Wow, learning to lose weight is giving me a headache, someone help please !!!

[southwest-rider]

Hello everyone, I've been reading up on nutrition in general, not so much the diet books, or the lose weight quick books, I believe in a balance diet combined with a good exercise routine (aerobic and resistance training both). But after reading and looking over some posts, I am getting a headache, and now I even have doubts about what I thought I knew.
The standard I grew up with was, if you're overweight and want to lose the weight, figure out how many calories your body needs in a day (not including cal burned in your workout) and spread them out throughout the day, then use exercise to create a defeceit. Therefore your weight loss comes from the exercise you do, and if you want to increase weight loss, then you start cutting down your calories.
But now I am reading more and its getting confusing. I have Alwyns NROL book and I like it, especially the workout schedule, its great, but what confuses me is when he talks about increasing your metabolism. It kinda makes sense, the more you eat and workout, the more you increase your metabolism, but if you're trying to lose weight, eating more is not what you want. Then again I understand that cutting too many calories and increasing your workload hasn opposite efect on your metabolism, it slows it down. So what do you do?!?!!?
The only thing I can come up with that kinda goes along those lines is to incrase the amount of times you eat throughout the day, and maybe cut down a lilttle on your calories, but how will this affect my metabolism, will I still get the same effects tha Alwyn talks about ???
And if I cut down, whats a safe number to cut by ????
Anyone, have any hints advice, anything ???
Any and all comments are greatly appreciated.

p.s. when I say weight loss i mean both fat and muscle, since I have never seen, nor do I believe that you can just lose fat and keep all your muscle mass, but you can minimize the amount of muscle you lose.

Thanx for your patience in reading this

[Lost Dog]

Doesn't NROL have a formula for how many calories eat to lose weight?

Anyhow, any formula is just a starting point. You can find use a Harris-Benedict formula to start or just go with 12 times your body weight. From either one, you adjust up or down after a couple of weeks, depending on whether you think it's going too slowly or too quickly.

When Alwyn and Lou talk about being able to eat more, that's usually good. No one want to eat less. Eating less sucks.

The NROL workouts are designed to boost metabolism and retain muscle, allowing you to eat a bit more and still lose weight, and since you're retaining more muscle, you'll likely lose more fat than muscle.

[JoshDunn]

The whole metabolism speeding up and slowing down has confused alot of people.

They simply mean that you eat a bit more to fuel more and more productive workouts. By eating more they might mean 2200calories rather than 1800calories not 4000calories like it makes it seem.

Weights and intervals stimulate your metabolism anyway so this metabolism slowing thing is usually targetted to the cardio bunnies who only eat lettuce.