Most dogs learn to sit in a week. Most owners then spend the next three years carrying treats everywhere, because the moment the pocket is empty, the dog looks away. That is not a stubborn dog. That is a dog who learned that a treat in your hand is part of the cue. The fix is not to withhold food and hope, it is to change the picture the dog sees when you ask.
Why the treat becomes part of the signal
When you teach a sit with food, the dog is learning a chain: hand with food goes up, bottom goes down, food arrives. The hand movement and the smell of the treat become part of what triggers the behaviour. Positive reinforcement built the sit correctly, the problem is that the lure was never separated from the cue. The dog is not being stubborn when you ask without food. He is responding accurately to a cue that now looks different to him.
The lure-to-prompt shift: doing it in order
The transition has three steps, and skipping any one of them is where owners get stuck.
First, move the food out of the hand before you ask. Hold the treat in your closed fist at your side, or put it in your pocket. Give the same hand signal or verbal cue you always used. The moment the dog sits, mark it, a clipped "yes" or a clicker, and then deliver the treat from the other hand or from your pocket. Do this for two or three sessions until the dog is sitting reliably with the food out of sight.
Second, vary when the treat arrives. This is called a variable reinforcement schedule, and it is the most powerful tool for making a behaviour stick without food. Reward the first sit, skip the second, reward the third, skip the next two, reward again. The dog cannot predict which sit earns the treat, so he keeps offering the behaviour. A predictable reward schedule trains a dog to stop trying the moment the reward disappears. An unpredictable one trains persistence.
Third, bring in other rewards. A game of tug, a short sprint, a scratch behind the ear, or permission to sniff a lamp post are all reinforcers if the dog finds them valuable. Start pairing these with the sits you do not treat with food. Over time, the behaviour is maintained by a mix of rewards, and food becomes one option among several rather than the only currency that works.
The timing that makes the difference
Marker timing matters more during the fade than it did during the initial teaching. When food was in your hand, the dog knew immediately that the reward was coming. Now the gap between the sit and the treat arriving from your pocket is longer. A marker, "yes" or a click, bridges that gap. It tells the dog exactly which moment earned the reward, even if the food takes two seconds to appear. Without it, the dog may start adding behaviours between the sit and the treat, trying to figure out what you actually wanted.
Keep sessions short: five to eight repetitions, two or three times a day. A dog who is drilling sits for ten minutes is bored, and a bored dog starts offering the behaviour sloppily or stops offering it at all.
What to do when it stops working
If the dog's sit rate drops sharply when you reduce treats, you moved too fast. Go back one step, treats visible but not in the asking hand, and hold that stage for another few sessions before fading again. This is not failure. It is the training telling you where the dog's actual understanding stopped.
If the dog is sitting reliably at home but ignoring you in the park or on the street, the problem is not the treat fade, it is that the behaviour was never proofed in those environments. A sit that works in the kitchen is a kitchen sit. Build it in each new place from the beginning, with treats, and then fade again in each context separately.
If the dog is showing any reluctance, stiffness, or hesitation before sitting that was not there before, stop the training and have him checked. Pain changes compliance faster than any training variable, and a dog who suddenly finds sitting difficult may have a physical reason for it.
Where you end up
A fully faded treat means the dog sits on cue in most situations, gets rewarded intermittently with food and occasionally with something else, and does not stand waiting for a biscuit to appear before he responds. You will still carry treats sometimes, for new environments, for distractions, for keeping the behaviour sharp. That is maintenance, not dependency. The difference is that the treat is now a bonus the dog does not know is coming, not a toll he charges before he will perform.