Help me critique my plan to escape skinny fatness!

Cardio is not required. You can achieve fat loss through a caloric deficit alone (which is what I recommend for reasons I won't get into here). When fat loss begins to plateau THEN you can/should incorporate cardio if you don't want to reduce cals any further. This is my 8 month progress with ZERO CARDIO. Strength training only. Cardio is great for your heart and in leaner individuals can greatly influence nutrient partitioning, other then that it's really not worth it. Diet is everything. Also, carbs are great..don't fall into the low carb hype.

Hiiiiiiii. :flowerforyou:

Some good advice here, only thing I can add is, if you want to be Skinny Muscular in your words, get Skinny first.

Get as lean as you can, then see how much Muscle you need to put on. Some people will say just bulk early as you know you're Gonna be Skinny fat but you don't know, or know what you will have to work on during the bulk. I'm 5'9 and I was cutting down from a bit of muscle and I still got to 140 pounds lean then decided to bulk, and even that was enforced by my gym closing so I had to move to a Powerlifter type gym, I think I probably could've cut to about 135.

After that bulk until you have enough muscle mass, then cut slower than you're doing now.

What do you enjoy more? Start from there. If you enjoy a certain type of exercise, this is the right one for you.
What is the goal? Look at photos of body builders, runners, swimmers, cyclists etc and see what you would like to look like. Everyone involved into serious exercise will be more muscular than someome who does not exercise, so in this sense there is no right or wrong with any exercise. If you enjoy cardio and find it easier to focus on this, do cardio and add some stength training once or twice a week. If you enjoy weight lifting, make this your main activity and add some runnign or walking in there. If you want to become more athletic, it will take more than e.g. one hour per week, so focus on first finding somethign you can enjoy regularly.

As others have stated, and I will say the same.

Caloric deficit
Right macros
Weigh room more, tread mill a lot less.

I myself do maybe 1 day a week of cardio, about 40 min.

The rest of the time it is weights and diet.

Protein == 0.8 - 1.0 gr / pound of body weight
Fat == 0.4 gr / pound of body weight (minimum)
Carbs == Can make up the rest of your calories.

I'm wondering however if it would be more worth my while to eat at maintenance instead of at a small deficit. What would happen in either case?

Since you have fat to burn, you will want a deficit, while doing weight training.
You still want to burn off the fat....
So a combo of deficit while lifting will help accomplish.

I would add weights as others have mentioned. The body weight w/o is good. Break them up into groups of three or four and do rounds of them. Maybe 3 to 5 sets in a 10 to 15 minute cycle.

But get access to some free weights - both barbell and dumbbell. Youtube some different lifts or exercises with weights.

I would go heavy on lean protein including a good, clean protein powder (I avoid powders that add artificial sweeteners).

Good luck.

I'll share my experience. Profile is the last pic I shot @ 169lbs. in January, down from 207. I started doing Stronglifts 5x5 a couple of years ago just before I joined MFP but actually gained too much weight (227) since I wasn't already lean and started consuming nearly 3000 cals/ day! I was getting a lot stronger but also a lot flabbier. No cardio was involved, however, I am a runner.

When I realized this error what I did was figure out what my BMR was, set my MFP activity settings to sedentary and then told it that I wanted to lose 1 lb. per week which was a 500 calorie deficit per day. This gave me my base number of cals to work with. I also stayed with the default macro partitioning set by MFP. Then each and every day I calculated and ate ALL of my exercise calories back - a consistent 500 calorie deficit was good enough. It was a slow, steady, healthy pace. During that time I continued doing SL 5x5 but eventually stopped altogether when the expenditure from heavier weights became too great in comparison to what I was consuming. Then I resumed running 3 x's/ week (8-14km)

With the consistent 500 cal deficit and eating exercise cals back, I lost 1 lb./ week like clockwork with a temporary plateau around 190ish and then again around 180. Both times took about 3 weeks before I saw progress again. I just kept plugging along and went to 169 in about 15 months. At 169 my body just told me that was enough and it was starting to show, thus I knew I reached my goal. Anything lower and I would've started started losing muscle and looking unhealthy.

The plan all along however was to lose the weight and most of my BF and then resume SL 5x5 which I'm back on now because weightlifting is what gives you a nicer body composition. Therefore, as much as I love running, I now either go for a 15-20 minute run right after weightlifting or a longer easygoing run once a week for about an hour because recovery and rest days after weightlifting is more important. Plus once the weightlifting becomes a challenge you'll see that you won't want to be doing much cardio afterwards anyway, lol.

I eat nearly 3000 cals again today (after weights) a year later only this time it gets burned off like kindling in a fire! It's easier to sense if I'm gaining unnecessary weight now and can adjust accordingly. So a plan, patience, consistency, rest... let these do their job. For a plan, I read the Stronglifts report as a starting point a couple of years ago and believe it is still there to freely download. I definitely watch form/ technique videos and search for credible advice when in doubt of anything. i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fmrKmJMQnw

:bigsmile: