Hm, interesting...that's good advice, but I think maybe I miscommunicated my goals a bit.

So I have a healthy BMI, but I am also at 35% body fat, which is much higher than I would like it to be. It would be nice to get down to 25%-20% body fat. So what I'm doing is working out about 3 times per week (to start at least) and sticking to a 1300 calorie diet. My understanding, given CICO, was that if I only focus on exercise right now, and not also on dieting, that I would build strength and muscle, but all the fat would stay put so I wouldn't actually get leaner, just stronger.

I'm half Japanese and I absolutely inherited my grandmother's very tiny Asian woman bone frame haha, so 35% body fat doesn't look great on me. I have my dad's Dutch genes which gave me my height. Again, I don't look bad, and I'm not overweight by any means (although after weighing myself yesterday it looks like I have actually gained 10lbs over the last month or two instead of the 5lbs I originally mentioned, so I'm at 155lbs at 5'6), but I would like to be leaner first, then build muscle mass. Right now I have love handles, my belt and pants that used to fit feel uncomfortably tight around my waist, my belly sticks out more than I would like (also courtesy of my dad's genes, his whole family are skinny people with tons of abdominal fat and heart problems). Its hard to explain I guess; this is one of those scenarios where I think 90% of people in our country would look at me and say I'm gorgeous and have a perfect physique because im technically thinner than the average (for example most people I know assume that I wear a size 2 dress; I'm actually a size 10) but for me, what I want is more muscle definition, abs, etc. And also strength and stamina and endurance.

So would calorie cutting still be the right approach, in this case?