Need some advice

Switch to whole grains. Enriched wheat flour products like bread cause inflammation and will worsen your arthritis. Cut back on sweets and junk food. Instead of cookies and cakes, get fiber bars, protein bars, and granola bars. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. You'll also lose weight with whole grains, because they give you more time to burn them off before getting stored as fat. Try to eat healthy. Pinterest can give you lots of good ideas.
You can start by going out for walks. You can break into a slow pace jog for a little while and then go back to walking. Eventually, you can jog more and more. Try landing more-so on your toes instead of your heals for the to take stress off your joints. At home, you can do body-weight squats and push-ups. You can put some music on you like, and just dance. You can shadow box, and do different kinds of aerobic movements you've seen on exercise commercials. Do whatever you feel like doing. Start slow. As long as you're doing something, you're developing a good habit.

is it inflammatory arthritis, or 'mechanical'? they're fundamentally different. inflammatory comes from your immune system being confused and trying to 'protect' you by eating soft tissue inside your joints. the mechanical kind (my word - osteo is the only kind i know anything about) tends to mean that something is causing bone to rub against bone inside them.

with immune-active arthritis, it isn't just that your joints hurt. as far as your body's concerned, you might as well have the flu. and in early stages the risk is more to the soft tissues that stabilize and cushion a joint, since that's what your white cells are trying to destroy. during a flare is not a good time to do anything that puts undue strain on those soft tissues - your ligaments, joint capsule tissue, tendons, etc. they're more vulnerable when you're flared up, and those tissues are not like muscle. they don't spring back once they've been strained.

fwiw, i have rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed about 15 years ago. and i hated walking. still do, if my stuff is flared up. it actually, literally hurts. people were constantly yabbering at me about how water workouts would change my whole life, but i fecking hate water and i didn't turn into a different person just because it turned up with r.a.

so my thing is: i ride a bike. r.a. actually got me riding. not because i wanted to be healthy blah blah, but because a bike is like the next-best thing to a wheelchair. it gets me off my feet, no impact and lets me sit down while moving.