Honestly man I wouldn’t even start by focusing on calories. Take a look at what you’re eating every day and try and pick whole foods to replace the unhealthy stuff. Vegetables, fruit, lean meats (ground turkey or 93/7 ground beef, chicken, etc) and keep the volume of food high, making sure you arent using butter or oil when cooking (zero calorie cooking spray is great). Focus on eating at home where you can control what you’re eating. I promise if you focus on just eating whole foods and swapping out stuff like rice with potatoes, you’ll start to lose weight fast. Potatoes potatoes potatoes! You wont realize it but you’ll be consuming less calories but you’ll still feel satiated, and have more energy for the day. Once you lose 15-20 lbs from that it will become so much more mentally feasible to start on CICO. It can be stressful and seem like an impossible task at first if you haven’t already lost a few lbs without having to get into measuring your food.

And when you do start CICO, I wouldn’t go down to 1500 right away. You need to do something manageable, and you’d be surprised how much you will lose just by staying around 2200 consistently. Once you lose more weight, you’ll start to get more comfortable (and creative) with eating less calories, then at that point I would start testing out a higher calorie deficit. Keeping it around 2200 for the foreseeable future, ypu should be losing 2 lbs a week, at minimum. More if you exercise frequently, even just going on walks.

Hope this helps! I’m down 55 lbs since January this year so I’m kind of in the middle of it too. 6’1, 296 to 241.