Being content with life is certainly not good for ones waistline! I've been fighting mine for the last month or so... here are some tips that I learnt the hard way. 1) Don't worry about weight - look at size. As fat turns to muscle you gain weight but loose size. Swap the scales for a tape measure and monitor your progress in inches (not pounds). BMI is the work of the devil! 2) Get a heart rate monitor, and change your effort level to match what the monitor tells you - not what you 'think' you should be doing. It surprising at first how little you need to do to in order to get in the fat burning zone. I found that I was overdoing it at first - which was counter-productive. Too many aches and pains, and feeling knackered the next day which in turn put me off going to the gym again. Work out your rate here: http://exercise.about.com/cs/fitnesstools/l/bl_THR.htm 3) Try and keep your heart rate up for 30mins as a minimum, an hour is better. Once you get going with an initial spurt you can keep your heart rate up easier, so refer to point 2 and throttle down a bit - as long as you keep your rate in the zone 4) Stretch. Warm up and down with 5 mins light exercise (slow walk or a swim is good) 5) Expect progress in your performance and capability to come and go. It all seems a bit random. The trick is to ignore it and just keep on going. 6) Going with a partner helps as they can guilt-trip you when you skip a session. 7) Even if you're too knackered to go to the gym don't just sit round and watch TV. The trick is to build a habit of allocating that period of time to doing something that isn't your normal routine. Rather than go to the gym, go for a walk. It still gets you into the habit of doing something (and also counts as mild exercise!) 8) Blog your progress. The more visible your progress (or failure!) is, the more motivation you have to keep working at it. If you want to maintain a level of privacy about your measurements then take X as your starting measurement and report progress as X-2 inches, X-3 inches etc. 9) Good luck! And, keep going. Just keep on going! Hope these help :-)