It seems possible to hang on to most of your muscle with enough light activity so that you're trying to burn it off vs. dieting it off.
Lately I've found walking seems to do very well here. It's very low intensity so that most of what is burned is fat, and also it doesn't gas you out. You can lift 5x a week and still walk everyday. Walking 10K average pace flat terrain IIRC is 300-400 calories (ballpark, lots of variables).
If you keep your cals at maintenance and then walk 10K+ steps every day that's some decent fat loss. Step it up to 13K or so and that gets you in the 1lb/week neighborhood.
ETA: If you can, walk 5-10 minutes after each meal. Work breaks too especially if you are a desk jockey. There's additional benefit to not just sitting on your ass for 8 hours straight and breaking it up is less monotonous to me than 30-40 minutes straight.