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John McLaren's journey is nothing short of extraordinary. Imagine surviving a near-fatal attempted murder and losing your life savings in a foreign business venture—such harrowing experiences could break anyone, but for John, they became the catalyst for a profound transformation. As a Christian husband, father, and passionate health coach, John shares his incredible story of faith and resilience, along with his innovative approach to brain-driven weight loss that integrates psychological psychology, neuroscience, fitness, and nutrition. This episode highlights how John's childhood dreams and his amazement at modern technology that connects people globally have shaped his inspiring outlook on life and health.
In a gripping recount, John opens up about a traumatic event in South Africa that forced him to reassess his relationship with God and question the true essence of Christianity. For over a decade, John battled mental health issues, including PTSD, binge eating, and food addiction, which brought him to a place of humility and vulnerability. Through God's mercy, he found the strength to rebuild his faith from the ground up. This renewed faith also transformed his perspective on health and fitness, driving him to help others achieve wellness. John's story is a testament to the transformative power of adversity and the importance of surrendering our gifts to God.
John's compassionate approach to coaching is rooted in his personal struggles with trauma, obesity, and financial ruin. We explore how dissociating from his body after trauma led John to reach 330 pounds and how self-loathing was gradually replaced by self-compassion through the guidance of another coach. Running a nutrition and supplement store revealed to him the critical need for emotional support and guidance, beyond just supplements. This realization inspired him to become a coach who values human connection and compassion above all. John emphasizes that true change is tough but possible with gentle guidance and understanding, likening the effort required for sustained health to the ongoing process of spiritual growth. His insights on adopting a lifelong, balanced approach to health and fitness are both practical and profound, offering listeners valuable advice on their own journeys to wellness.
In a gripping recount, John opens up about a traumatic event in South Africa that forced him to reassess his relationship with God and question the true essence of Christianity. For over a decade, John battled mental health issues, including PTSD, binge eating, and food addiction, which brought him to a place of humility and vulnerability. Through God's mercy, he found the strength to rebuild his faith from the ground up. This renewed faith also transformed his perspective on health and fitness, driving him to help others achieve wellness. John's story is a testament to the transformative power of adversity and the importance of surrendering our gifts to God.
John's compassionate approach to coaching is rooted in his personal struggles with trauma, obesity, and financial ruin. We explore how dissociating from his body after trauma led John to reach 330 pounds and how self-loathing was gradually replaced by self-compassion through the guidance of another coach. Running a nutrition and supplement store revealed to him the critical need for emotional support and guidance, beyond just supplements. This realization inspired him to become a coach who values human connection and compassion above all. John emphasizes that true change is tough but possible with gentle guidance and understanding, likening the effort required for sustained health to the ongoing process of spiritual growth. His insights on adopting a lifelong, balanced approach to health and fitness are both practical and profound, offering listeners valuable advice on their own journeys to wellness.
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00:00 - Journey of Faith and Transformation
10:13 - Renewed Faith and Health Journey
13:27 - Journey of Compassionate Coaching
18:49 - The Lifelong Pursuit of Health
29:12 - Balance Through Travel and Weight Loss
33:17 - Healthy Living Through Personalized Approach
42:05 - Thankful Guest on Show
WEBVTT
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Hello everyone, thanks again for joining me on another episode of the Daughters of Earth show.
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Today we have a special guest with us.
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His name is John McLaren.
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He is a Christian husband and father and a passionate health coach who combines psychological psychology and neuroscience with fitness and nutrition to equip people with the tools to create lasting health.
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He survived attempted murder, nearly beaten to death in South Africa, as well as losing his life savings in a foreign business venture and rebuilt himself up from the ground up.
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He focuses on brain-driven weight loss.
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His goal is to marry the science of metabolism with the psychology of behavior change and compassion of human connection to create life-changing transformation in his clients.
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John, thank you for the show today.
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Well, thank you very much for having me, and it's always interesting to hear my own bio read back.
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You know, I think about our lived experience and sometimes we kind of take it for granted, a little bit like, oh well, that kind of happened to me and whatever.
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But you know, yeah it, it's been quite a journey, so, uh, happy to happy to share a little bit of here with the audience if it'll help them out.
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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Usually I like to ask a icebreaker question to open up the um.
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The first question is what did you want to be when you were a kid?
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And why?
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Oh man, I had a hard time settling.
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So it depends on what age we're talking here, but at one point I wanted to be a firefighter, which is probably a fairly common one.
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I also wanted to be a chef when I was nine years old.
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So I learned how to cook.
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I don't want to say I taught myself, I did have some help from my parents but I learned how to cook at a young age because I thought I wanted to be a chef, I think in my younger years I also thought it'd be cool to be a ninja.
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I had no idea about jobs and employment, so I thought, well, a ninja sounds pretty cool.
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And I was probably slightly influenced by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to be fair, I thought they were pretty cool.
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So, between firefighter, chef, ninja, in my teen years I thought maybe a professional mattress tester might have been a fun job where you get paid to sleep.
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But I never imagined that I would end up doing what I actually do, which is kind of funny.
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If you'd have told me as a kid that, hey, you're going to be a virtual health coach of all things I mean.
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Well, of course I grew up without the Internet, right?
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So I couldn't even imagine this was a possibility of a career.
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I actually recall that we, you know, as kids, we talked about, about in the future this technology is going to be so advanced we're going to be able to do phone calls and see each other on screens.
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And you know, it's funny because here we are now living this thing that we thought was this amazing, mind-blowing technology when we were kids, and now we get to do this through broadcasting, which is really cool right?
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yeah, I mean I've had conversations from people you know all across the world in different countries.
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You know, like you're saying, you know 20, 30 years ago you would think that would be an impossible.
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You know feat.
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Yeah, yeah, it was like I grew up with here this will date me a little bit the monochrome Game Boy like dot matrix, matrix game boy where you played tetris and and the original like super mario brothers.
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So you know, like gray.
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Then there was no like 3d animation or it was like four buttons on my monochrome game boy and you had to pull a cartridge out and blow in the cartridge and then like put you know and try and get it to work again.
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That was my life, can you tell us a little bit about your journey of faith and becoming a Christian, and what did that look like for?
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you.
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So the South Africa experience is actually going to tie into this too, which is kind of interesting.
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So I was raised in a small, I'll say a small Christian fellowship and it's kind of interesting because at this point in time actually I would never imagine this either.
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But the Christian fellowship that I grew up and was raised a part of is making sort of national news right now because of a scandal related to church leadership, and I'll use the term CSA and SA.
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I can expand on it if people need.
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But anyway.
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So I was raised some people call us the two by twos and there's other names like that.
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The name sort of is derived from our homeless itinerant ministry that goes that sort of lives in the homes of congregants and goes out in pairs.
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So I was raised in kind of this.
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I don't want to say oddball.
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Really the intent was to sort of follow like the original, what was the word Commission from Jesus when he sent out his disciples two and two?
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We could debate whether how a scripture letters or not, but I believe that was the intention behind those who kind of started this fellowship.
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So that's what I was raised in.
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You know, I have to give credit to my parents.
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They said we'd like you to be a Christian, but we can't choose that for you.
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You have to choose this for yourself.
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If we could choose, we would choose this for you.
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You have to choose this for yourself.
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If we could choose, we would choose this for you, but you have to choose this for yourself.
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And so there was never really, in a sense, there wasn't this pressure that like I had to perform, so to speak, which I don't think everybody in this fellowship that I'm a part of could say the same necessarily.
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So my parents were quite forward thinking in that regard.
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They just recognized it had to be my choice.
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Quite forward thinking in that regard.
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They just recognized that it had to be my choice.
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So when I was about 14, I thought this is maybe what I want to do.
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I do want to commit my life to God.
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I don't think I fully understood, necessarily, what I was doing, but I thought I wanted to commit my life to God.
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I was baptized when I was 16.
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So full immersion baptism, indicating that I wanted to really commit my life to God.
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And the funny thing is, it seems like not long after, that was when my life sort of I don't want to say it went off the rails.
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That probably makes it sound more dramatic.
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I just kind of got into the usual teen stuff of like partying, secretly drinking and things like that.
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It was nothing too wild I never got wildly drunk or anything like that, but just rebelling basically.
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So it's funny that I was baptized and committing my life to Christ.
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And then I got into the usual teen shenanigans trying to hide it from my parents and things like that.
