Monique,
This is the first time Ive visited this forum, and much to my surprise, you live in Longmont too!!!

Anyway, I think your missing the bigger picture here. I think you should be maybe thinking less about % of fat you consume and more about the types of workouts your doing.
You say that all of your w/o's are lung burners, and thats not good. It is very important to vary the intensity and duration of your workouts through out the week. What your husbands swim coach was doing is breaking down the muscle thru hard work, but then allowing REST, which is the key to improvement. The workout is only a part of the total package. If all of your workouts are the same intensity (hard in your case) the body never has time to fully repair and reap the benifits of those workouts.
You didnt mention if you are doing any weight training, and if not (which I suspect) you really should add that into your routine. Many reasons for that, first being that if your not building muscle while trying to lose weight, what you are losing IS muscle, not fat. Also, lean muscle burns calories just being muscle, and its preferred food is... FAT! Another benefit would be that stronger muscle requires stronger bones, so as long as you are getting enough calcium in your diet, you will be increasing your bone density.
Your body burns more FAT calories at lower aerobic intensity, but that doesnt mean you should keep all workouts at that level, because you will burn more overall calories at higher intensity, so the two go hand in hand.

After all that, you should also take a look at genetics....sometimes we are programmed to have bigger hips, or a little pooch. We can keep it from getting out of hand through diet and exercise, but we may not be able to ever erase it completely.

I would write down all your calories for about 3 days, and make sure that you are getting enough....I agree that sometimes we go too low in calories and that will shut your metabolizim down in a heartbeat.
I second the suggestion on Chris Carmichaels book...very good information.

Good Luck from a local!
Jayne