The short and the long of it

I'm liking this working out thing. I think because I don't have to go in the car and drive to the gym even though I live less than 10 min away from it. I pack my workout pants, and because I work in a super casual environment I just wear my sneakers and tee shirt to work.  At 3:30 when I clock out for the day I walk up two flights of stairs (warm up!) and enter the gym in my building. Easy as that.
I've been spending about an hour in the gym,  for the last two days at least and I'm going again today. Yesterday I did half hour on the elliptical, non stop, with an all over workout. It's a cool program. It'll be a normal forward stride,  then a reverse stride,  and every couple of minutes the program has you hop on the side and do only the arms of the machine, pumping them back and forth as fast as possible. I like the different techniques, I get bored easily. I also did a pretty good upper body/arm workout that included 3 reps of 10 each: dead lift to high pulls, curl to lunge press (guhhh lunges), tricep extensions and chest press and fly. I'm moderately sore today, especially in the arms and shoulders, but I used really low weights for the upper body stuff (2.5-7.5 lbs) so I'm not expecting to be super sore yet.

My goals are as follows: 100 pound total weight loss. I'm giving myself more than a year for this, I'd like to be at this goal by  January 1 2016. That's the long term goal. And would put me down to about 160 lbs, yeah you can do the math. I'm 5'8" so that puts me in a healthy zone for my height.  I'd also just like to shop in the non plus size section. More on the at a later date. Oh and I want to wear a bathing suit next summer,  not a two piece, not a two piece ever again ohhellnosaysmystretchmarks, but I just want to feel comfortable in a normal bathing suit. Not the maternity bathing suit I've been wearing for the last four years. Yeah. 
As far as short term goals go they're pretty simple. Cut out soda, stop smoking, get down to a healthier weight where I can run and not want to die. Soda is going to be the death of me, but in the last 2 days I've only had 1 diet Dr pepper which is crazy because I usually have like 6 a day.

I'm going to keep documenting my fight here on the blog and hopefully some of you can follow along.