I don't quite understand.

[BFSHR02]

Hello. I'm new to this site, just found it tonight by accident when I was looking for how much water should a person really drink. LOL I've been skimming over a few articles and other's journals. I'm not sure how strength training will help me lose weight quick. I keep fluctuating between 230 to 235 lbs. My joints ache from arthritis, and I can't get in the floor to play with my child.

When I married my husband I was a size 8. Beautiful! Loved it! But I still wanted to strengthen and build up my arms and I want more leg strength. I don't know how much I weighed then because I never weighed myself, I just know that my pants use to fit great.

I'm going to start drinking lots and lots of water. I've got a huge cup that I'm going to be taking to work and filling with ice water. I don't drink water. I'm terrible at that. My starting goal is to drink two of those big cups a day. I don't know how much it holds, but its a huge cup. I want to work myself up to a gallon of water a day. I understand how water is essential to my health. And I want desperatly to be able to play kick ball with my child without my lower back or hips and legs hurting all the time.

I'm always tired. It doesn't matter how much rest or sleep I get, I stay tired. I had blood work done and everything came back normal. So far, all I have is asthma (doesn't bother me that much) and I have pretty bad arthritis. I want to improve my health, not only for me but for my husband and child also. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

I have a treadmill and a lateral thigh strider and tons of work out videos. Although at the moment we are living in a place way too small that we've had to put all of that into storage. We do plan on moving soon and I want to start using my treadmill and lateral thigh strider soon. So for the meantime, I'm walking outside. I don't have a place for weights or a weight bench either. So that's going to have to wait. The hours that I work doesn't make it possible for me to go to the gym right now. So that's going to have to wait until my hours get changed, hopefully soon.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm a loss right now, not really knowing what all I can start with.

[mjh]

Start with your diet. I don't mean "go on a diet", in the usual sense. Rather I mean improve your diet in such a way that the improvements become part of your everyday lifestyle, not just something you're doing for the time being to lose weight. It's sounds like you're ready to do this with your water intake, which is great (especially if the water is replacing soda or juice).
Read these two articles, and then the ones they link to:
stronglifts.com/how-to-lose-fat-fast/
stronglifts.com/7-ways-to-build-the-habit-of-eating-healthy/
One of the best things you can do is sign up for a free account with fitday.com, gyminee.com or thedailyplate.com and start tracking your eating habits. This will give you an idea of what your current diet is like, and what you can do to improve it. It can be a shock when you enter common sweets or junk foods and see just how many calories, bad carbs and grams of fat they contain. Use this shock to motivate you not to consume them. Eat lots of foods that you buy in their natural state or close to it: fruits and veges, beans, whole grains, for example.
Keep exercising as much as you can. Set small, acheivable goals to work toward, like "walk X miles in X minutes" or, with a cheap pedometer, "take X hundred/thousand strides today". When you acheive each goal reset it- add distance or reduce the time to do it in.
Read kerberos's training log- stronglifts.com/forum/discussion/518/kerberos-traininglog/#Item_50 - he's a very big guy and he's been working hard to get his weight down. Don't focus so much on his weight lifitng, but look at how he sets goals for his work on the eliptical trainer.
Overall, the best thing for you to do is to make gradual, but consistent improvements in your diet and lifestyle. The goal of drinking a gallon of water everyday is a perfect example of this. Stick with that, and within a few weeks it will be second nature. Set small goals for your exercise and reset them once they've been met. Choose the worst elements of your diet and work to eliminate them or replace them with something better.
Best of luck with getting in shape, mjh.

[mjh]

and to answer your question about how strength training burns fat...
Muscles burn calories. Therefore, more muscles and bigger muscles burn more calories, not just during exercise, but all the time. That's a highly simplified equation, but it's pretty much what it boils down to.