Getting yourself set up for success in your path to fitness

As I've discussed and written elsewhere on this site, making a state change requires some iteration to refine the changes. Do your best, keep going, and come back to review and update your thinking as you learn more. Here's some general steps for setup:

1. General things in life. Get your main sources of stress managed. Figure out your mental approach to handle the inflows and outflows of information and stuff that you have to manage in your live.
2. Sleep and biorhythms. Get your sleep locked in. Figur out a weekly schedule that will plausibly work to give you a regular and predictable 24 hour schedule with ample time for sleeping.
3. Figure out a food plan. Learn how to eat to gain, and how that feels (always eating till full, snacking ok). Learn how to eat to lose, and how that feels (skipping meals, light meals, controlled portion size). Develop awareness of inflammation triggers. Explore low carb/sugar/insulin management in order to break away from the cycle of insulin spiking and crashing. Remember that it is ok to have carbs again sometime later, but carbohydrate management is important if you're heavily overwieght in order to get more freedom to manage your appetite.
4. Figure out a movement plan. You're going to want to make a plan for when you can get regular activity, and what kind of activities work with your body to do the following:
• Prevent injury
• Allow recovery in the time that you have with the recovery pace that you have
• Break a sweat a few times a week
• Move a bit every day rather than being completely sedentary
• Don't be completely tethered to your desk at work
• To get leaner, move regularly, manage intensity (don't go to blowout high intensity too often, can be too physiologically stressful), explore playing around with rest time to allow full recovery between sets
• To add more mass, the standard approach is higher reps, higher volume, and shorter recovery time between sets (10/2018 currently working on testing this out)
• To add more strength and power, go to sets with fewer repetitions, longer recovery time between sets, and longer recovery time between workouts. 
• Consider cycling over multiweek, month, seasonal, yearly time intervals.
5. Put it into practice. Make time in your schedule for working out, for the food prep and proper eating you have planned, and for the biorhythm you have planned. Update your planning continually as you figure out what is practical and realistic within the constraints of your life. Eventually try to remove some of those constraints.
6. Reassess. Periodically reassess and do a bigger overhaul of what is and is not working in the points noted above.