Hi there, my advice would be to look at your diet. Really start to understand exactly you’re eating on a day to day basis. I know it’s a pain but keep a food diary and log everything that you consume for 2 weeks, drinks, everything. Use an app like myfitnesspal if that helps. Be completely honest, you may be very surprised. In my experience what I ‘thought’ I ate in a day is quite different to what I actually ate. Yes I was eating clean but I was going through almond butter, butter, olive and coconut oil like my life depended on it. Just sneaking an extra spoon of almond butter and handful of nuts soon added up.
Speaking from personal experience, I’d forget about cheat meals or anything like that until you’re at quite a low body fat precentage and even then I prefer a carb refeed rather than a cheat.
Not everyone agrees however, some people say it can give you a bit of a mental boost and help you to stay the course.
I’d recommend reading articles from Nate Miyaki on T Nation or google precision nutrition and understand what your portion sizes should look like. From the physique goals you’ve described you won’t need to worry about drastic calorie cutting or macronutrient ratios.
You should be able to maintain strength and drop the fat as long as you put in the effort in the gym and really get your nutrition on point. It’s difficult physically and mentally when you are trying to shed the fat and a lot of the time you feel weaker but this is more down to depleted glycogen stores. You’ll want to give up because it’s miserable sometimes you’ll feel you can barely drag your arse to the gym let alone get underneath a heavy barbell. This is why common advice is to alternate your goals have a fat loss phase where you do get a little weaker and then a strength phase where you forget about fat loss for a while. I can’t remember who said “you can’t ride 2 horses with 1 arse”. You may even progress quicker with this approach. I did it the hard way and there were times when I wasn’t a lot of fun to be around and times where I could barely focus at work. It took it’s toll to say the least.
Stick with 5/3/1 as you will need to keep lifting heavy to maintain strength but go easy on the conditioning if you are dieting. First assess if you’re losing fat on the diet and perhaps a small amount of low intensity cardio on one of your recovery days. Perhaps a 45 minutes walk or something like that. Before you think about having to do any further conditioning. It’s not a good idea to bring all of the possible techniques into play initially. You need to hold something back for when the fat loss slows down or stalls.