Most people who want to lose weight actually want to lose fat and look and feel better at the end. Weight lost as muscle works against that: it leaves you weaker, can make the result harder to maintain, and changes your shape less than you hoped.
The good news is that the main levers are simple and well supported.
Keep lifting, and keep it heavy enough
Resistance training is the strongest signal you can send that muscle is still needed. During a diet, the goal is to keep training hard enough to maintain strength, not to add volume to burn calories.
Two or three full-body sessions a week, built on compound lifts and taken reasonably close to effort, is enough for most people. You may need fewer total sets than usual as recovery gets harder, but avoid switching to light weights for high reps on the theory that it 'tones'. The load is what does the work.
Protein, toward the higher end
For people who train, around 1.6–2.2 g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day is the commonly supported range, and the higher end is most useful in a deficit. Protein also tends to help with fullness.
For someone at 180 lb (82 kg), that is roughly 130–180 g a day. If you carry a lot of body fat, basing the number on your goal weight is a reasonable adjustment. Anyone with kidney disease should agree a protein target with their doctor first.
A moderate rate of loss
Losing about 0.5–1% of bodyweight per week is a sensible range for most people. At 180 lb (82 kg) that is roughly 0.9–1.8 lb (0.4–0.8 kg) a week. Leaner people generally do better toward the slower end; people with more to lose can often sustain the faster end.
Faster than that, the deficit usually becomes harder to sustain, training suffers, and the share of weight lost as muscle tends to rise. Slower is not a failure. A rate you can hold for months beats one you can hold for three weeks.
How to tell it is working
Watch three things together: weekly average weight trending down, waist measurement following it, and your main lifts holding steady. Some strength dips late in a long diet are normal. A steady, marked slide in strength suggests the deficit is too aggressive or recovery is falling short.
What to do this week
Set a daily protein target and hit it on most days. Schedule two or three lifting sessions and record every working set. Then check your weekly average weight against the 0.5–1% range and adjust food slightly if you are well outside it.
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