Hey dude, I just read (around 80%) of this post. I say power to you. I am 5'9" and had a similar body size and frame a couple years ago. I'm honestly not sure which made the biggest difference, my change in diet OR my commitment to exercise. However, I very much know that the overall success was literally impossible without both of those things. Here's a couple of pointers that, if I could go back in time, I would tell myself the first chance I got:
Cutting anything out of the diet is completely unneeded. Having a big piece of cake when someone is celebrating a birthday makes you GAIN as much weight back as doing an extra set of exercises makes you LOSE weight. In other words, neither thing makes more of a difference to your weight than throwing in or taking out a pebble makes to the water level of a swimming pool. Technically, yes, it has to make a difference to obey the laws of physics, but it's not noticable.
I'm fairly sure that one of the reason I was able to suceed in drastically changing my diet was because I didn't make any unrealistic goals and I didn't much change the way I ate in social situations. I never made a big deal about it when out with family or friends. However, when it was ONLY myself, I would 99% never eat potato chips, ice cream, or anything like that. But yeah, I gave myself very little wiggle room if and only if it affected me. When I was out with people (or just having meal with family), THAT was my 'cheat' time (though I hate putting it that way, because it sounds quite girly).
Also, basically any kind of exercise was a real change from 'baseline' for me when I started my weight loss, and I'm assuming it's the same way for you. To that end, don't beat yourself up too bad if you miss a day or two of exercising. Take it on weekly averages. I'm going to assume your current (as of a week ago) weight was pretty much consistent. So, your (mostly) resting ****bolism burned as many calories as you took in. Even if you just eat a little better OR just exercise a little bit, it is STILL a departure from baseline in the positive direction. Just DON'T be deathly afraid of 'bad' food or taking a day off exercise. As I said, eating bad for a couple meals isn't going to make you gain fat any more than going out and running a mile is going to make you lose fat.
Don't let the scale fool you. A scale does not measure the weight of your fat only, it measures how much you weigh. In other words, if you eat a couple big meals, and drink a lot of drink or basically take a day or two off, do NOT be alarmed if all of a sudden you weigh like six or so pounds more. It's NOT fat that has suddenly appeared. It's water weight and the weight of all that food traveling slowly throughout your intestines. Until I started my weight loss, I never paid attention to scales much at all. But I've weighed myself daily for damn near the past two years (the scale is in the bathroom, and it's just just instinct to step on it a time or two a day), and my weight can fluctuate a lot. For example, I just weighed myself (it's Wednesday) and I'm a shade under five pounds lighter than I was on Sunday night, after a weekend of pretty heavy eating and drinking.
Out of EVERY exercise, I will tell you the few that made the biggest difference in the way I felt. I've worked virtually every muscle in my arms, legs and core at some point in the past couple of years and strengthening my core and my abs made the biggest difference. I mean, just bending down to pick something off the floor, or getting up out of a chair....whatever, I just felt so much less sluggish after consistently (pretty much daily) doing situps and the following three 'core' exercises:
Make sure your knees are above the ground, and that you are perfectly straight from the tip of your head to your feet. Hold this for as long as possible for as many 'sets' as you can stand.
Make sure your shoulder blades are almost forming a straight line from shoulder to shoulder. Same deal here, hold it as long as you can for as many sets as possible. Do this with BOTH arms.
If you do the situps and these core exercises consistently (pretty much daily), then I can guaran-damn-tee that after a few weeks you will be able to feel the difference in daily activity moreso than after any other exercise. There are lots of diffrent types of core strengthening exercises you can do if you ever get tired of these too (burpees are awesome).
Also, about the whole 'working the arms' thing, that's pretty much what I did. For right at five months, I ONLY did situps (like a mad man), bicep curls and bench presses. Why? Because I did not have a gym membership and all I had were free weights (I put the weights on a chair while lying on the floor to do my bench presses). During those months, those were
literally the only exercises I did. I'm not saying that that was smart, but I was pretty ignorant of weight lifting, training....anything dealing with that, really. And between those three exercises and chaning the way I ate, I lost around 40 pounds (a very consistent ~8 pounds a month) during those first five months. I've lost more weight since, but those first 1 or 2 months are the "make or break" time, and I'm very pleased with the amount and speed of weight loss that occured. So yeah, any change from baseline will make you burn weight. Yes, there are much better exercises that you can do if you in any way have access to them, but working out arms technically will work too.
....ok, so I just reread my whole post and while I typed a lot, I didn't really
say alot. It's hard to put into words, but I guess my whole thing is that yeah, these days, I work out 4 to 6 days a week and eat better than literally any other guy I know and I'm more fit than any other guy I know as well (with the exception of some of those that I train with). Whatever my overall 'method' has been, I'm extraordinarily happy with the results.
To expect the Adam of two years ago to do this same thing would be crazy. I advise people to just take it fairly easy on themselves the first few months. Not as in, allowing themselves to be mentally weak, but to allow themselves SOME downtime and SOME crappy food intake. Cutting it cold turkey is just unncessary. It's not like smoking where if you do it one time after you quit, you fall back into the pattern. Unless someone really is mentally weak, eating some cake an ice cream one day and eating a burger and fries the next will have no bearing on not allowing themselves to have it for the next week.
Also, like I said initially, my change in diet was probably as big (or really, probably bigger) of a factor in my weight loss (and the following 1 - 1.5 years of keeping it off, up through the present) than my working out. I could get into that too, but I'm tired of typing. I read a lot of the stuff on here about people's recipes and whatnot, and hell, I'm confused about a lot of stuff and have never even heard of a lot of the foods/ingredients called for. Most everything I eat is simple, and honestly, for example, Berardi's Gourmet Nutrition cookbook would probably never get used by me. People say that 'eating healthy is too confusing', and it's because it IS for people who don't know anything about it. Like I said though, I keep things very simple and still don't know what the hell some of the people around here are talking about with some foods, supplements, etc. and it's worked excellently for me. Not that I couldn't benefit from more knowledge and a more strict diet, but I feel that it would be well beyond a point of diminishing returns (in that it would take more time and effort to learn about the implement the ideas and foods than the results would justify), because there's not really much I feel I'd want to change about my fitness or energy levels as they are. If you ever want to pick my brain about eating, not to sound like I know everything (because obviously lots of people at this particular forum know tons about this sort of thing), but for myself, I feel that over the past two years I've very much crafted a diet for myself that takes care of my nutritional needs and balances that with simplicity and effectiveness.
Good luck dude! And I'll be checking back on this thread, and I'm hoping to see success.
...and damn, this concludes the longest post I've ever written....