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I'm not proud of what I did, but I can't undo what I did.
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So through my late teens and early 20s I was kind of trying to find myself and whatnot, and I probably didn't live a very Christian life, so to speak.
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And then the woman who then is now my wife kind of came into my life and probably tamed me a little bit from being a wild and reckless young person.
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But what I would say is I felt like, looking back now I can say that I was probably what I will call a cerebral Christian.
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So in other words, I have a pretty good brain.
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I don't take the credit, I got it free of charge, but I got a pretty good brain.
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I don't take the credit, I got it free of charge, but I got a pretty good brain.
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I have quite a good memory.
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I can recite things quite well.
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I did very well in school just because I could just remember random pieces of information and recite them well for tests.
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So this also meant that I could kind of be I would also say a performative Christian.
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So in our fellowship gatherings I could recite a verse and I could quote something and say something that sounded good, but in a sense my heart wasn't entirely in it and it wasn't necessarily deliberately or malicious, I wasn't necessarily trying to pretend.
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But I could say my nature is to sort of coast because of the gifts that I have in terms of I'm a pretty smart guy.
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Through school I was kind of able to coast on my intellect and so on.
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Through school I was kind of able to coast on my intellect and so on.
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That traveled over into my Christian journey where I was kind of just coasting on my natural gifts of like intellect and memory and things like that.
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And God's not impressed by that at all.
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Of course you know the wisest among us is a drop in the bucket compared to the infinite wisdom of God.
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Wisest among us is a drop in the bucket compared to the infinite wisdom of God.
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So when I was in South Africa, I went through this experience where I was attacked and nearly beaten to death by four men and it was a terrifying, awful, horrible experience to go through.
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And I'll call it a hellish experience because I feel like I got a little bit of a taste of hell in that experience.
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I was alone, attacked at night, screaming for help.
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Nobody was coming to save me.
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I mean, I do believe that God intervened somehow and gave me the strength and helped me to survive that experience.
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I don't know how you fight a four men after your head's been smashed a few times with a rock and you're concussed and dazed and so on, but somehow I survived that experience.
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But in that experience I had this thought I can't die tonight or my soul is bound for hell.
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And that was a.
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That was a like, if you want to talk, a terrifying thought.
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When you think I'm going to die and I'm going to end up in hell, there is like nothing more terrifying than that.
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And and uh, that was.
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I mean, that was one of the blackest moments of my life and I feel like Belshazzar, you know, when there was that hand that wrote on the wall that said you've been weighed in the balances and found wanting and I was like God was saying to me like I see through you, you can fool other people, but I see your heart and you've been you're a shell, you've been pretending you know you're, you're, you're, you're pretending to be a Christian.
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You can say the right things, you can, you can sound like a Christian, but you haven't really truly given me your heart and it took like nearly dying and really staring death in the face and my own mortality, 29 years old and just being humbled beyond belief, to recognize that, like you're not what you think you are and you're not fooling me.
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But God, you know people would think like why would God put you through this?
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But God, in his mercy, does this.
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It took an experience like this to really reach me and make an impact in my life, and so that was.
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I don't want to say that like from that day forward, I was like a perfect Christian or something like that.
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That was the start of almost like a new walk with God, where I had to renew my faith and I almost had to start from the ground up again and go like how do I make this my own?
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What does it really mean to be a Christian?
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What does it mean to give my heart to God, to yield my life to God?
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What does that even look like?
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I had to just rethink so much of what I knew after having gone through that experience.
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I went through probably I'm going to say a decade of mental health struggles because of what I went through in South Africa.
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So the trauma, the PTSD there was binge eating and food addiction and all kinds of maladaptive coping mechanisms.
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I didn't understand at the time.
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I was deeply ashamed of it because of my very awesome and Christian behavior.
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But God, oh God, in his mercy, he saw me through all of this and uh and I don't want to make it sound like I have I'm like the perfect Christian Now.
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I'm still a strong soul, you know.
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But boy have I learned a lot along the way and I've been humbled a lot along the way and I'm so.
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I would not take those experiences out of my past.
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I'm so grateful that God brought those experiences into my life.
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I wouldn't ask for them again.
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I'm not putting my hand up again saying I want to go through that, but I'm so glad that I went through that because of what it, how it changed me and yeah, so that's kind of been my journey to date.
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And after those things, think we can get things to you for the better.
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I would imagine.
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Correct For sure it absolutely did.
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It laid bare a lot of things about me that maybe I'd previously been able to cover and hide, that I couldn't anymore and it brought out some natural human and physical and emotional and mental struggles in me that really brought me to the end of myself and I don't want to say that I was cocky, because I don't think I was.
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It wasn't that I was cocky, but again I have these gifts that I was given.
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I was given a very good brain.
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Like I said, I can't take the credit.
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I got it free of charge, but I was given these gifts and I was coasting on them.
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God was just saying I'm not impressed, like I gave you these gifts but all you're doing is coasting and you're not really yielding them to me.
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So it took that to get me to revisit.
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Like what does it mean to be a Christian?
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What does it mean to serve God?
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What does it mean to commit my life to this walk with God where I can genuinely say I'm a Christian or a child of God?
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Yeah, child of God.
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Yeah, now tell us a little bit, because I read in the bio that you help people with health and fitness and everything.
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Tell us a little bit about that, with your background and what made you get into that a little bit.
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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For a long time I had an interest just a personal interest in being fit and healthy.
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I go to that South Africa experience where I gained over 120 pounds through the binge eating and food addiction and my struggles with that.
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I'd previously just been fairly fit.
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I had this idea about people that were out of shape and that weren't fit and that were overweight and so on, that they were just lazy and not trying hard enough.
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Boy did I get humbled.
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I got humbled immensely because you know, and people would look at me and go like, well, didn't you notice you were gaining all of this weight.
00:14:22.147 --> 00:14:31.968
And it's kind of hard to explain if someone hasn't been through the kind of trauma where you dissociate from your body and like in my mind I was still picturing myself as the athlete I used to be and so on.
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Like I was, I was denying the reality of the facts that were staring at my face as basically a coping mechanism for my trauma.
00:14:40.760 --> 00:14:46.983
And so, once I had been obese, I hit 330 pounds at my peak and had to find my way back from that.
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It gave me a whole new understanding and insight into what people struggle with.
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I no longer was just sort of educated about this.
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I was now living the struggle and it actually took another coach coming into my life and really modeling for me compassion for me to start to learn self-compassion.
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So I really fell into this pattern of self-loathing, self-hatred because of who I'd become.
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I just was so ashamed that I'd become obese.
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I was so ashamed of I was no longer the athlete I used to be.
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I just thought that everybody must think I was the worst human being on the planet, the most terrible failure.
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How could I be as educated as I am?
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And I couldn't find my way out of this.
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And someone came into my life and modeled for me compassion and it was the thing that I needed.
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And you know, I look at this again and I go man the hand of God in this.
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You know you have this one experience over here, but then you have this next experience where it's like okay, now you need to learn what compassion is and how compassion can help you, because prior to that I wasn't showing even myself compassion.
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So learning that compassion was not about enabling, it's not about ignoring or denying or pretending these harmful behaviors don't exist, but it's the freedom to look at them without judgment so we can get the help that we need Now.
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At the time I was also running a.
00:16:06.634 --> 00:16:13.833
I was part owner and running a nutrition and supplement store because I actually have a background in marketing, psychology and chemistry, which is kind of funny.
00:16:13.833 --> 00:16:16.038
It really goes well with the supplement industry.
00:16:16.038 --> 00:16:19.212
So I know we're sort of jumping around the story a little bit.
00:16:19.212 --> 00:16:24.197
But I ended up running a nutrition and supplement store and I jokingly called myself a bartender without alcohol.
00:16:24.197 --> 00:16:32.347
So people would come into the store and we just have these conversations at the counter and I thought, man, these people are looking for a supplement to solve a problem that a supplement can't solve.
00:16:32.347 --> 00:16:46.357
And one of these other gifts that I have is this ability to read people and I can't exactly quantify it, but I have kind of this ability to read people and sense what's going on.
00:16:46.357 --> 00:16:50.339
And so I realized that I'm actually a pretty good like.
00:16:50.740 --> 00:16:53.442
I'm a pretty good coach and I used to coach athletics as well.
00:16:53.442 --> 00:16:55.303
I used to be a basketball and volleyball coach and so on.
