How to lose weight and tenacity of habits

The Tenacity of Habits
I can give a directive to my mind and it will at once react or behave accordingly. Most people who make up their minds to stop smoking or to stop eating so many sweets will continue with those actions in spite of themselves. They do not change
because their minds, like blotting paper, have soaked up habits of thought. Habit means that the mind believes it cannot get rid of a particular thought.
Habit, indeed, is tenacious. Once you perform an action,it leaves an effect or impression on the consciousness. As a result of this influence, you are likely to repeat that action. After several repetitions, that inclination is so strengthened that the action becomes a habit. In some people, just one act is enough to form a habit, because of a latent predisposition from past lives. The mind may tell you that you cannot free yourself from a particular habit; but habits are nothing but repetitions of your own thoughts, and these you have the capacity
to change.


The nature of habit can be understood by this analogy: Clay can be molded into a vase; and while the clay is still soft it is easy to change the form of that vase again and again. But once it is fired in an oven, its shape becomes firmly set. So it is with your consciousness. Your thoughts are molding your actions, and your mental convictions from the repetition of those actions is the fire that hardens the thoughts into unyielding habit patterns.
Why are the faces of all of you different? Because your minds are different. Your habit patterns of thoughts have molded not only your mind but also your body. You have probably noticed that some thin people might eat five meals a day and yet
never gain weight. And some heavy people may eat very little and yet become heavier. Why? The former, sometime in a past life, established the thought in their consciousness that they were thin, and in this life they brought that thought and
tendency with them. No matter what they do, they never grow fat. It is the same with obese persons. In past lives, they left this world with the consciousness of being fat, and they brought the seed of that thought into their present existence.
The whole physiology of the body responds to these karmic seed tendencies. If you want to change your constitution, then you have to say, "It is I who thought myself into being thin (or heavy or sickly). Now I will myself to be robust (or whatever
you so desire)." If you get rid of the thought that has made you other than you want to be, you will see the body change. I can maintain my weight, or as easily be thin at will.
My trouble as a youth was that I was too thin. Master [Swami Sri Yukteswar] cured me of that consciousness, so ever since I have preferred to be heavier.


Except from the book "Journey to Self-Realization" By Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda