What’s Your Soul’s Gifts?
As you may know, what most excites me about my work is helping people develop and share their soul’s gifts. Well John has done an amazing job of that! Check out his novels!
From John:
You invite us to share experiences, and so here’s mine. When I began IOWL I found that my issues with food linked directly to a feeling of being without worth (ie I was fat because I didn’t deserve to be thin). Through the podcasts I discovered that these feelings of worthlessness harked back to when I was really young. I was a very chubby kid with a mother who had lived through World War II and suffered not having enough food meant her family’s diet consisted of red meat, pies, fish & chips — resulting in one very fat child. Definitely a case of quantity over quality. I was *that* child in the playground that everyone homed in on. I also had glasses and very greasy hair. School was hell for me.
At 14 I was a very chubby 16 stone (224lbs), but during the end of puberty and starting work, I lost a lot of that weight — and while I was never thin, I was much closer to a normal weight for my height and build. But underneath that feeling of being unworthy started me on a course of eventual failure and reaching middle age I found that the fat kid inside me was actually governing my life and actions. By then I was obsessed about not putting on weight and my writing (my great life passion) suffered too. I had written three novels but these were gathering dust and I had no intention of ever sending them to publishers for fear of rejection. I also had zero confidence.
I started IOWL after listening to a few weight loss podcasts but it’s the only one that made sense to me (as I’d been there, done that with fad diet plans, strict exercise, depravation, etc). At the beginning of the podcast I just carried on listening because I liked the soothing sound of your voice and you spoke a lot of sense, and then after about episode 100 something clicked. I realised just what was behind my problem and came to these startling (for me) conclusions:
• I wasn’t broken and wasn’t ‘meant’ to always be overweight.
• I wasn’t stuck being this size by some cruel force of nature and I wasn’t doomed, as I got older, to get progressively, inevitably heavier.
• I didn’t have to be controlled by that fat useless kid who had to overachieve/impress/work slavishly to get people to like him. I could just be myself.
Strange as they sound, these were the inner beliefs that ruled my life. And after *that* little revelation, it was all downhill easy riding! My food issues vanished, I prioritise exercise I liked and I just got over the whole tiresome stress I had previously associated with eating.
Now, I am my goal weight, feel happy and love life — and as a bonus got up the courage to send my manuscripts off. I now have two of novels published with the third out in 2012. How’s that for IOWL changing lives!
Thank you, Renée…
John Trevillian”