00:16:55.303 --> 00:16:58.308
So I had a coaching experience, so that sort of.
00:16:58.308 --> 00:17:02.217
I started to see the shortcomings of like nutritional supplements.
00:17:02.217 --> 00:17:03.166
I'm still a fan of them.
00:17:03.166 --> 00:17:12.880
I think they certainly beneficial, but I realized people need more than this, and so I kind of casually started coaching people on the side in a very informal fashion.
00:17:12.880 --> 00:17:16.209
I was not charging very much for what I did, I just wanted to try to help people.
00:17:17.173 --> 00:17:21.020
Now, when that business failed, that cost me my life savings and left me with a mountain of debt.
00:17:21.020 --> 00:17:22.546
There's another humbling experience to go through.
00:17:22.546 --> 00:17:23.048
I'm like boy.
00:17:23.048 --> 00:17:32.333
God has sure humbled me a lot in my life, but again it's wonderful and incredible to see the provision of God.
00:17:32.333 --> 00:17:36.270
When we lose absolutely everything and then God shows us he can still provide for us.
00:17:36.270 --> 00:17:37.414
It's absolutely incredible.
00:17:37.414 --> 00:17:40.189
It's a wonderful thing.
00:17:41.264 --> 00:17:43.394
So then I started coaching, just virtually.
00:17:43.394 --> 00:17:46.350
I was like, well, I don't have the money to start another bricks and mortar business.
00:17:46.350 --> 00:17:47.091
I don't have any money.
00:17:47.091 --> 00:17:48.033
I just have a mountain of debt.
00:17:48.033 --> 00:17:48.734
What could I do?
00:17:48.734 --> 00:17:50.558
And so then I started.
00:17:50.558 --> 00:18:01.213
I just went to my clientele and said, hey, I'm now doing this virtually and started coaching people via email and zoom.
00:18:01.213 --> 00:18:08.828
And I didn't really know exactly what I was doing as an online virtual coach, but I've been kind of coaching people informally for a couple of years at this point, and so I just started learning from scratch how to build this online business.
00:18:08.929 --> 00:18:19.635
And the amazing thing about coaching people is they teach me so much, like I think, maybe as a coach, that I teach and guide and help people and absolutely I do.
00:18:19.635 --> 00:18:23.474
I bring a type of expertise into this, but I learned so much from my clients.
00:18:23.474 --> 00:18:27.490
Every client teaches me something and it actually is incredible exchange.
00:18:27.490 --> 00:18:28.994
A coach is not a guru.
00:18:28.994 --> 00:18:31.487
A coach is like a facilitator and a guide.
00:18:31.487 --> 00:18:56.639
I like to say that a coach is like a guide by your side, not a sage on the stage, and so that kind of got me into that, and the more you get into it, the more I realized, okay, this isn't just about information, like, yes, I'm educated in terms of the science of nutrition and metabolism and exercise science and things like that I have this stuff in my background but it's about, like, the lived human experience and we need, more than anything else, we need compassion.
00:18:56.639 --> 00:19:00.747
We need just like gentle guidance.
00:19:00.747 --> 00:19:03.076
You don't need to coach hard ass or things like that.
00:19:03.698 --> 00:19:22.879
And so my coaching style this began to evolve and change, and so now I say like the compassion of human connection is like the glue that makes this work when we enter into this sort of coaching relationship and people become vulnerable, because it's a scary thing to try and change.
00:19:22.879 --> 00:19:24.301
It's a scary thing, it's hard.
00:19:24.301 --> 00:19:28.531
This whole getting healthy business is hard and this is going to sell a lot of programs.
00:19:28.531 --> 00:19:33.872
I guarantee you, when I'm sitting here telling you it's hard, that's a great marketing, but I feel like I have to tell people the truth of this.
00:19:33.872 --> 00:19:36.316
I guarantee you, when I'm sitting here telling you it's hard, right, like that's a great marketing, like, um, but I feel like I have to tell people the truth of this, but not that they don't already know this.
00:19:36.316 --> 00:19:37.317
But we'd like to pretend it's not.
00:19:37.317 --> 00:19:43.598
We'd like to buy the 21 day fix or the 30 day fix or whatever you know, um, the eight week challenge or whatever.
