Joe the Juggler has it right: LIFO. Last In, First Out. If you've always had fat distribution issues, then you may not know what will come off first. Of course, that doesn't really matter because it will come off when it's damned good and ready.
As for losing weight, it's far less complicated than people make it out to be. Your body burns energy constantly. Most of that energy is consumed just keeping you warm and moving you around. Some is used to replace cells in your body. If you stress your body hard enough (exercise), your body responds by building muscle. This muscle in turn requires you to consume a bit more energy to support it.
The energy you consume but don't use gets stored for later. We call this fat. From an evolutionary perspective it makes perfect sense since many ecosystems don't have a steady source of food. From a physics standpoint, you can't get something from nothing. In other words, fat doesn't just magically appear. It's a result of consuming more energy than you burn.
If you want to lose fat, you need to expend more energy than you consume. Your body will then tap into the fat stores to make up the difference. Here's the thing, though. To create this calorie deficit you have essentially three broad choices for changing your lifestyle:
A) Keep your energy expenditure the same and reduce energy intake (eat less).
B) Keep your energy intake the same and increase your energy expenditure (exercise more).
C) Both A and B.
There's a big problem with choice A: Your body will most likely think a famine has arrived. From an evolutionary perspective, those animals whose bodies started reducing energy consumption were the most likely to survive a famine. Those are our ancestors. So, when we drop our food intake, especially drastically, the body responds by slowing the metabolism.
There are at least two problems with this. First, weight loss slows down over time as our bodies adapt to the lower calorie intake, so it takes a long time to lose the weight. Second, after we reach our "goal" weight, our metabolism is so slow that we very quickly begin putting on weight even if we begin consuming just the same amount of calories we did six months ago when we were maintaining or even losing weight. This method of weight loss is doomed when it comes to the long term.
By contrast, those who exercise don't suffer the same slowing down of the metabolism so long as they don't drastically reduce their calorie intake. Those who train with weights in addition to exercising aerobically will build some muscle or at least slow down the rate at which the body cannibalizes muscle. Oh, I forgot to mention that. In addition to consuming fat, the body will also consume muscle to make up for the energy deficit. The body is less likely to consume muscles that are being actively used. This is another problem with the "just eat less" strategy - you become less fit.
When using B or or preferably C, once you reach your goal weight, you should have a body that it is geared to burning more energy just to survive daily life. If you totally revert to old habits, it will take longer to put the fat back on than with A. That said, it's much easier to maintain your weight by keeping up with a moderate amount of exercise. That, I assume, is your ultimate goal.
Be prepared, though, for it to be a constant battle. That's just a natural result of civilization where we burn fossil fuels instead of calories for our daily survival. Excess food and excess rest are not natural to humans, so our bodies are in a constant battle with our environment. The sooner you accept this and approach it accordingly, the better. Anything else about weight loss that contradicts the above in a major way is a crock of ****.
To sum up, your body will remove fat from the last place it put it on. Spot reducing is a myth.
