Good morning Scott!
Glad to hear you made a decision to get in shape! Remember, set realistic goals and work towards achieving them. Keep at it and dont get discouraged. Changes will come and you will see results for sure. I love the elliptical. It is low impact yet it can get my heart rate into the mid 180 bpm. Many awesome workouts have happened on the elliptical. Good luck and let me know if I can help you in any way. I am willing to share what I have learned throughout these past 6 months.
...oh, and please leave the pop tarts alone! 
Not to worry, these are the healthy Pop Tarts, the unfrosted ones
It should be interesting to see how far we can push ourselves. Right now, I can't image hitting 180bpm. At 48 I think my max target is 172. Right now (1 week in) we're trying to maintain 130bpm until we get used to working out. We haven't set any weight or measurement goals at all. The only thing we committed to was getting our HR above 125/130 and holding it there for 30 minutes a day, then increasing that to 45m/d, over rest of our life, that should do us plenty of good. And thats the big piece of that statement, the rest of our life.....its a lifestyle change. We aren't trying to get buff or enter competitions, we just want to get our hearts and circulation systems healthy. Burning calories and loosing weight is just an added benefit.
You're right about the elliptical. That thing can work you to death if you let it. We had to do something low impact because of Laura's hip replacement (premature hip degeneration) and my bad knees. We tried all of the inexpensive ones out there and ended up settling on an Octane. It was the smoothest and most comfortable ones we stepped on.
Next step will be seriously watching what we shove in our pie holes. Thats the part that will really suck cuz we both love food. I don't know, maybe we'll have to sacrifice and just spend more time on the machines.
