Advice for Cutting - Been at it for two years with minimal progress

I’m having a problem shedding fat and cutting down. I’ll lead off here with my relevant stats:

Male 33 5’9” 242 lbs

Major lifts (1rm): Bench - 225lbs Squat - 400lbs Deadlift - 425lbs OHP - 150 lbs/Push Press - 185lbs

Daily Calories: 2100-2300 (very strict, I measure and weight my ingredients)

Exercise: 4-5 sessions/week on a Push-Pull-Legs split, usually 50-70 minutes at heavy intensity (heart rate 130-150, no more than 90-120 seconds between sets). Might not mean much, but my Apple Watch usually has me around 400 cals/session for push/pull and around 600-700 on leg days.

So this is a little bit of a journey, but summing up briefly - when I finished my PhD back in 2019 I was 265 and very obviously overweight. I’d been totally focused on research, writing, and maintaining a full-time job for the last year and really lost track of my health.

Early in 2020 I grabbed control of my diet, started exercising more, picked up running (around 25 miles/week), and dropped all the way down to 208 by the end of the year. At this point I decided to prioritize getting stronger (used to have trouble doing 5 push-ups), and started a regimented lifting plan in 2021. I’ve been doing that since, adjusting volume and the types of exercises I regularly incorporate every six months or so to make sure I keep my strength balanced.

I’ve been pretty successful here and have gained a ton of muscle. Most of my lifts now are firmly between Intermediate and Advanced strength standards. My last body scan had me at 181lbs of fat-free mass with 61lbs of fat mass. I’ve gone from being very overweight-looking to looking more like (pardon the expression) a frat bro who drinks too much beer/needs to do a little more cardio, but is relatively strong.

My problem is with cutting down that last 30-ish lbs of fat to get down to where I want to be. I work an office job, so my maintenance calories should be around 2400-2500, and with my calorie restriction and my exercise routine I definitely should be dropping weight, but for the past year I’ve been stuck between 235lbs and 245lbs, moving back and forth occasionally. No matter how I adjust - move the calories down a bit, move the exercise up a bit, throw in cardio, etc - my muscle mass keeps slowly ticking up and my fat mass either only changes a little or doesn’t change at all. My overall composition is getting better by virtue of putting on more muscle, but that’s still not a healthy amount of fat to be carrying.

I guess I’m kind of at a loss - does anybody on here have any experience with this kind of plateau? It’s been a TON of hard work to get here, but sometimes I am on the scale and it just feels like I haven’t made any progress at all. That’s partially a psychological hangup, and there’s definitely dysmorphia involved, but does anyone have any advice for how to systematically approach cutting down from here? I’ve applied the fundamentals and have held rigorously to my daily food intake, keeping it below my theoretical maintenance even before exercise is factored. I just feel like I’m beating my head against a wall.

The only routes I see are either adding in another 30 mins of cardio every day, or restricting my calories even further to around 1800. I’m hesitant to do either because I don’t want to catabolize too much muscle, but at this point it feels like that might be my only good option. Any advice at all would be a huge help!

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