Hi Man Wolf,
First thing - congratulations on your progress to date, you've done brilliantly!
There's a lot of good advice in this thread, particularly from Aeris and if you follow a few of the tips posted you'll be on the way to addressing your problem stomach and chest fat.
A couple of things that might help as well. Firstly, when you diet you lose fat and muscle. The more fat you lose, the more muscle goes with it. You can minimise muscle loss by not dropping your calories too much (1,200-1,300 calories a day for a 5'8" man sounds a bit low), eating a little more protein - around 1gm for every 1lb of lean body weight (approx 80-100 gms in your case) and doing some regular resistance training, which you are doing.
Secondly, your body equates dieting with starvation and has evloved a number of strategies over the course of human evolution to deal with periods of famine. Your metabolism drops to match your calorie intake and your body deaminates protein to burn the carbon shell for fuel, eg it burns muscle tissue. As muscle is responsible for most of the calories you burn each day, your body conserves energy this way. Clearly, losing muscle tissue is not a good thing when dieting, or at any other time for that matter!
The longer and more often you diet, the less effective the diet and each successive diet becomes.
It sounds to me as if your body has adapted itself to your diet. It will do whatever it can to hang on to your remaining body fat. The key now is to raise your metabolic rate and to build some muscle. Your weight sounds rather low for your height, but without knowing more about you it's hard to say.
Regardless, building some muscle will help. Looking at your daily food intake, I'd make a few suggestions.
1. Eat more. Gradually increase your daily calorie intake. Do this too quickly and your body will suck up the calories like a sponge and store them as body fat to protect against the next period of starvation. Try adding 50 calories a day in weekly increments.
2. Eat more lean protein. A convenient way to do this is a protein shake. Find a good protein powder, add in some skimmed/soya milk, chuck in a blender with some frozen berries, half a banana, mix and enjoy. One shake a day will add around 250-300 calorties and 20-30gm of protein. Also, eat some lean protein at each meal - chicken fish, the usual suspects. A skinless chicken breast has around 25 gms of protein.
3. Eat 5-6 small meals a day/eat every 3-4 hours. Already suggested and good advice. If you're eating 2,000 cals a day, then say five 400 calorie meals at, for example 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm and 7pm would spread your intake out over the day and ensure that your body used the food for energy rather than store it as fat. It will also keep your metabolism fired up and in fat burning, rather than fat storing mode.
4. Build some muscle. 3-4 weight training sessions a week, working each body part once a week should do the job. Each pound of muscle burns 14 calories a day at rest, a lot more when you're active. As such, add lean tissue and you burn more calories, which will help to shift that stubborn body fat. Please note that you won't burn body fat whilst weight training, but the muscle you add will increase your metabolic rate, and some of the additional calories you burn each day will be from body fat.
5. Burn fat through aerobic exercise. 3x30 mins sessions a week should do. Don't overdo the aerobics as your aim should be to build some muscle. You don't build muscle whilst weight training, which 'damages' muscle tissue, you build muscle whilst resting between sessions. You want your body to use dietary protein to repair and build muscle tissue and dietary carbs to replenish muscle gycogen (carbs) ready for the next session. If you're pounding the streets for an hour a day that ain't gonna happen. Also, it's hard to burn fat and build muscle at the same time. I would suggest that you might want to make the latter your priority now.
Without knowing you and doing a personal analysis, this is pretty general advice but I hope it helps. You've done really well so far and should be proud of yourself! You're ready to move on to the next stage in your body reshaping project - stay smart and motivated (and there's plenty of good people in this forum that will help with that) and you'll get there.
Best wishes,
Marcus
