Continued from Breaking the Fat Pattern. That’s right, yo-yo dieting may lead to what can be described as weight loss cravings.

You “crave” to lose weight and you also crave certain foods, you do your best to follow what seems like a decent diet, but your efforts are just not good enough.

So why is this happening to you? Because it’s not easy to breakaway from yo-yo dieting. “If you learn nothing from each time you diet you’re destined to repeat history,” says Charles Stuart Platkin, author of Breaking the Fat Pattern.

“You have to raise your awareness level.” You can greatly increase your chances of ending the cycle of yo-yo dieting by examining your previous dieting attempts and listing three tactics that worked for you and three that backfired.

“People tend to forget what’s worked – they throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Platkin says.

For example, maybe when you followed Weight Watchers, you were inspired by having contact with people who truly cared about your success. Lesson learned: You need to surround yourself with supportive people.

Or maybe when you were on the South Beach diet, you discovered that you actually enjoyed snacking on hardboiled eggs and found them satisfying. The dieting strategies that failed may be more obvious to you.

For example, maybe you kept setting your alarm for 5:30 a.m. to exercise but could never drag yourself out of bed. Lesson learned: Forget about morning workouts and try 20-minute walks on your lunch break or after dinner.

Collect these lessons and use them to develop a new plan for yourself, which should help you crack your yo-yo dieting cycle.