Sugaplum, I'm assuming you're a girl (if not, sorry).
But honestly, you'll get a lot of info if you'd come to the women's forum and check the stickies at the top. It's also a good place to start a log (helps keep you honest, meanwhile others can look at your diet and exercise habits and makes suggestions).
The forum is here: Women's Fitness (Female Bodybuilding and Training) - EliteFitness.com Bodybuilding Forums
In particular, be sure to read the sticky at the very top, that says
START HERE it's LOADED with information. Also, once you're there you can look at the logs of other women, yes, some are competitors, but some are just "regular people" trying to achieve their personal fitness goals.
You need two components to weight loss, a grip on your diet and regular exercise. The diet is best achieved by learning what to eat and portion control and that comes from learning to log everything you eat. The easiest way to do that is with a diet diary, and there are plenty out there. We refer a lot of people to Fitday.com, but that's not the only one, it is, however, free (I like one that I paid for and downloaded to my desktop called Calorie King, the convenience was worth it for me).
As for exercise, I don't know if you get any form of exercise or what your fitness level is. If you're totally new at this, start small, work up, even if it's just a daily walk, bike ride ANYTHING.
As for how to figure out how many calories a day, again, there's tons of calculators on the internet. The rough number I got for you to eat to lose weight would be 1,966 calories. I got that information from this website:
BMR Calculator First I calculated your BMR using the information you provided and then used the Harris Benedict calculator, assuming you are sedentary, to get the calories you need to eat daily just to maintain your current weight (2,466) and then subtracted 500, which, IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE, would result in a pound of weight lost a week. If you burn an additional 500 calories by say, walking brisking for one hour a day (you don't have to do it all at once, you can break it up into two sessions of 30 minutes or even more if you need to) then you're going to lose two pounds a week. Actually, what happens is you lose it in fits and starts, even eating on plan and exercising regularly you'll have big drops some weeks, then no drops at all, then another big drop and so on. Eventually, after you lose about 20 pounds or so you need to recalculate your caloric intake based on your new weight and activity level.
Losing weight is not a sprint, it's a marathon, more of an endurance race. You can't be good one or two weeks and then give yourself permission to go completely overboard for the rest of the month. It's like quitting smoking or controlling any other addiction or bad habit. You have to be relentless, and you have to be patient, but the most important thing is to take it one day at a time.
Good luck, Suga.
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