00:19:43.845 --> 00:19:53.397
The reality is, this is a lifelong struggle because we live in a world that's hostile to being healthy, uh, hostile to being physically healthy, hostile to being mentally healthy, hostile to being spiritually healthy.
00:19:53.397 --> 00:20:16.275
And one of the things I've actually been realizing in recent days I say realizing, kind of feeling pulled a little bit more is we can't ignore the spiritual aspect of our struggle with health, because the health, our spiritual health, is in some ways manifested and reflected in our physical health, the way that we take care of ourselves, the way that we honor the temple that God gave us.
00:20:16.275 --> 00:20:20.275
That's not meant to judge or shame anybody, but to say that I'm realizing.
00:20:20.275 --> 00:20:27.916
I've been finding myself saying, hey, aa got something right when they said we need to call upon a higher power to get help with this kind of stuff.
00:20:28.485 --> 00:20:42.015
There is so much that is like arrayed against people when they're trying to get healthy from, like food manufacturers that are just deliberately and intentionally making food immensely addictive using psychological marketing.
00:20:42.015 --> 00:20:43.912
It just like undermines people's psyche.
00:20:43.912 --> 00:20:52.305
You know, in an attention negativity driven economy like that's just made to make you unhappy, a world that's more emotionally stressful than ever before.
00:20:52.305 --> 00:20:57.023
There's a biology that wants to store fat because we're wired to survive famines.
00:20:57.023 --> 00:20:59.673
Like we're literally wired to store fat so we can survive famines.
00:20:59.673 --> 00:21:03.870
Like there is so much that makes this incredibly challenging to do.
00:21:03.870 --> 00:21:09.211
We need all the help and support we can get and somebody can tap into a higher power and ask god to help them through their struggles.
00:21:09.211 --> 00:21:13.874
Absolutely, get all the help you can need, all the help you can get in this process.
00:21:14.865 --> 00:21:20.529
Now you mentioned something back then and then it connected to the spiritual and Bible.
00:21:20.529 --> 00:21:30.074
Basically, you said that living a healthy lifestyle, trying to live a healthy lifestyle, trying to be fit, is a lifelong process.
00:21:30.074 --> 00:21:31.741
Yes, yeah, trying to be fit it's a lifelong process.
00:21:31.741 --> 00:21:41.446
Yes, yeah, well, isn't?
00:21:41.446 --> 00:21:55.477
That the same way where, if we're trying to be more like God every day and we're trying to get rid of the sins and the temptations that we deal with in our lives from the spiritual aspect, that's sanct, lifelong, that's a lifelong bucket.
00:21:56.739 --> 00:21:57.300
Man it is.
00:21:57.300 --> 00:21:57.947
I tell you what.
00:21:57.947 --> 00:21:59.653
You hit the nail on the head, right.
00:21:59.653 --> 00:22:11.277
I just think, like, like every time I I might start to think like, okay, I went through this really hard experience and this really worked something into my life, oh, but then this next really hard experience came along and then worked something else Okay.
00:22:11.277 --> 00:22:14.255
But then this next really hard experience came along and then work something else okay.
00:22:14.255 --> 00:22:16.042
But then this next really hard experience came along and then fatherhood comes in.
00:22:16.062 --> 00:22:19.514
I have, I have two young boys now at the time of recording of a three-year-old and an almost one-year-old.
00:22:19.514 --> 00:22:22.946
And, oh man, again, talk about being humbled.
00:22:22.946 --> 00:22:29.406
These boys, I mean I now, I I gotta tell you I never knew how much I could love a little human.
00:22:29.406 --> 00:22:41.796
But being a father to these boys, like you know, when my little fella topples over and he has a black eye you know cause he fell off of something and bonked his head Like I feel so much pain in my own body when my little child hurts himself.
00:22:41.796 --> 00:22:45.433
I'm now being humbled and learning what it means to be a father.
00:22:45.433 --> 00:22:56.794
And then I think about God, our father, and how he feels towards us, his children and his creation, and I think about the love and how I want my children to do well and I want to protect them and I want to help them and I want to guide them.
00:22:56.794 --> 00:23:02.177
But the funny thing is I recognize that I can't always intervene.
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I have to let my kids struggle sometimes in order to learn something.
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