First of all, understand that safe and sustainable weight loss is a slow process, so right off the bat, don't despair too much. Having said that, your progress is very slow indeed, so lets look at this a little bit.
The reason most people fail at weight loss is that they underestimate how much they're eating, and overestimate the caloric value of the exercise they're doing. That's documented fact. The first thing I would encourage you to do is find an online calculator that tells you about how many calories a day you should be eating, based upon your lifestyle, gender, age, height, and weight. If you do nothing more than cut 500 calories a day out of your allowable daily intake, you can expect to lose about a pound a week (a pound of fat is about 3500 calories). That's with no exercise.
This is only the latest study to show that where diet and weight loss are concerned, what really counts is cutting calories; it doesn't matter what kind (i.e. protein/carbs/fat):
http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/nm/ca...ome-from-study. Obviously, you want to stay away from junk food, processed foods, bad fats, simple carbohydrates, and too much salt for other health reasons, but a responsible, balanced diet of whatever kind that fits your lifestyle will get you where you're going. It is VERY important that you be reasonably accurate and honest with yourself about how much you're really eating. It's a pain in the ass, but if you keep your diet fairly simple, you quickly get a sense for portions and caloric value.
Straight up, despite what people may tell you, exercise is a shitty way to lose weight, because you have to do a LOT of it to get much result. To make my point - I'm about your height and weight - 5'-11" and 180 lbs. I ran a marathon this past weekend, and the total calorie burn for that 26.2 mile race was about 3800 calories. That's just over a pound of fat. Are you ready to go out and run 22 marathons in the next couple of months? Probably not. So as I said before, slow and steady is the way.
Again, find an online calculator that tells you what the calorie burn is for someone of your weight doing an exercise AT A SPECIFIC INTENSITY for a particular period of time. A ballpark estimate is about 400 calories per HALF hour running at a pace of 6 miles per hour. Not very much, is it? But if you do a half-hour of running day on top of the 500 calories you're cutting from your diet, that adds up to 900 calories a day, and about a pound of weight loss every 4 days. It's that easy. And that difficult.
Strength training will help tone your body, and will help burn calories as well. Indeed, increasing the amount of muscle in your body will slightly increase your basal metabolic rate. A good exercise plan would be 3-4 days a week of aerobic exercise (such as running), 2-3 days a week of strength training, and 1 day a week of rest. Shoot for an hour a day of exercise, if you can make the time. If your time is limited, focus on the aerobic exercise for now.
Supplements are a waste of your money - forget them. They're not needed if you're eating a balanced diet. I'm not going to get into recipes and meal plans here - there's plenty of information about that on the Internet if you need it. If shakes fit into your lifestyle, by all means use them, but there's nothing magic about them.
Likewise, I'm not going to get into specific training plans. If you can't sustain a running pace of 6 miles per hour for 30-60 minutes at a time, there are plenty of training plans on the Internet that can teach you how, though a quick way is to run at that pace for 1 minute, and then walk for 1 minute, and gradually increase the number of minutes you run until you take a 1 minute rest walk. Your aerobic exercise needs to have a certain level of intensity though to be of much value, both for calorie burn and for cardiac benefit. The "20 minutes of gentle exercise 3 times a week" that's all over the news is a bunch of bullshit. It might help to stave off a heart attack, but it will not get you where you're going.
ETA: I should add that in January, 2000, I weighed 260 lbs, and decided I wasn't going to be fat anymore. I made a number of important lifestyle changes to get down to 180 pounds and level of fitness that I'm at today, and that included using the exact information I'm passing on to you in this post. There is no magic - just a lot of hard work and commitment. If you want it badly enough, you can do it. Good luck!
