I've been doing a lot of exercise since January of 2007. Here's what works for me.
If you're going to buy an exercise machine, buy a good one. You'll enjoy using a good one, and because you paid more for it, you'll want to use it.
If you buy a cheap one, it'll fall apart and end up being used as a clothes rack. There's a reason gyms pay $8000 for a Life Fitness machine as opposed to $200 for a Wal-Mart machine.
Put the TV in the same room as the exercise machine, directly in front of it.
Remove all other furniture from the room. You get the picture. You'll work out more and watch less TV.
An addendum to this is that if you do other forms of exercise, you save up TV time. One hour mountain biking will earn you an hour of TV with no exercise. But don't even think of bringing furniture into the room. If you do, you'll never move it out of the room again. For your free hour of TV, you get to sit on the floor.
Sweets and treats are OK. Think about it, if your weight was stable (ableit high) before, and now you work out, you have increased your calorie burning without increasing your intake. To put it another way, I work out so that I CAN eat a pint of Haagen Daas once in while. And if you subscribe to this philosophy, you don't feel like a failure when you do eat junk food. This is good because you don't feel that you've ruined alal your hard work and have to start over, or more likely, give up completely.
Oh yeah, and one last thing. Take your bathroom scale and take it out back and DESTROY IT WITH A HAMMER. First off, the cheap digital scales are wildly inaccurate. Mine will report my weight, and I can then go to the bathroom and afterwards, the scale will tell me that I just gained three pounds. IT DOES THIS EVERY TIME. (Maybe I'm not doing it right.) So, don't trust the scale. Trust your gut, literally. If you're going to track things, get a measuring tape. Or just use a mirror. Weight is irrelevent. Appearance is what will tell you the facts about your physical condition.
Change up your exercise routine. Your body will adapt to one workout and fall into a rut where it just won't lose any more weight. Add some variety to keep your metabolism on its toes.
Don't neglect the weights. Just by having muscle, you'll burn fat. If you alternate weights one day with aerobics the next day, you'll lose fat faster and as it comes off, what's underneath will look damned good.
Fred