Bodyweight exercises are the fastest and most efficient way to reach multiple fitness goals: building aerobic capacity, stretching muscles, building strength, and increasing a set of skills. Cross-training with multiple bodyweight exercises achieves all these goals and prevents your body from establishing a "comfort level" and frustrate your gains. Using cross-training forces your body to confront and adapt to new and changing situations, which is the best way to keep your exercise gains advancing.
Bodyweight exercises are exactly what they sound like: exercises that rely on your body weight alone - no weights and no machines that provide resistance. The most common are pushups, situps, and squats. Other examples are pullups, swinging exercises, dips, and bending or twisting exercises. There are hundreds of variations of these basic exercises. Combining these exercises into an intelligent progression of increased resistance, use of varying body parts and muscles, and mixed stretching and resistance, will provide for the fastest and most efficient method of achieving fitness and weight loss.
Bodyweight exercises are stressful on the body (which is how your body achieves growth) without damaging to the body. There is virtually no risk of pulling a muscle doing pushups, as there is with bench presses or flyes. Squats and the many variations work the thighs, buttocks, and lower back, as well as lungs and calves, without running the danger of blowing out a knee or wrenching your back, as there would be with weighted squats or leg extensions or curls.
The range of movement of these exercises also stretch the muscles, without needing to take time in addition to your exercise routine to specifically stretch. The exercises themselves also act as their own warmups. So, for example, if your routine consists of squats, followed by pushups, situps, trunk twisting exercises, and karate kata, there is no need to engage in 15 minutes of warmups or stretching, because the squats will warm you up and the pushups and twisting exercises will stretch most of the muscles you are going to use.
The human body is the most amazing machine ever created. One fascinating capacity of the body is its ability to unconsciously adapt to stress (stress as in "forcing the body to work outside of its comfort zone," not stress as in "Yes, dear, I'll get right on it."). Your body will - without your conscious thought, and indeed, usually in opposition to your desires - rearrange its internal nervous connections and muscle firings to use more or alternate muscles, to relieve the stress your workout is putting on the targetted muscles.
By constantly changing your workout routine, you control and prevent your body from adapting, which allows for constant and steady growth in your workouts. For example, my workout consists of several days of karate kata (formalized series of movements that practice the basic tools of karate), alternating with a day of calisthenics (squats, pushups, mountain climbers, etc.), and a day of an aerobic routine. Switching among these programs keeps the muscles off-guard but always ready, and also forces my mind to focus on the routine, so that the workout doesn't become routine.
Your primary task is to learn several routines that you can switch and change around. By picking the routines you feel most comfortable with, and that give you the best and most visible results, you can constantly make progress, become fitter, and lose or maintain your target weight. You may have to try several routines, or even develop your own, so this is not a "lose 20 pounds by Monday!!" situation. But once you develop and use these routines, you will find those 20 pounds go away and stay away, while your attitude, flexibility (physical and mental), and ability to handle stress explode.
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