[Question]: Why do I seem to maintain at a lower amount of calories than others?

I was having a really similar problem as you (at a lower-cal level b/c I'm shorter than you) and I discovered two very important things that have helped me drastically over the last 4 weeks in finally shedding some pounds - actual fat, not water weight. I, too, was lifting 3-4 times a week and cutting calories without seeing the results I wanted (started last August, at 27% bodyfat, wanted to lower my bodyfat, was getting much stronger but my bodyfat wasn't really lowering by any noticeable metric).

1) Tracking. It's not enough just to log your calories every day. I thought this was working until I put the last 2 months worth of data into an Excel chart, and then made a formula to tell me my average calories per day. I saw that I was eating a lot more than I thought I was, on average. This was critical in coming out of denial and seeing that my cheat days sometimes outweighed my good days. Now I track, every day, my weight, my calories, and my estimated burned exercise calories for the day, and I can see almost exactly how much deficit I am really truly in, and how that correlates to my weight. Again, I track everything daily and then look at weekly averages. This is simple in Excel or Google Drive Spreadsheet.

2) This was a hard discovery for me to accept, especially after being on this muscle-building-focused forum for a while, and some may not agree, but I believe the sources which say that cardio needs to be a minimum of 30-45 minutes to be effective. HIIT never worked for me personally in losing weight - especially since it was over-exhausting my muscles since I also do weight training. It may be that in 20 minutes, unless you're doing HIIT, you're not getting a high enough heart rate to really burn a lot of calories. Again, HIIT works for a lot of people - but as taboo as it is to say on this forum, for me, it took starting to do 3-4 sessions of 1-hour each high intensity cardio to really see the weight drop. At the end of the day, if I do a 20 minute session of HIIT, I burn about 100 calories. However if I do 60 minutes of steady state, medium-to-high intensity cardio on the stationary bike (I'm crazy sweating but not about to die), I burn about 450 calories in 1 hour. The math is quite simple there - 300 calories a week burned as opposed to over 1400 calories a week burned in exercise. If you do 3-4 hours of cardio a week and change absolutely nothing else you should be putting yourself at a deficit to lose at least 1/2 pound a week, more if you also strict up your diet. I'm not recommending this forever - just for a few weeks or months until you lose some of the extra fat, then continue with a strength-training program.

TLDR; if your priority is to loose weight quickly, you should focus on a 'cut' before a 'bulk'. Since 'cut' is all about deficit, log your calorie input and output VERY CONSISTENTLY and focus on cardio for now. There is a lot of information on this under r/fitness FAQ. When you get to about 20% body fat, or otherwise feel like you're ready to bulk (too many other variables to list here), then refocus on the muscle building.

Sorry this is so long but I am just hoping this can help! These two points got me out of a huge, initially incomprehensible rut.

/r/xxfitness Thread