Unquenchable Hunger?!

Are you eating back exercise calories? Remember, if your 'diet' is not sustainable, then it's just a crash diet and you will not stick with it. Do what you can do for the entirety, not just right now.

I eat back some of the calories if I feel like I need to. And it's not just a diet, the changes I've made work great for me. I can see myself eating this way forever lol.

Sounds like you need to.

^^^ this

you say you eat exercise calories back "if you feel you need to" yet you're hungry all the time and obsessing about food. Excessive hunger and obsessing about food are natural survival responses to eating too little, so this suggests that you're not eating back all the exercise calories that you need to.

It takes overeating by 3500 calories to gain just one lb of fat... that means 3500 calories over and above your TDEE. You are not going to undo your progress by eating more, if anything you will ensure that you continue to progress. It will take raising your calories by a lot before you actually start gaining fat.

Eating too little, after a while you'll start to lose strength and lean body mass, and you're already constantly battling with hunger... you can foresee yourself sticking with this in the long term... but surely feeling constantly hungry is undermining that? Try upping your calories by 100-200 and see if that fixes the constant hunger. Also, don't stress about scale weight gains from upping your calories, it is water and glycogen, *not fat* - unless you overate by 3500 calories, you did not gain even 1lb of fat. If you're constantly hungry you probably are glycogen depleted, so you may see a gain on the scale of several pounds, but none of it is fat, it's just your glycogen stores refilling (which is a good thing!). Upping your calories by 100-200 will not result in gaining that much fat in a short time. Do this for a while and give your body a chance to settle down. Once your glycogen stores are refilled, you will probably find you have more energy and your workouts improve and also you stop feeling constantly hungry. If you still feel constantly hungry after you've given your glycogen stores a chance to refil, then do the same again, i.e. add another 100-200 calories a day.

Check your calories against a BMR/TDEE calculator, such as the one linked to from the "in place of a road map" thread.... if you want to maintain your current weight you want to eat all your TDEE calories (this may not be the exact number predicted by the calculator, you have to go by real world results and adjust the numbers a little based on that, but eating at TDEE your weight will be stable (once the initial glycogen weight gains are done with) and you shouldn't feel hungry except right before meal times).... if you still want to lose weight, then as you're already lean, stick to eating just 10% less than your TDEE number. Eating too much less results in problems like excessive hunger, and in the long term, loss of lean body mass. Those with more fat to lose can get away with eating fewer calories, i.e. 20% below TDEE, and the fact you were fine on your calorie number before, suggests to me that this number was okay before because you had more fat to lose, but now you're much leaner, you'll need to have a smaller deficit. The less fat you have to lose, the harder it is to lose fat without also losing lean body mass. This hunger seems to me like your body's way of telling you that you need to eat more.