39.5 lbs and 9.5% body fat lost in 7 weeks!

I joined this site a while ago but until the last 2 months I hadn't used it as the great tool that it really is. I've been holding out to post anything here until i reach my goal but I feel like I'm doing pretty well so far so I thought I would share my story so far. I want to wait with my pictures until my goal is met though I think.

I'm 30 years old. I was always pretty athletic until the last couple of years. I have a very active job in a factory building cars but that also kind of hurt me along the way... I injured my shoulder a few years ago and wasn't able to play a lot of the sports that i was used to. By the time my shoulder was healed I found out that I needed surgery on my wrist for carpal tunnel. Prior to injuries I never ate well but was active enough that I got away with it. That all changed. I slowly started putting on weight but kept procrastinating getting back on track. This continued until a couple months ago. I'm 5'11 and at my heaviest got up to 267.5 lbs and 37.7 body fat%. I was starting to get motivated to get back into shape and coincidentally some co workers approached me about doing a 2 month fitness challenge at work. We each threw in some money to keep it interesting. The winner is the person that loses the highest % of their body fat % they started with.. (As of today I've lost 9.5% total divided by 37.7 x 100 works out to just over 25% and I'm in the lead by rather large margin.) So, I'll find in 1 week if I'm $300 dollars richer - which is a bonus!... Ultimately the money doesn't matter too much to me I'm just happy to be getting good results.

I started off slowly, only really focusing on eating right for the first 2 weeks and lost 19.5 lbs and 4.5% body fat with that alone. Then I started doing weights 3 times a week after that. For the last few weeks I've been doing more cardio along with weights and eating well. In the past I have tried to go too hard too fast and ended up quitting. After reading many success stories I found myself motivated so I thought I would share my progress. I look forward to putting up some pictures soon to see your reactions. I feel much much more confident than I have in years... Thanks to everyone here at MFP