A client asks: “I’ve been wondering about what the prayer for food and drink can do to mitigate the usual weight gain from “overeating,” which for me simply means having dessert and more fats, mostly from meat and dairy products. The prayer requests that Creator “Heal any exaggerated consequences of nutrition, and restore a healthy equilibrium.” I gained weight again this Christmas season, after easing some of the many Medical Medium restrictions of the prior year and a half. I am still religiously making celery juice and have increased my liver therapeutic fruits, vegetables, and some supplements. But before and after my teenage years, weight gain has always been a lurking threat in the background and I have gone up and down many times. What can the prayer do to help us with this issue? Is the problem a lack of belief on my part that it can really help, or do I have some karmic issues with food and things to learn about gluttony and diet?” What can we tell him?

First of all, the reason for that statement in the prayer is not simply about overindulgence and weight gain that might result as a health liability. There are many things that are ingested in the course of maintaining a diet that can at times be excessive without a person realizing what is taking place. Usually, things ingested to an excess are simply excreted from the body, but that is not always true, there are some that are stored and harbored, and that can lead to problems down the line and, in fact, some things that are critical for health and well‑being, but need to be within a certain range of concentrations within the body can become toxic if they accumulate in too high a level. The issue of weight control is often multifaceted. It is very common to have karmic underpinnings that promote accumulating excess weight. Such things as times of famine that were painful and a kind of torture and, of course, when people die of hunger there is a tremendous karmic wounding that takes place. Many times starving prisoners has been utilized through the ages as a way of adding extra punishment, and living through such treatment compounds the damage from being locked away, making their life hopeless and an endless series of insults and painful experiences. Such things set a person up to overindulge as self-protection, and the best solution is to have deep karmic repair to resolve the trauma episodes from the prior lifetimes. That may take a considerable length of time to work through, depending on the backlog of trauma involved, because it will likely involve multiple layers of influence, including cellular consciousness. This is why maintaining self-control and discipline can be very helpful because a person's appetite and enjoyment of food can outstrip the rate of healing for an undesirable weight gain so that it becomes, in some cases, a lifelong problem that is never surmounted. Self‑control is important in many areas of life and an aspect of being in divine alignment that helps greatly to manage things in a way to promote personal well-being, and this is expected from a soul perspective. Everyone has the wherewithal for this within their soul, but people vary to what extent those soul attributes are fully awakened and operative if there has been trauma experienced to erode self-confidence and self-control in other respects that might carry over into many areas of personal care. So in the case of this client, there are some karmic issues in addition to the need for keeping an eye on food intake in general. Every individual and their personal metabolic setpoints must reckon with the cards they are dealt, so you can be reassured that the prayer segment in question here, "to heal any exaggerated consequences of nutrition," does encompass all such aspects of misalignment and distortion from one's personal karmic history. How well or how poorly he does with prayer work to keep everything in trim, so to speak, will depend on the magnitude of the underpinning problem and the degree of self-control he can exhibit to contribute his own self-discipline, and not simply rely on the divine to see to it on his behalf.