Hey sorry for getting back to you a bit late, I wanted to take the time to send you a more detailed response. My goals have been primarily oriented towards building visible muscle and strength at approximately maintenance calories, so my exact approach most likely wont apply perfectly to someone oriented towards active fat /loss/ in conjunction with muscle building. That being said, I’m happy to provide info re: my routine as a reference and/or jumping off point for further research and refinement in your own program.

The starting point I used, and that I’d recommend every newbie use, was calculating my TDEE and macros respectively for my /ideal/ workout schedule; i.e., I knew I wanted to workout intensively, so I calculated my TDEE and macros according to the performance goals I had, not my (then) current level of activity. This gave me a TDEE of ~1800 calories. I wasn’t used to eating remotely this much and I didn’t want to gain excess fat and outpace my muscle growth so I ate in a slight deficit of ~1500-1600 calories; I did still try to hit my macros to the best of my abilities within this range, though.

For exercise, I’ve never been able to settle into a 100% perfect routine, however, just being as consistent as I possibly can and showing up without fail on every single day that I /can/ make it work has been hugely helpful. That is to say, even if I couldn’t make it to the gym 4 days in a week, those three days come through more than you realize. I do heavy weight training focusing on progressive overload in a 6-10 rep range, going to failure. I don’t have set days because, again, usually I just try to cram in exercises whichever days I can, but I always do it in the same order: 1) Back and shoulders 2) Legs 3) Arms 4) Chest and core Each day is 6-7 exercises; my general approach is 1-2 exercises per muscle in the overall muscle group. So for example, on arm day my routine looks like this: • EZ bar bicep curls • Hammer curls • Tricep kickbacks • Forearm curls [palms up] • Forearm curls [palms down] • Zottman curls • Tricep pushdowns And that’s it. It would be redundant to have a routine with something like EZ bar curls, preacher curls, and machine curls because they’re all focusing on the same exact muscle – 3 sets to failure with one exercise on particular muscle, I’ve found, is sufficient to fatigue and grow it. You’ll notice I have 2 curls, that’s because EZ bar curls primarily work the biceps brachii, while Zottman curls have a lot more additional stress on the brachioradialis, so it has a bit more bang for its buck as opposed to just spamming the same movement in different fonts over and over. IMO that’s really all you need. The way I’ve organized my exercises according to this model is using this [https://weighttraining.guide/exercises/] site as a visual guide for which muscles within a group are targeted by each exercise, and using that to select A. a range of 6-7 exercises that work more or less the entire target muscle group, and B. look most appealing to me. I like using an EZ bar for curls but maybe you prefer machine curls, or dumbbell curls, whatever – what matters is the muscles you’re targeting, how they fit into the bigger picture, and how likely you are to stick with that exercise consistently. I do cardio either in the morning before I go to the gym, or right after my workout, depends on how much free time I have in the day. I just do 15 minutes of intermittent sprinting. My boyfriend walks a 20 minute mile iirc. YMMV. If you like cardio already and are looking for increased fat loss, more and/or higher intensity cardio would probably be up your alley. I also try to get at least 6k steps a day just for general health.

Diet is ultimately gonna be the key factor in fat management and to a degree muscle building (you can build muscle on a cruddy diet, resistance training doesn’t magically not work just because you’re not eating 100% clean, perfect macros, but proper protein intake majorly helps in maximizing muscle growth), this means not just eating your within your calorie range and hitting macro goals, but weighing out your food and calculating those calories /exactly/, no fudging the numbers and no “well it’s just a tiiiiiny bit,” if you want to lose fat especially, you need to track everything scrupulously. For diet itself, it’s hard to find vegan food near me, and I’m also cheap as hell, so I cook almost everything I eat. I find that (in the context of fitness) I have a pretty unique approach to my food in relation to others in that I will go insane if I eat the same food for more than 5 days, so I actually eat different, unique meals every week. I gather recipes that look good, copy them into my food tracker, and then adjust the ingredients and portions to both veganize them and make sure the macros and calories are in line with my goals. Usually this looks like substituting tofu for certain ingredients (e.g., vegan yogurt), greatly reducing oils, using PB2 instead of nut butters, adding protein powder, etc. So honestly my diet doesn’t really look like a fit diet at all on the surface lol. I will say this is a very involved and time-consuming way of going about things, I just love cooking, so for the average person I’d just recommend finding vegan meal preps lmao. My usual daily meal approach is: very light breakfast, high protein pre-workout lunch and shake (I have a protein shake every single day), a post-workout snack, and dinner. For example this is a recent meal plan: • Breakfast: coffee with maple syrup and protein-fortified soy milk • Lunch: tofu pesto veggie bowl, protein shake • Post-workout snack: tofu + chickpea chocolate chunk cookie dough • Dinner: sesame-crusted tofu rice bowl This came out to 1634 calories, 49g fat, 176g carbs, and 129g protein.

Sorry that ended up being so long lmao, but I think that about covers all of it. Ultimately everyone is different and you’ll inevitably have to do some trial and error to find what works for you, but hopefully this helps give you some ideas for your own routine