The proper way to lose weight is not the way I'm going about it. The best way is to find out your resting metabolism (how many calories you burn on a daily basis when not doing anything extra). This you can find you fairly easily online, there are calculators for it. Once you have that, construct a daily diet that is basically just that many calories PLUS a few hundred more. THEN add an exercise routine to this that burns those few hundred calories extra plus a few hundred more. So if your resting metabolism is say 1800 calories eat 2000 calories a day and do a 400 calorie workout. This means you would be burning a net 200 calories a day.
The reason this is the way to go is that it boosts your metabolism and makes sure you are burning fat and not muscle and keeps you in good cardio health. But it's also slow.
If you want to lose weight faster like me then just find your resting metabolism and construct a diet that's significantly less than that and keep at it every day. You can have a few splurge days here and there but for the most part stick to it. For example I'm on a 1000 to roughly 1500 calorie / day diet which is pretty drastic. I don't plan on sticking to this forever, just until I get down to my target weight. I'm also going to add exercise to the mix as I go. Once I get down to my goal weight I'll have to play around with diet and exercise will I'm at a happy equilibrium.
One thing you can do is get a calorie counting app for your smart phone. The one I'm using is called MyFitnesPal and has something like 3 million food items in its database. It will calculate your rest metabolism and then you just keep a daily food diary of everything you eat. It makes it easy to not go over and you can also track your weight loss over time.
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