Okay cool that extra info helps a lot.
First off looking at the physiques you have posted it’s clear to achieve them you are going to have to put on a fair amount more size, which means a cut is going to delay that. But I also know sometimes you just want to strip off as much fat as possible and just see what you look like, so if that’s what you wanna do and you want to prove you can get lean with abs then go for it.
The reason you lose that first 7 or 8 pounds straight away is because your mostly going to just be dropping some water, glycogen and shit for lack of a better word. Out of that 7 or 8lb not much will be fat. It’s at this point that patience and consistency is going to keep the scale moving down, but at a slower pace than those first few lbs.
Diet wise, eat as many vegetables as possible. The fact you eat a fair few carbs makes it pretty easy to tweak things. My personal approach is to spend say 2 weeks eating exactly like above but choose 1 meal and half the carbs in that meal and replace it with some extra veg. Then the next 2 weeks half the carb serving in 2 of your meals. Next 2 weeks half carb serving in 3 meals. Keep this same carb dropping going, This approach will slowly drop your cals around 200 cals every couple of weeks, but if you replace with veg Then you won’t feel like you are eating much less. I dropped around 28lbs doing this and I started out already fairly lean.
I’m also interested in the answer to @EyeDentist question. Take a look at this thread I started
It would be cool if you could add your ab hypertrophy recommendations at some point @EyeDentist