Make sure that the calories you're eating don't go below what's recommended for someone at your ideal (but healthy) weight for someone who's your height and age. If you don't eat enough calories, your body will have to burn muscle, including your heart.
Also, you probably have huge leg muscles from having been overweight. Make sure that you don't let those waste away, because they're furnaces that are burning fat for you all day without you having to do anything. Eat enough protein to maintain them. Walk a lot, ride a bike, do ellipticals, etc., but don't run because your joints might still need to repair themselves from when you were overweight.
The stuff I know about this might be outdated and/or just plain wrong, so anyone can correct me.
You need to keep your protein intake the same to maintain muscle 100% while losing weight but, depending on how thin you want to get, keeping the same protein intake as before is going to be impossible unless you're a bodybuilder. Since she's eventually going to have to eat less protein than before to get to a balanced diet, her body will start burning muscle when there's not enough fat to burn. If she's eating fewer calories than are recommended for her ideal weight, her body is going to take that from her muscle. She's doing calorie-counting right now, and I assume she doesn't want to do keto (which is dangerous in other ways and doesn't have much long term success), so I think she needs a balanced but high protein diet that's right for her ideal weight.
I'm no health guy, though, and only know about this stuff from doing things the wrong way. I used to count calories while keeping up my protein intake, but I based the diet on an unhealthy ideal weight and ended up getting too thin, losing muscle, getting minorly injured whenever I tried to work out... then I ended up gaining weight again so that I wouldn't die, and it was harder to lose without the muscles I used to have. I think that, if OP uses a better target weight than I did, keeps eating a lot of protein, and does some exercise to maintain her muscles, she'll have a better outcome than I did. But I really don't know. There was a while when I was doing it this way before quarantine and it was working really well, but then I got depressed and my muscles withered away when the gym in my building closed. I ordered an exercise bike, and am going to try again but, as you can see, I'm no expert at all, and don't even have the average person's knowledge about this. I'm just mostly trying to warn OP about not cutting calories as drastically as I did.
Congrats!
Make sure that the calories you're eating don't go below what's recommended for someone at your ideal (but healthy) weight for someone who's your height and age. If you don't eat enough calories, your body will have to burn muscle, including your heart.
Also, you probably have huge leg muscles from having been overweight. Make sure that you don't let those waste away, because they're furnaces that are burning fat for you all day without you having to do anything. Eat enough protein to maintain them. Walk a lot, ride a bike, do ellipticals, etc., but don't run because your joints might still need to repair themselves from when you were overweight.
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The stuff I know about this might be outdated and/or just plain wrong, so anyone can correct me.
You need to keep your protein intake the same to maintain muscle 100% while losing weight but, depending on how thin you want to get, keeping the same protein intake as before is going to be impossible unless you're a bodybuilder. Since she's eventually going to have to eat less protein than before to get to a balanced diet, her body will start burning muscle when there's not enough fat to burn. If she's eating fewer calories than are recommended for her ideal weight, her body is going to take that from her muscle. She's doing calorie-counting right now, and I assume she doesn't want to do keto (which is dangerous in other ways and doesn't have much long term success), so I think she needs a balanced but high protein diet that's right for her ideal weight.
I'm no health guy, though, and only know about this stuff from doing things the wrong way. I used to count calories while keeping up my protein intake, but I based the diet on an unhealthy ideal weight and ended up getting too thin, losing muscle, getting minorly injured whenever I tried to work out... then I ended up gaining weight again so that I wouldn't die, and it was harder to lose without the muscles I used to have. I think that, if OP uses a better target weight than I did, keeps eating a lot of protein, and does some exercise to maintain her muscles, she'll have a better outcome than I did. But I really don't know. There was a while when I was doing it this way before quarantine and it was working really well, but then I got depressed and my muscles withered away when the gym in my building closed. I ordered an exercise bike, and am going to try again but, as you can see, I'm no expert at all, and don't even have the average person's knowledge about this. I'm just mostly trying to warn OP about not cutting calories as drastically as I did.