I doubt anyone reads this anymore, but who cares? I'm over 22 pounds down from when I joined the gym and I'm really starting to see the cardiovascular endurance improve, too.
My goal is to be back to the weight I was at when I quit grappling by the end of January and back to the weight I was when I was doing metric centuries on my bike (100-kilometer "races," though my idea of racing was pretty leisurely) by the end of this coming school year. If I can maintain a gym habit, I think I can do this pretty well.
In theory, if you can create a deficit of 3,500 calories, you've burned one pound of fat, give or take. Daily maintenance for my current weight is over 3,000 calories by the Basal Metabolic Rate method, so the first thing I've tried to do is to eat the maintenance level for my eventual goal (about 225-250, which on my frame is fairly muscular and reasonably lean) which means staying somewhere between 1600-2000 calories per day. For now, I use 2000 as my benchmark . . . but I try to burn at least 500 calories per day in the gym doing cardio work just so that I have something trackable and repeatable. The goal is to create a 1,000 calorie deficit minimum per day. That would mean I burn 7,000 more calories than I take in every week, which translates to 2 pounds lost per week on average. The calorie numbers sound kind of extreme, but the rate of fat loss is right in the middle of what most doctors recommend.
