Exercise regime....

Just keep doing it until you're a sweaty, horrible mess.

The only thing you need for weight loss is a caloric deficit. Exercise is more for your health or increasing your caloric deficit so you can eat a bit more. As you can’t spot reduce fat, I’d just focus on maintaining the caloric deficit by accurately tracking your food (ideally with a food scale for all solids) and eating only about half your exercise calories back (because they tend to be really overestimated).

I'm currently doing Jillian Michaels' "Killer Abs".

Nothing is needed... but what do you want to do? What are your goals? Is it just to loose weight? Is it for cardiovascular health? Do you want have muscles? Be stronger fitter? Is this at home, or do you want to join a gym?

This is where you start.. there is no recommended exercise.

If you care about body composition (maximizing fat loss and minimizing muscle loss), you'll need to do some sort of progressive resistance training (most popular option: heavy lifting) and eat enough protein (around 1g per lb of LBM).

Cardio is enough but keep good diet as diet is the key. If you will combine cardio with other exercises, that will be even better for your body look improvement and health. The best is to do cardio 20-30 minutes (not too long) on an empty stomach in the morning before breakfast (some ppl may say that this is a myth but still many professional fitness instructors recommend this). And when burning fat its better if you do cardio at pace which doesn't make you feel totally exhausted. Gyms are very expensive, I'm thinking about quitting mine too

ndj1979 wrote: »

tziol wrote: »

Cardio is enough but keep good diet as diet is the key. If you will combine cardio with other exercises, that will be even better for your body look improvement and health. The best is to do cardio 20-30 minutes (not too long) on an empty stomach in the morning before breakfast (some ppl may say that this is a myth but still many professional fitness instructors recommend this). And when burning fat its better if you do cardio at pace which doesn't make you feel totally exhausted. Gyms are very expensive, I'm thinking about quitting mine too

OP ignore this bro science...

This "bro science" are words of many fitness instructors too. Let's ignore them

Martin_leeann, looked at your pics and congrats your bravery to post them. Body shame's pretty hard to overcome.

First, what works for you might not be what works for others. So take all advice with a grain of salt. If something doesn't work, while people are saying "its a sure bet", don't worry, just try something else.

The "Bro science" that ndj1979 is objecting to is "on an empty stomach". For some people that makes them nauseous. For me its when I'm most energetic, so it works. I don't think it speeds weight loss though. The part that is NOT bro science is the 20-30 minutes; that is real science. Its been shown that to really get increased fitness you need to exercise for more than 20 minutes. 2 10 minute workouts is NOT as good as 1 20 minute. Your heart rate and metabolism don't kick in until about the 20 minute mark.

Based on you're comments, you'd like to not only lose weight, but also tone and firm up. I'd recommend you approach this in 3 phases, light cardio only to start, heavier cardio and light weights, and then some whole body weights.

You're pics look like you are in fairly good shape. By that I mean you can sit on the floor and then stand easily. You could probably walk for an hour or 2 and not be dying by the end of it. If thats true, then for the few weeks do some walking 5-6 days a week. 20-30 minutes to start. But on the weekend try to go for some nice long walks 1-2 hours. By week 3 you should be doing hills, and picking up the pace. I can't run, as I have bad knees that won't take the impact, but by week 5 you probably want to be doing some light running, just for 20-30 minutes. After 8-9 weeks of this kind of exercise your body is going to be really good at walking and jogging. Which will lessen the benefit you receive. So it will be time to add things that move other muscles. Planking, push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, etc. At 18-20 weeks you'll be needing weights to really get a good workout. Start with weight machines as its easy to get injured, but long term you need to hit the squat rack, deadlift, and bench press.

If your in better shape you can accelerate these times. If you're in worse shape, then give yourself more time. But you need to ease into this, worst thing to to is get injured and then you can't even move as well as before you started!

You mention problem areas, and the truth is that you can't target weight loss to any real extent. BUT, there are some things you can do to make things look more attractive. Many folks have the "bat wings", flab under the arms. Well, if you put on some muscle in the upper arms they will go away! Saggy butt? Time to hit the stairs and do squats! Put some muscle on that butt and the sag will fill out. Only bad thing about muscle, it does reduce if you stop exercising. So this is really a life long commitment to being in better shape, which is probably a good idea anyway!

Good luck!