Runningfromfat: In my opinion, the quickest way to reduce excess bodyfat is to lift. Yes, perhaps my opinion could be biased considering this is a weightlifting forum...however, my personal experience was that nothing happened for me till I picked up the dumb bells.
Think of it like this, you really need to cover three things here....
1. Strength training: goal is to maintain current muscle mass while lowering your bodyfat. Muscle is metabolically active and is something you will want to preserve as you begin your weightloss.
2. HIIT training during your cardio sessions. High intensity interval training. You can get this done in about 20 minutes if it is done correctly. I would suggest incorporating true HIIT training no more than 2x a week in the beginning and then 3x in a few months....
3. Clean eating. You will need to eat to support the workouts. It's difficult in the beginning and to be honest difficult on occasion years later. It's a way of eating that can often collide with our current lifestyle and culture. It's about getting back to basics, fruits, veg, and PROTEIN.
In your case, I would first review info from
http://www.stumptuous.com/.
It's one of the better places to begin for a lot of the information. If you have an hour to workout...spend five minutes on stretching and warm up. Take twenty five minutes to lifting doing a full body workout routine using compound movements. (Squats, pushups, deadlifts, assisted pullups etc.) Don't waste your time on movements that only work one muscle group at a time like bicep or tricep curls. Then spend twenty minutes on HIIT training for your cardio. Jump rope is my current poison of choice but do what works best for you. Spend the remaining five to ten minutes cooling down with more stretches and some foam rolling.
A lot of the things I have kind of thrown out here can be researched more indepth online. There are numerous books written about the topic etc. Youtube has great foam rolling vids and you can also find stretches for opening hip flexors which will be important as you are learning to squat and deadlift.
Bottom line: The dreadmill alone is not the most efficient or effective route to a leaner body. At some point your body will adapt to the work and you will no longer get improved fat loss results. Don't wait until you've lost weight to begin strength training. The combined efforts listed above should result in nice hypertrophy of muscle in the mirror instead of being left with the "skinny fat" syndrome of just doing cardio and reducing caloric intake.
Best of luck and let us know how you are progressing!