How to tone, build muscle and lose body fat?

cllmetatrsld

I have lost 30 pounds with starting at eating 1200 calories a day. I have done cardio and strength training on and off. I plateaued after losing about 20 pounds and doing cardio and strength training every other day. I stopped weight training after being in a car accident in late February and my neck and back still bother me and so I have only been lifting about 5 pounds with my arms for now but I'm ready to move up a bit.

I weigh 155 right now and would like to get to 140...but I would like to lose the love handles and the flabbyish arms and jiggly thighs. Right now I eat about 1500 calories a day and other than that don't really look at nutrition. I've paused my dieting to prepare for another round of strict dieting/nutrition. Now I am ready to go. What do I need to do to tone the areas I mentioned while burning fat? Do I need to do low car and low calorie or just low carb? I have read on here before something about those wanting to lower their body fat % have to lower their carbs. I would also like to know about how I should go about weights/cardio. Are they equally important? In terms of my status physically due to the accident I will go over that with my doc but he says just start slow and build up. But what should I eventually be doing? I'm guessing I'm at 25% body fat and I don't want to be super model fit but I'd like to get rid of jiggle. 15%? No idea.

Help!

NikoM5

You'll find it difficult to gain any meaningful amount of muscle while trying to lose fat. Oh and BTW, toning is actually just losing fat to reveal the muscle shape underneath. What you can do is preserve the muscle you have while burning fat. In order to that you'll need to lift heavy weights while on your fat loss, calorie deficit diet. Heavy would be 8-10 reps of a weight that is heavy enough that you can ONLY do 8-10 reps. If you are physically able to do 11reps then you aren't lifting enough and you are cheating yourself out of results. You'll want to eat enough protein to preserve muscle. Eat good fats and keep the carbs low. I like to eat the majority of my carbs in the morning so that I have plenty of energy for my afternoon workouts. Cardio is great but it's a distant second to diet in terms of losing weight.