Exercises

I think the object of keeping the weight off is more of a focus on your food intake than your exercises. While it is amazing for your body and beneficial in so many ways to exercise at all, what you eat dictates how much you weigh, for the most part.

Create a calorie deficit from what your body needs to lose weight. Continue to eat only what you need to maintain that weight.

This your total daily energy expendature. This number is what you can focus on eating to stay at the same weight. If you eat less than that, you lose weight, if you eat more, you gain weight. Here is one example of a calculator to see how many calories you will need to eat to stay at the same weight: http://www.fitnessfrog.com/calculators/tdee-calculator.html

Losing weight is about 80% food intake, 20% exercise. So while you're in losing weight mode you need to focus on your food. Lean meats and fish (assuming you're an omnivore, apologies if you're not), plenty plenty fresh vegetables and some fruit. Then add dairy and grains according to your personal preference. MFP can help you out with proportions of protein, fat and carbs. Many people find keeping the protein intake high (a little higher than MFP sets) helps manage the cravings for sugary things (which I personally agree with, and think sugary things are nearly as bad as cigarettes). Keeping up the protein level may also minimise muscle loss during the weight loss phase.

And while your food is very important, so is exercise - activity will assist your weight loss and will improve your overall health. The bike stuff is excellent and since you like playing ball why not go shoot some hoops at the local court, or walk in the park with a ball, dribbling and just generally mucking around with it?

Keeping the weight off then is about paying attention to what you eat forever (yes, sounds bad but I've been doing it for years now and believe me it's worth it) and keeping up the activity.

And when you're ready to start strengthening muscle do some research on programs for that specifically. As Ninerbuff said, you can't significantly lose weight and build muscle at the same time.

All the best, let us know how you progress.

So your goal is to lose fat and gain muscle? Great plan but I question why you think that it should be a two step process. A-it will take you twice as long and B-if you lose fat to get to your "ideal" weight, when you put on muscle that number is going to rise.

Let me recommend an awesome book for you. It is called "The 14-day Body Sculpting Bible". If you search these forums you will find countless entries for "plateau". People start a plan, lose like crazy for about 2-3 weeks then hit this plateau. the reason is because your body is designed to survive and it will adjust to whatever plan you are doing in a repititous fashion and you'll stop burning fat. I beleive the proper way to do it, and the book centers on this philosophy, is to periodically mix up your workout to purposefully confuse your body. If you do it properly you lose fat like crazy while building muscle at the same time.

For 14 days you'll do low weight, high reps. the next 14 days you do moderate weight at moderate reps. the next 14 days are heavy weight, low reps. the intensity, or resting period between reps also fluctuates throughout the plan. I can personally attest that it will blow you up. I did this program in 2009. I went from not being able to bench 200 lbs. at all to a personal best of 265 in about 6 months. I also had a couple of guys tell me, "I wish my arms looked like yours".

Now a key thing to know is that my overall weight only dropped about 5 lbs. BUT-best estimate was that i lost about 20 lbs of fat and replaced it with 15 lbs of muscle and it made a huge difference.

Since then i got lazy, quit working out, ate horribly, and gained it all back. Then i found MFP and got motivated again. One month ago on Sept 6th, I was at 210 lbs with a 42.5 inch belly. Today, I weighed in at 199 and 39.5 on the gut. It works for me so i highly recommend it.

whatever you decide-best of luck.

manjingirl nailed it

Losing weight is about 80% food intake, 20% exercise.

One could argue percentages a little, but yeah, weight is primarily controlled by diet, not by exercise. And yes, it is a system calories in - calories out = weight change.

Actually manjingirl, everything you said made decent sense. No magic, just keeping at it. Nice.