When I did a keto diet for a few months it was a very interesting experiment. This was many, many years ago. My experience was that I was constantly ravenous and I was eating constantly while on the diet. It felt very weird to be eating so much and especially so much fat. But I followed the diet I was using and it told me to eat as much as I wanted as long as I didn't stray from the specificied foods - and in particular zero carbohydrates. I'd eat a full, huge meal and then be hungry enough to eat another meal like it 2 hours later.

Very quickly I could feel that my metabolism had shifted into a different mode. And even though I was eating what seemed to me like ridiculous quantities of meat and fat, I started losing body fat within a few days and that continued for a while (maybe 3 - 4 weeks if I am remembering things right) until I plateaued at a lower body fat level.

While I was on the diet, no matter how much food I ate, it never felt actually satisfying. And even though the food I was eating was extremely high quality and very well-prepared, it always seemed like it was missing something. It's hard to put in words what I am trying for but it's like the food was simultaneously delicious and completely blandly uninteresting and all the while I was totally ravenous. It was weird.

I don't think it would be a healthy diet (for me anyway) for a long period but I think it was a really good metabolic reset for a short period. I think of it kind of like running a gas engine flat out for a while to blow out all the carbon deposits. Engines always seem to run cleaner after that treatment and that's kind of how my body felt after the keto diet.

Anyway, that was my experience. I'd say that if you find yourself craving more food than you are "planning" (in the Mike Tyson sense of things) to eat, to go ahead and eat as much as you want. That's what I did, anyway. Just stay away from the carbs which I think would inhibit that metabolic switch that I was talking about and then your body might keep storing the fat instead of burning it. 

 Your experience is very much what I expect... where you just can't eat any more fat and protein, and yet you are still hungry for something.  Your body wants carbs (for the brain at least) and has to subtitute ketones, but it really doesn't want to, so you remain carb-hungry. 

 Hi, Mike, writing from Gossip here :) My way of giving back for the benefits of your work is to share something about my personal journey in this regard. Short-term changes (diets) generally don't work. Lifestyle changes do. In my specific case, cutting out gluten + intermittent fasting (16:8) (with paleo) were crucial (I've been doing this for many, many years). It was a truly transformative experience. In my view (i am not a doctor), Medicine is a very, very complicated field. It's unavoidable (and can be beneficial, for sure) in extreme situations (when the benefits outweigh the risks), problematic in so many other cases. Our science tends to leak water when dealing with complexity (human body...). Listening to our own body and learning from the history of human evolution tend to yield better results in prevention. The results for me appeared within the first few weeks of experimenting with paleo (and the consequent elimination of gluten). Some other simple lifestyle changes with a high impact in my personal life include HIIT and proper breathing. But this is just my perception of the problem; I don't know if it's generalizable, although I have seen similar results in many people. 

 One detail: all these measures are simple (although they require discipline and persistence), and they all have a systemic impact. 

 Thanks. Yes we are complicated and all somewhat different. I experiment on myself a lot and I take a lot of clues from evolution, some evolutionary arguments are very convincing. Gluten alone didn't make much difference in my case, but cutting out coffee+milk+wheat for 2 weeks did fix my IBS for a while (until I started cheating)... it took almost 2 weeks for the result to occur which is probably why it has been so hard in the past to test foods (I didn't know I had to wait so long). HIIT is great. I climb hills as fast as I can, forcing myself to over-breathe makes it easier. My current keto diet is not a short-term change, it is a short-term experiment. I will evaluate what to take from it after I'm done experimenting.