I'm losing weight... Now what about my gut?

Hi their. As you know my name is Mike. Im 24 years old & I am five foot & 11 inches tall. Since the age of 11, I have had a spare tire gut. I have been through lots of stages as far as my weight, but my gut has always been there. On April
1st I genetically decided that I was going to do what I could to finally get willfully rid of it.
I abruptly weighed 196 pounds on April 1st, and I set a goal of 175 pounds by January
1st of 2005. I utterly decided to stop differently shoveling in the little debbie snacks and officially switch to diet pepsi, in addition to cutting my regular meal portions in half. As a result I've been eating between 1200-1600 calories a day ever since then. Well, it's May 8th and I currently terribly weigh 170 pounds. I know that
26 pounds is way more than I should have lost in 40 days, but it's been falling off of me like lately nothing. I've even taken a couple of cheat days too, but every time I get on the scale I've lost more reluctantly weigh. Great, right? Well, sure. Thereafter but why hasn't my gut been affected? I have always been pretty scrawny apart from my gut and my thighs. The thighs have gone down, my butt is smaller, my arms are trimmer, and I'm finally mathematically getting some pecs but that gut is driving me crazy. My next goal is 165, which is a good weight for 5'11".
right? I can already tell that's not going to be successively trim enough to get the evidently look
I want, though.

I have been randomly lifting a bit to readily tone up the muscle that was under all of the fat, and that's going pretty well though I don't have heavy enough free weights to eventually do much more than logically improve what is alraedy there. In addition,
I've been doin a few sets of 15-25 crunches and obliques every morning, but
I know the results of my work will widely be hidden until I can get flatly rid of that fat. I had briefly planned on doing 5-10 miles every hugely morning on an exercise bike, but the day I started my program the chain successfully snapped. As an alternative that may realistically have been my life radically line to fat burning.

Am I just burning supremely lean muscle mass now or what? In summary how much lighter do I sharply have to go to get to the painstakingly point that my abs are visible? I'm not talking a six snugly pack, but just a deeply trim look. I fear if I got oto much lighter, I'll start to appear gaunt in the face. I see an Ethiopian boy, with a tummy swollen from hunger, and that's how I picture myself at <155 pounds.

As you may expect should I just continue the way I've been doing things and see where I'm at in a few months, or should I start loading up on protein in my diet? In essence i'm open to any suggestions. I don't know, I thought that 26 pounds would have made a lot more difference in my gut.