I started my practice in 2003 from my clinic in South Delhi. I had no website. No social media. No advertising. My first clients were people I knew personally, and their friends, and then the friends of those friends. That is how it grew, slowly, one person at a time, for over two decades.
It is now 2026 and I have worked with more than 5,000 people. Men, women, teenagers, people in their 70s. From Delhi, from across India, from Mauritius, from Australia. Each one came to me wanting to lose weight. Each one left teaching me something I did not know before.
Here is what 23 years have taught me.
Willpower is the most overrated thing in weight loss
I know this sounds strange coming from a dietitian. But I mean it.
The clients who lost the most weight and kept it off were almost never the "disciplined" ones. They were not the ones who followed every instruction perfectly from day one. They were not gym people. They were not the ones posting about fitness on social media.
They were the ones who were honest with me.
When they ate something off-plan, they told me. When they were struggling with a particular meal, they said so. When they had a bad day and ate two parathas extra, they did not hide it. They just sent me a message and said, "Geeta ma'am, today was bad."
And because they told me, I could fix it. I would adjust the next day's meals. I would rework the week. We would get right back on track without losing momentum. That is how weight loss actually works. Not through perfect discipline, but through constant small corrections.
The clients who worried me were the opposite type. The all-or-nothing people. They would follow the diet with absolute perfection for 10 or 12 days. Then they would go silent. No messages, no weight updates, nothing. A week later they would come back and say they had "slipped" and wanted to start over.
Starting over again and again is not a weight loss journey. It is a cycle. And I have spent 23 years trying to break people out of it. The answer was never more willpower. It was always more honesty, and someone on the other end who does not judge you for a bad day.
"My body does not respond to diets"
I hear this almost every week from new clients. They say it like a medical diagnosis. Like their body has been officially classified as immune to weight loss.
"I have tried everything, ma'am. Nothing works. My body just does not lose weight."
In 23 years, I can count on one hand the number of people whose bodies genuinely could not lose weight with the right nutrition. On one hand. Out of more than 5,000. For everyone else, the problem was never their body. It was the approach.
They had been eating too little and their metabolism had slowed down. Or they had been following a diet from the internet that was not designed for their body. Or they were skipping breakfast and overeating at dinner. Or they were doing everything right during the week and completely undoing it over the weekend. Or they were drinking four cups of sugary chai every day and not counting it as food.
I do not say this to blame anyone. I say it because I want people to stop blaming their bodies. I have watched hundreds of people walk into my clinic believing their body was broken, and walk out months later having lost 10, 15, 20 kilos. Nothing was wrong with their bodies. Everything was wrong with the approach they had been given before.
One client came to me after trying four different diet programmes over three years. She had spent a lot of money. She had lost hope. She told me her metabolism was permanently damaged and she would never be able to lose weight. She lost 15 kg with me in seven months. The same body that she thought was broken.
Your body is not working against you. It just has not been given the right inputs yet.
I learned to work with the family, not just the client
This is something no textbook taught me. I figured it out the hard way.
Early in my career, I would give a diet plan to a client and expect them to follow it. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not, even when the client was clearly trying hard. I could not understand why.
Then I started asking more questions. Who cooks in your house? Does your mother know what the plan is? Does your cook understand how much oil to use?
That is when it clicked. In most Indian households, the person on the diet is not the person making the food. Their mother is cooking. Or their wife. Or their husband. Or a cook who comes in the morning. And that person has their own ideas about what is enough food, how much ghee is appropriate, and whether a smaller roti is an insult to the family's honour.
I realized I was solving the wrong problem. I was designing the perfect diet for the client and ignoring the kitchen entirely.
Now I do it differently. When I start with a new client, I make sure whoever is responsible for cooking understands the plan. Not just what to make, but why. How much oil to use and why. What size roti and why. When to serve the heavier meal and when to keep it light. If the kitchen is on your side, the diet works. If it is not, even the best plan will fail.
This is one of those things you only learn after years of working inside the reality of Indian homes. No course teaches it. No diet chart accounts for it. But it makes all the difference.
The worst thing that happens is not a bad week. It is silence.
After 23 years, I have developed an instinct for this. I know when a client is about to disappear.
They stop sending their weight in the morning. Then they reply late to my messages. Then they stop replying altogether. By the third or fourth day of silence, I know what has happened. They had a bad stretch, they feel they have ruined everything, and they are too embarrassed or too defeated to face me.
This is the moment I am most needed, and it is the exact moment most dietitians lose their clients. Because most dietitians wait for the client to come back. I do not.
I call them. I message them. Not to scold them. Not to give a lecture. Just to say: come back. One bad week does not erase three good months. Tell me what happened, and we will fix it together.
I have pulled clients back from the edge of quitting more times than I can count. And almost every time, they go on to reach their goal weight. They just needed someone to tell them it was okay to stumble, and that stumbling does not mean starting over.
The weight loss industry treats a bad week like a failure. I treat it like a Tuesday. Because in 23 years, I have never had a single client who did not have at least one bad week. Not one. It is part of the process. The only thing that matters is what happens after.
It was never really about the kilos
People come to me and say they want to lose 10 kg. Or 15 kg. Or 20 kg. They give me a number. But over the years, I have learned that the number is almost never the real reason they are sitting in front of me.
They want to feel confident at their cousin's wedding. They want to stop dreading family photos. They want to climb two flights of stairs without losing their breath. They want to stop avoiding mirrors. They want their clothes to fit again. They want their partner to look at them the way they used to. They want to stop feeling invisible.
The kilos are just a way of measuring something much deeper than weight.
And the most beautiful part of my job is watching what happens when the weight starts coming off. It is not just that they get lighter. They get louder. They start making plans. They buy new clothes. They post photos they would have deleted a year ago. They laugh more easily. They stand differently.
My son Raghav did not just lose 42 kg. He became someone I had not seen before. More confident, more open, more willing to take up space in the world. I watched that transformation as both his dietitian and his mother. And even after 23 years and 5,000 clients, nothing I have ever seen in my career has come close to that.
That is why I still do this. Not for the kilos. For what happens after.
If I could say one thing to you
Do not wait for the perfect time to start. There is no perfect Monday. There is no "after the wedding" or "after the vacation" or "once work calms down." Life does not calm down. It just keeps going, and every month you wait is a month you could have spent getting closer to where you want to be.
Start imperfect. Start messy. Start even if you are not sure it will work this time. Because the only difference between the people who lost weight with me and the people who did not is that the first group started and did not stop.
And if you want someone in your corner who will not let you stop, you know where to find me.