We tell our patients that they should not feel like they are on a “diet” during the weight loss process. The reason for this is two-fold. 1) The changes you make during your weight loss journey need to be lifelong habits that you can sustain. If you carry with you healthy habits, then you never have to worry about playing a game of catching up with your weight regain every few months. Therefore, we hold your hand every step of the journey with our dietary counseling to make sure these are habits that you are sustaining in the long term, so you don’t rebound after you hit your goal. 2) Any time you feel restricted, you will want and crave whatever it is that is being restricted. It is human nature to want what we can’t have, and this applies directly to dieting. If you tell someone they can never eat sugar or carbohydrates again, they will almost certainly end up binging at some point as their will power declines. For this reason, we try to prescribe a dietary framework that is balanced and not overly restrictive to the point where people feel they cannot live their lives.