Questions about doing a recomp

As an untrained beginner, you should see pretty good results by starting a heavy lifting routine and eating at maintenence level calories. I would save losing the last 11 pounds until you stop seeing newbie gains. You only get to benefit from that once!

Eat initially right at your TDEE while getting your strength up. After a couple months switch to bulking or cutting. Check out this post for more info:

http://leadingmuscle.com/2014/07/12/how-to-build-muscle-lose-fat-get-abs-cut-and-bulk/

Read New Rules of Lifting for Women. It has the best comprehensive discussion about diet and calorie deficits/maintenance for any woman who is a true beginner, imho. It also gives you a beginner lifting program and details how to do each lift. However, if you find the lifting program to he too convoluted, you can use another beginner program like Stronglifts 5x5, which is free and available over the Internet.

You want to get your body fat percentage down to a point where you're relatively happy with it before you begin to bulk (eat at a surplus). That means eating at maintenance or even a very small deficit while lifting.

When you bulk, you add fat and muscle, and will need to do a cut cycle to get your BF % back down to the level it was pre-bulk. Bulking with an already high BFP will just mare it harder to lower it after the bulk.

Personally I think stronglifts 5x5 is much better at actually building muscle/burning fat and is much simpler and easier than NROLFW. It's also free and will teach you the real fundamentals of heavy weight training better than most routines.

Changing my post here cause I think I misunderstood you. What you want to do is burn a little fat and build strength, if I'm understanding you right. You won't be able to build a lot of muscle on a surplus or anything, its just not physically possible for you. You're a 127lb female, even at a surplus with your noob gains you're only going to add 1lb of muscle here or there. So what you're really talking about doing is burning fat and building strength.

Just to clarify, building strength is not the same thing as building muscle. Muscle is just tissue, and it packs on very slowly, for anyone. Most people who think they're adding muscle are actually adding a combination of things, some muscle yes, but also some fat, some water weight, things like this.

Strength is how well you use the muscle you have to move weight. There is a woman who weighs 132lbs who can bench nearly 300lbs... she has a lot of strength, not a lot of muscle. You build strength by doing functional, compound weight training. That means work with freeweights, primarily the barbell. Barbell bench press, barbell squats, barbell deadlift, the standing overhead press and the pendlay row. They're compound exercises because they use many muscle groups in tandem. They're functional because they build real strength. You will put on some muscle in the process of doing them, but what you're really doing is improving your nervous system's ability to make use of the muscle tissue you have.

So this is what you want to do when it comes to heavy lifting. You want a lifting program that focuses on fundamentals, like barbell training, in order to build strength.

At the same time you want a reasonable diet with a slight caloric deficit, to burn fat. I say slight because I don't think you want to push the diet part too hard when lifting heavy, you want to get enough food. You need to know your TDEE and you need to be eating just under it. This will allow you to burn fat, hold onto your lean mass and build strength. Or if you eat a bit more, basically at maintenance or slightly above, you'll add muscle a bit easier, but you probably won't burn much fat. These are numbers that you should fiddle with to find what works for you, what gives you the best progress, and where you are most comfortable.

You have to be willing to experiment, just a little bit, in order to really optimize this for you.

And yes you need to get enough protein. Your LBM is probably around 90lbs (although this is hard to say, I don't know, I'm just guessing based on your pictures), ideally you'd be getting about 1g of protein for every pound of lean mass you have per day. Getting in the ballpark of 90g of protein a day is easy... for you this might mean 1 scoop of whey protein supplement (20-30g) and the rest from chicken and other protein rich food. But that's up to you.

So you need to figure out what your TDEE is and your LBM. Eat accordingly, lift 3x a week and get plenty of rest. Your progress might be slow as was mine but it will be solid progress, you'll see and notice differences with enough work and time.

And don't sweat the details too much to start. You'll be refining and improving as you go, so the important part is to do it and be willing to make changes and experiment. Good luck!