The ellipse is now a circle again. The Equidistant Conic Projection preserves shape and maintains accurate distance in the East-West direction for the lower 48 states, at the expense of direction and area. Hopefully you now have a better idea about projections and how shape and distance can change from one projection to another. A map is equidistant when it portrays distances from the center of the projection to any other place on the map. When the scale of a map at any point on the map is the same in any direction, the projection is conformal.
Shape is preserved locally on conformal maps.