New to exercising need help!!

Just a few things here...first off, diet is for losing weight and exercise is for fitness. Secondly, you have to think calories in/calories out; to lose weight, you need to have a 20-25% deficit of calories. You need to figure out how many calories your body consumes in just an everyday routine...no working out, just a regular old sedintary day. For example, I have a 500 calory deficit/day to get me to a 3,500 calorie deficit in a week which equals roughly 1Lb weight loss per week.

Now to your exercise...You should be doing both cardio and strength training. With the cardio, you're going to burn more calories which can create a deficit if you burn enough...I don't do it that way, my deficit is built into my base and I eat back most of my exercise calories. I use exercise as a way to increase and maintain my fisical fitness. In RE to weight training/strength training...you don't burn all that many calories, but what you do is build muscle and that muscle replaces fat. Over the long run, strength training helps to maintain a healthy weight because the more muscle you have the more fat that gets burned...but it's not really going to be measurable on a scale, at least not in terms of weight loss because muscle is heavier than fat. In fact, I know a lot of people that have gotten healthy through diet and exercise and achieved their weight goals but then wanted to sculpt their bodies to look better...they intensified their weight training and they gained weight. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing because at that point they weren't all that concerned with the number on the scale, they were concerned with sculpting their bodies and adding muscle.

So, depending on where you're at, you should probably look at diet and cardio primarily and throw some strength conditioning in there for good measure. As you get closer to a healthy weight, you can reduce the cardio and increase the strength training to sculpt and mold the body. Just my 2 cents.