Are You Suffering from Post-Traumatic Dieting Disorder?

You spent months swearing off carbs and sweating your brains out at the gym and were finally rewarded by dropping a few pant sizes. But then the diet ended, as did the trips to the gym. And those pants? Well, they no longer fit.

This was your umpteenth diet -- the one that was supposed to work. When all the weight came back, and then some, you couldn't help but feel a deep sense of shame and guilt.

It's what obesity expert Yoni Freedhoff calls post-traumatic dieting disorder.

As he's seen with thousands of people who try severe calorie restriction, cleanses or any diet that involves suffering and sacrifice, people feel demoralized after regaining all their weight. They believe they failed.

"The thing is, people don't fail diets," Freedhoff says. "Diets fail people."

Freedhoff, founder of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, Canada, which focuses on long-term weight management, noticed how failing to keep off the pounds often led his patients to develop depression, lower self-esteem and relationship issues. There had to be another path to weight loss. So Freedhoff devised his own diet plan called the 10-Day Reset, which he lays out in his book, "The Diet Fix," released this week.

[See: U.S. News Best Weight-Loss Diets .]

The plan includes keeping a food diary, exercise, lots of protein and -- believe or not -- as much chocolate as you want. While he says it will ensure long-term weight loss success, Freedhoff warns the approach requires careful planning. "Weight management is complicated, he says. "If there was a quick and easy fix for everybody, the world would be slim." U.S. News talked to Freedhoff, who blogs for Eat+Run, about the 10-Day Reset and how it could help cure post-traumatic dieting disorder. His responses have been edited.

In a nutshell, can you describe your 10-Day Reset plan?

It's 10 days to try to help a person reclaim a normal relationship with food, healthy living and weight management. The societal message around weight management is that it requires suffering and sacrifice, and I don't think suffering and sacrifice work very well in the long run. So this is 10 days to try to reset a person's attitude and approaches to weight management to be both realistic and sustainable -- where food does not simply play the role of fuel, but also is permitted and encouraged for comfort and celebration.

With the Reset, there are no forbidden foods and no required foods. How come?

What I prescribe in "The Diet Fix" is a plan to help people troubleshoot what will work best for them. I don't think there's one size that fits all. And there's no such thing as the eat-whatever-you-want, whenever-you-want, as-much-as-you-want lose weight program.

What's important is organizing a person's diet -- making sure people eat enough at every meal and snack, both in terms of calories and protein -- and making sure people don't eat too infrequently, so as to minimize hunger. If you're not hungry and go to the supermarket, it is easy to make thoughtful choices. Same with sitting down to a meal.

[See: U.S. News Best Diets Overall.]

You regularly write prescriptions for chocolate, chips, cookies and ice cream. Most diets steer clear of these foods, so why do you allow these?

Food is a seminal pleasure that never lets us down. We might occasionally be disappointed with our friends and relatives or our jobs or our lives in general. If we happen to love a particular food, it does not disappoint. We've been celebrating as a species with food forever, and it is no doubt the oldest social network. To suggest that people aren't able to use food for those purposes is what makes some diets fail.

So it's not about no chocolate, and it's not about all-you-can-eat chocolate. It's about the smallest amount of chocolate a person needs to be happily satisfied, and that amount will vary person by person, and even day by day. Some days might be worth none, and some days might be worth plenty.

Those following the Reset must eat protein with every meal and snack. Why protein?

Studies regularly demonstrate that diets rich in protein are more filling, and anything we can do to our diets to encourage fullness is a good thing. If you only have a big hunk of protein with dinner, and the rest of your day is very light, it does not have the same impact on fullness as spreading it out throughout the day. So by having enough protein per meal, it helps to keep the hunger demons at bay.

You instruct dieters to keep a daily food diary and mention that people who keep food diaries lose two to three times as much weight as those who don't. Why does a food diary help?

The most important role of a food diary is habit formation. Food diarizing is incredibly easy nowadays given the apps that exist. Every time you tap into that app, what you're doing is consciously reminding yourself of all the things you're trying to change. And regularly reminding yourself of what you're trying to do differently is how you generate new habits. So the food diary becomes a habit creation tool. There's no question your food diary will require some effort at the beginning -- no more than 10 or 15 minutes a day, but that 10 or 15 minutes a day drops to one or two a day once you're good at it. One or two minutes a day for double the weight loss is a very fair price to pay.

[Read: Don't Just Diet -- Exercise to Lose Weight, Too.]

Exercise alone won't take weight off, but it can help maintain weight loss. So how much exercise should someone do?

I have an eight word exercise manifesto: Some is good. More is better. Everything counts. People ask me: Should I do weights? Should I do cardio? What's the best thing I can do for my weight? First of all, I point out that you can't outrun your fork. Unfortunately, exercise does not burn sufficient calories to make a huge impact by itself on weight. Weight is generally lost in the kitchen; health is gained in the gym. But the best exercise to do is the one you think you might actually continue doing. That means ensuring people don't take on exercise programs that are too vigorous, too lengthy or too frequent to enjoy.

What we want is people to pick something they can sustain and the largest amount of exercise they can do in a day to still enjoy their day. Some days that might be zero, and some days that might be lots, but feeling constrained by a specific prescription is worrisome to me. I don't think overexercising is any wiser than undereating as far as long-term success goes.

In "The Diet Fix," you write that "The secret to long-term success with weight management is actually liking your life." Is it really that simple?

Well, nothing is simple, right? Everything that has value requires effort. So there's effort required fixing your diets as well, but that effort has to come in the form of organizing and thoughtful planning -- not suffering and blind restriction. Healthy living is not intuitive; if it were, we'd all be slim. But it is doable, and it is doable without suffering.

Truly, the only thing that matters to me is that a person likes the life they're living while controlling their energy intake. If you like the life that you're living, it's the healthiest diet you can enjoy,

[Video: Diet Success Stories .]

Freedhoff includes specific instructions for each day of the Reset, but the principles boil down to "10 Cardinal Rules." Reprinted from "The Diet Fix:"