by Heidi, Goonellabah, Australia

I am a 22 year-old Australian with a Swiss background. It goes without saying that I loved chocolate. I loved the taste, the texture, the feeling and I ate it all the time. When I was 16 I started to nominate and second-guess my love/need for chocolate. It was strange, I started to notice that it was almost like chocolate would call to me and I was pretty much powerless to resist. I remember one New Year’s Eve I made the dedicated choice to not eat it for an entire year. Holy moly, that was hard!! I lasted a couple of weeks and oh, how long those weeks were! This is embarrassing, but one morning I remember cleaning the house and finding some old chocolate… hidden in the sofa. I looked at it guiltily for a while and then ate it. Well, it was a downhill spiral from there and my intimate relationship with chocolate started all over again. Except this time I was convinced we would be lifelong partners (whether I liked it or not).

After graduating from high school I went to Switzerland for a year as an au pair (nanny). One of the reasons I left was because I was fed up with my Mum; I thought she had started yet another spiritual pursuit and I wasn’t being taken along for the ride. She’d taken a stand against my under-age drinking, started listening to Serge Benhayon recordings in the car (which just annoyed the hell out of me) and confronted me about our lack of communication. I could not stand that she was changing all the rules of our relationship, as I was pretty comfortable with how things were.

So I found a Swiss family looking for an au pair online and I left. At the beginning it was okay, but staying at home all the time cooking, cleaning and walking the dog started to wear me down. Well surprise, surprise, my love of chocolate (and other foods) started to grow. It was to the point that my skin got quite bad and I put on a substantial amount of weight. This was really inconvenient because on top of everything else going on…. I started feeling all this self-loathing come up.

My Swiss family tried to help the best they could. My Auntie sent me to a skin specialist and my Grandmother asked “Don’t you care you’re getting so fat?” while others politely ignored it. My Mum got pretty worried about me so she flew over from Australia to see me for a couple of weeks. Well, didn’t I get a shock. She had changed so much since I’d last seen her. Before, I had a Mother who talked a lot about Universal Medicine and all its philosophies but hadn’t really made any profound changes. Well this time was different. She hardly mentioned her involvement with Universal Medicine but boy oh boy, did she feel different. The way she talked, walked, hugged me and everything about her was so foreign. Before, it felt like she was trying to stuff all these random rules down my throat (sorry Mum – bit harsh, I know). Now, well now she was walking the talk and looking pretty amazing. Towards the end of her visit she recommended that I go along to a Universal Medicine course in London. So I decided to go.

Even though I’d seen the changes in my Mum, I was adamant that I wasn’t going to be taken on some spiritual roller-coaster. I was far too smart for that. After an interesting presentation during the course, Serge Benhayon asked us to pair up and talk about one thing that we had an over-reliance on and the reason for it. Of course, I chose chocolate, and initially I could not really tell you why I relied on it. I just liked it and that was it.

Amazingly, I had this memory. When I was a small child in outback Australia, my Swiss Grandparents came to visit. I didn’t speak German at the time so our means of communication were pretty limited. However, they would give me little individually wrapped Lindt chocolates with adoring eyes. It was beautiful; it was one of the ways they showed their love for me. While I was recounting the memory I suddenly realised…

I was reaching for chocolate as a form of connection or love. This may sound crazy but I don’t care, it’s true. It suddenly made sense. Break up with a boyfriend, chocolate. Fight with Mum, chocolate. Feeling guilty and hating myself for eating so much chocolate, well… I’d eat more chocolate.

After that activity during the Universal Medicine course things felt different. It wasn’t like this massive revelation where the heavens opened, music played and angels wept. No, it was just a really deep level of understanding from my body and it was really, really, really, really simple (really). It’s like I was given the opportunity to feel the effects of chocolate on my body long after the momentary pleasure in my mouth.

In the past I had used my mind to try and control my eating habits without understanding the underlying reason for my reliance on it. So, whenever I had tried to make a change it was always fraught with relapses, mentally psyching myself up to try again, coupled with a berating inner voice adamantly stating I wasn’t strong enough to make permanent, positive changes.

The quality of presentation given by Serge allowed me to approach what I knew needed to change from a completely different angle. It was because of this I was able to feel that the whole way I was living contributed to needing certain foods. So my focus was no longer on cutting out chocolate. It was more about how I interacted with people and how I treated myself. So when I made dietary changes from this understanding, things were a lot easier.

Surprisingly, I realised I just didn’t want chocolate or what it was offering me anymore. This was because I had dealt with my emotional stuff so I was allowed to feel that not only did I no longer need chocolate, but I didn’t want a bar of it (pun intended). I was able to then use this experience as a marker, so I began to experiment. I’d stop eating white bread, or cheese etc. for a bit and see how my body felt. If I could feel a marked improvement, then it was easy to cut these things out permanently and address why I had been reliant on them.

It’s been a process but my whole outlook is different. I don’t eat food in search of an amazing taste; it’s more about feeling what I can eat that allows my body to feel just as lovely as before I’ve eaten. So, no longer am I tired or bloated after I eat. The crazy thing is, is that I used to think being bloated was a sign I was full!! Oh how wrong I was.

It’s hard to write on paper how profoundly my life has changed, and there is so much to share about the amazing inspiration offered by Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine. But for the moment I’d love to say that it is for this, and so much more, that I am so colossally grateful to Serge Benhayon. Inspired by my involvement with Universal Medicine, I have made so many beautiful choices. I now live free of chocolate, alcohol, sugar, dairy and gluten. My body feels completely different, I love my job, I have a beautiful relationship with the most loving man, I hold myself in such high regard, I’m studying to work in an area I’m passionate about and I live a drama-free life.

What beautiful anecdotal evidence (even if I do say so myself).