Do you believe you must follow a diet plan exactly as it is written? Does your diet end the moment a potato chip hits your lips? Are you either "on" a diet or "off" - with no in-between? This all-or-nothing mentality makes life stressful and makes losing weight nearly impossible.

In order to move from an unhealthy diet to a healthy one many things must change; and they don't change just because you learned a new way of eating. You can know everything there is to know about how to eat healthy but applying those new lessons and discovering how to make them work in your actual life will require your time and patience.

Knowing how to do something and actually acquiring the skills to perform it well are two different things and not unique to dieting. Think about the first time you rode a bicycle, you knew what you needed to do in order to make the bike go; you simply push the pedals and the bike moves. But even with that knowledge you had to allow yourself time get your balance and coordination, and all the while you had to accept the fact that you would fall occasionally before you mastered the action.

Learning how to lose weight effectively is no different than learning to ride a bike in that it requires you to create new skills, habits, beliefs and patterns of behavior. This is not a simple process; you cannot simply flip a switch inside your head and be changed forever. The creation of new habits takes repetition and time and it must be reinforce with new patterns of thinking, and it is inevitable that your old habits and patterns will show up from time to time until the change process has completed.

It is not uncommon to hear about someone who starts a diet, does well for a few weeks, and then quits because they had a "bad day". Yet this is a huge mistake because if you quit too many times not only do you reinforce your old habits you also establish a pattern of failure which makes your future attempts at change more difficult.

Understand that there is a normal "settling in phase" when you are learning how to lose weight effectively, you will have great days interspersed with not so great ones. Your goal is not perfection, it is progression. If you slip back into an old pattern, recognize it; accept it and get back on track.

If you start a diet be patient and understanding with yourself; don't quit because you have a set back. Learning how to lose weight effectively is not an all-or-nothing game. You are learning new ways of acting and new ways of thinking. Just because you decided to start a healthy eating plan doesn't mean that you're mind and body will do an immediate 180 degree turn-around. Be patient with yourself and be creative, if you have a bad week, set a short-term goal of doing better the next week and be proud of yourself when you do.

Give your body and your mind time to learn the new pattern, remember you are creating a change that will last a life-time; be patient and believe in yourself, the rest will take care of itself.