing to make the advice more properly tailored...
I figured out the food part.. I'm in college and most of the main entrees at the cafeteria contain a calorie count, so for the time being I find calorie counting pretty manageable. I'm eating 2000 calories a day now (before I might have sometimes been eating as many as 4000, so this is quite a drop for me). I quite easily cut liquid calories out of my diet and now drink only out of a water fountain except at dinner (I LOVE water fountains but have trouble drinking water out of a bottle all day for some reason) I've also decided to eat breakfast, morning snack, lunch, sometimes an afternoon snack, dinner, and an evening snack, because I get hungry easily. I make sure that my lunch and dinner aren't too big though! I've found this quite easy. I tried "dieting" before, pushing myself too much and trying never to snack and I was always hungry and miserable. I'm pleasantly surprised now, because I'm never hungry and quite satisfied if I can eat every few hours. I have always loved fruit and have no problem with salad, so at dinner I make sure to have a salad and fruit, along with my glass of 2% Milk that I've been drinking every day since I was little (milk makes me full too, so I don't overeat!) I am not really having a problem not eating junk food, because I like fruit and stuff just as much. LOL I just make sure to eat 2000 calories a day (don't want to starve myself) and not eat a lot of junk food, and I'm not having trouble with it. I can imagine eating like this 20 years from now! It's not really difficult.
In the same way, cardio doesn't seem to be presenting too much difficulty for me. I am embarrassed to run in public, or go to a gym, so I am climbing up and down stairs every day (making sure to put the weight in my upper legs and butt when I go down, not my knees) and I can only do 10 minutes right now (up and down 5 times) but I'm slowly increasing it, until eventually I will just do stair climbing. For the time being, I'm doing brisk walking too, enough so that with the stair climbing and walking I burn about 500 calories (so 2000-500=1500?). The better I get at stairs, the less walking I'll have to do, but I can't push myself too much at once. I've been doing this every day pretty easily. I take a friend with me to keep me motivated. I can also see keeping this up 20 years from now, either stair climbing or having a treadmill at home (we do at my home where I'll return to in the summer).
But my ISSUE is strength training and stretching..... cardio is pretty easy to figure out, and there's a lot of info online about keeping calories in check and how to keep your metabolism up through the cardio. But everywhere says strength training, and then I look it up and it says to make sure to exercise your muscles equally to avoid problems... and all these different ways to strength train, and I get so confused.
I am just trying to burn muscle to burn fat, and I really don't want to go to a gym, because I'm embarrassed about exercising in public. I am also not specifically training any one part, so I guess I don't have any real need to just be exercising single muscles, since I just want to gain muscle to help lose weight. So it would make more sense to exercise my muscles in groups? But I can't figure out what would be the best way to do this. I don't want to overtrain one part and not train another.. but I can't find a good easy general dummies guide for building muscle to lose fat (so not to build a LOT of muscle), like an entire program, like what exercises to do to make sure I cover everything, and what exercises (exercises I can do in my room, I mean... I could buy some weights if they weren't too expensive I guess) and how many times a week (I THINK 3 is a good number so I don't overwork anything?) because trying to figure it out on my own isn't working. On top of that, I don't know if my climbing stairs is building leg muscle and if I should still work out that area equally or not.. I'm just really confused.
I'm just as confused about stretching. They say to stretch before you do cardio for 5-10 minutes, but not all the stretches you should do to make sure you don't miss anything. Could anybody help me on that?
Basically I just need advice on the weight training. I want to do it but have no idea where to start without going to a gym and am having trouble finding the info I need online.