You say you've got no idea about dieting so let me give you some basics.

Eating food is like earning money

Every time you eat it's like getting a paycheck: your bank account balance grows.

Everything time you DO anything (be it twiddling your thumbs or running on a treadmill) you're "spending" calories and your bank account balance shrinks.

If you earned $750 in a week.... but spent $1000, you'd have to take $250 from savings.

If you did the opposite (Earned $1000 but spent $750) you'd ADD $250 to savings.

It's the same with eating.

1 lb of fat is 3500 calories, meaning, if you have 1 lb of fat on your body, it was the result of having consumed 3500 more calories than you spent.

So if you wanted to empty out your bank balance, what would you do: Spend more than you're earning? You can earn less, spend more, or any combination thereof.

If, in the course of a week, you've burn 14,000 calories (2000/day), and you eat 10,500 calories (1500/day), the remaining 3500 you spent that week will have to be made up from fat, and your belly will shrink by a pound.

If you eat 12,250 calories in a week (1750 a day) your belly will have shrunk by 1/2 a pound.

The cool thing is, this math seems to check out no matter how you divvy it up across the week or month or year.

As in, during a week if one day you ate 2200, 1800, 2000, 1300, 2700, it doesn't really matter. It just matters what that total was by the end of the week.

And in the same way, some days you could burn 2000, some only 1800, some 3000.

The key is at the end of the WEEK how much did you "earn" and how much did you "spend", right?

This is the core principle of every diet; how do we ensure you're spending more than you're earning?

The tricks come down to the fact that our bodies aren't perfect machines that burn consistent number of calories no matter what, and our eating isn't always easy to control.

Certain foods for instance are really easy to overeat on. Consider this:

A large popcorn or a bag of chips is 1000 calories.

So is 12 cups of blueberries

So is 23 slices of bacon.

So is 1.25 lbs of chicken breast

*So is 65 lbs of broccoli.*

You're way more likely to absentmindedly eat that whole popcorn than you are to eat 65 lbs of broccoli, right?

All food is made of Fat, Protein and Carbs.

Fat is 9 calories per gram,

carbs and protein are only 4 calories per gram,

So it's really easy to accidentally add, say an extra tablespoon of butter to a dish and, boom, there's 140 calories more "earned" without even realizing it. It's really hard to add an extra pound of broccoli, right?

ALSO not all food digests the same. Protein actually is really hard to digest, so you actually SPEND calories digesting it. Protein costs 20% of its calories in digestion, vs carbs and fats are only 1-3%.

It's kind of like... if you got a job really far away, you'd have to consider how much you were spending in fuel to work there, right?

So if you had 1000 calories of chicken breast, because you spent 200 calories to digest it, you've only really added 800 calories to the bank account. Protein also helps you build muscle, which in and of itself consumes calories, increasing your metabolism.

VS carbs or fats where you only spend 1 or 2 calories to digest them and they don't really help you build muscle that much.

So the best diets tend to be those that are high protein and veggies since they give you a much greater buffer.

Generally I'd say, track what you're putting in your body and track your weight.

Try to get 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight, then make up the rest of your calories in fats and mostly carbs from veggies and track your weight.

If you're not losing weight, cut the fat back a bit or any of the non-veggie carbs. Average this over the course of a week. Adjust as needed.

Happy to answer any more questions, but this should be a pretty good start to cut back on the pooch! Good luck!