Sorry, friends, for digging in so hard on this topic, but it’s extremely important, IMO. I’m challenged on it constantly by academics who are bent on trying to get everyone else to believe the crap they had to memorize in order to gain their credentials. According to some of these people, I follow a “restrictive diet.” I’m still trying to determine precisely what I’m being restricted from. Oreos? Doritos? Added sugar? Foods I once had difficulty controlling—but no longer particularly want? If that qualifies as restriction, then I suppose I’m also on a cigarette-restriction diet, a heroin-restriction diet and a drinking-motor-oil-restriction diet. Academics can search PubMed and produce tens of thousands of papers containing the term restrictive diet. That establishes that the term exists. Congratulations. It does not establish that everyone who eliminates certain foods experiences restriction, deprivation or suffering. PubMed can identify what a diet excludes. It doesn’t typically tell you whether the person eating it feels restricted. That distinction matters a lot in the real world. If you sit down to meals you genuinely enjoy, eat until comfortably satisfied, experience no meaningful hunger or cravings, and feel healthier, stronger and more energetic than you did before, where exactly is the deprivation? Conversely, if you spend every day thinking about everything you “can’t” have, bargaining with yourself and waiting for your next opportunity to escape your diet, that sense of restriction is very real, even if your officially approved meal plan includes every food group. A dietary pattern can be technically narrow yet psychologically freeing. It can also be technically flexible while leaving someone hungry, preoccupied with food and miserable. That may be inconvenient for people who prefer labeling diets to listening to the human beings eating them, but inconvenience does not make it untrue. Years ago, avoiding added sugar would have felt restrictive to me because I still wanted it. Today, added sugar is so far outside my consideration that not eating it requires approximately the same willpower as not eating the cardboard box it came in. I don’t wander the supermarket mourning the Oreos I have been denied. I’m not staring wistfully at bags of Doritos, grieving the cruel limitations imposed upon me. I eat food I love. I eat plenty of it. Then I move on with my life. Call my diet restrictive if a journal’s terminology requires you to. But if I don’t feel restricted, deprived or hungry, your label tells me far less about my life than you seem to think it does.