YES THERE IS AN EASIER, SOFTER WAY TO GET SOBER
Janet Denzel
Now that you have stopped using drugs and alcohol and have started down the wonderful journey of sobriety, you may be ready to take a look at changing your diet as well. Since being sober, you may have found yourself eating fast foods with high carbohydrates and sugar. You are not alone in this scenario. Many people who get sober either crave these foods or do not really know what type of foods they should be eating to help their body to get even healthier.
One of the factors caused by addiction is malnutrition because food and drinking water which are imperative for health becomes second to whatever the addiction is. Regardless of the addiction whether it be substance abuse, gambling, gaming, or even a food addiction, taking care of the body is no longer a priority. Getting rid of the obsession to do whatever they think will make them feel good at that moment in their addiction becomes their main objective.
Getting sober shows an initiative that you are trying better your life. Although eating junk food and fast food seems like the easier, softer way, you will feel better all the way around if you are eating healthy. Your body is a complex organism that is made up of organs, tissues, and cells that need your help to maintain a healthy functionality. After all, your body is your temple and you should treat it as so. What you are putting into your body makes a difference because food affects your brain, your mood, and your physical health.
If you are young, you may think you have time to change. The truth is you have only one life to live and food is a way to heal the damage of your past addiction through basing your consumption on healthy choices. Fruits and vegetables are good for intaking nutrients, vitamins, and fiber. Healthy fats and whole grains are also healthy options to consider helping to lower cholesterol levels and improve your overall health. Lean protein is also a great choice to strengthen the body and mind along with providing the body more energy.
Establishing a routine around your diet is an essential piece to gaining your health back. Cessation from drugs and alcohol is not always easy to do but adding another invigorating measure into the mix, like a healthy diet, can make all the difference in the world in the longevity of your sobriety, and for your life span.
Being there with your presence, whether it is in person, via the phone or FaceTime, or Zoom, is the best thing you can do to help them. Holding space provides a safe container for the person to feel the feels, sit front and center with a craving and not feel judged or criticized.
Grant is 54 and lives in Sacramento, CA. He is married and they have two young adult kids. He enjoys hiking and the area he lives in has a lot of nice places he explores. Grant works in research and public policy work in California and now focuses on addiction and recovery.
After sober living, Grant started a home breathalyzer program to help him stay motivated. A meetup with fellow Caf RE members gave Grant another turning point and realized that he was on the right path.
I was 19, not even legal age to drink yet, sitting in a 12-step meeting in Minnesota in a halfway house that was my new home. Someone was getting recognized for being sober one year: a seemingly impossible feat to me at the time. My path to get here involved burning most of the bridges between myself and all my friends and family with a cherry on top of horribly failing out of school, all thanks to my inability to function without drugs and alcohol. I was lost. There were two meaningful relationships in my life in those days: one with a little pill and one with a bottle.
I began to meet an incredibly diverse group of people who seemed to have what I wanted: peace, happiness, purpose, the whole deal. Following their lead, I just allowed myself to get swept up in the recovery community and began to experience those promises for myself, too. Recovery is one of those things that is self-reinforcing in my experience. When I would be presented with difficult life challenges, I started to realize I had more tools in my toolbox than just drugs or alcohol and started to successfully navigate life. I forget about those tools a lot still to this day. At my core, I am still an alcoholic. I need constant reminders from the program and this community that there is an easier, softer way than my natural instincts sometimes.
Noah Namowicz is a partner and SVP of sales for specialty coffee importer Cafe Imports. Noah is based in St. Paul, Minn., with his wife and two young kids. He is a former Barista Guild Executive Council member and has been working in coffee for over 13 years.
I certainly didn't leap at the opportunity to face who I was, especially when the pains of my drinking days hung over me like a dark cloud. But I soon heard at the meetings about the fellow member who just didn't want to take Step Five and kept coming back to meetings, trembling from the horrors of reliving his past. The easier, softer way is to take these Steps to freedom from our fatal disease, and to put our faith in the Fellowship and our Higher Power.
This is the Central Office/Intergroup website for the Fresno area. This website contains information about A.A. meetings, activities, upcoming events in the A.A. community and links to other A.A. related websites of interest.
Yet the Twelve Steps, even though they are clearly aiming at the mountain top, are so plainly worded, and so well-explained in chapter five of the AA Big Book, that they can be done by anyone. And therein lies their great genius. There is no prior requirement of purity of life or advancement of learning. Just a willingness to admit personal defeat and a sincere desire to change.
The authors of the Big Book knew that their God-centered, psychological heretical, radical plan was liable to jar many of the newcomers they were trying to reach with their message. Therefore, they made two moves to sugarcoat the pill. First, they put the following disclaimer immediately after listing the Twelve Steps in chapter five:
In those early days of AA (1935-1939) there was no talk of suggestions. The basic points of the program, especially the word-of-mouth program, were regarded by all the older members as directives, as indispensable essentials, and were passed on to the newcomers as such.
Nevertheless, Bill was a man whose watchword was prudence and who went out of his way to steer clear of destructive controversy. One cannot help wondering if his feelings on the decision to present the Twelve Steps in the form of suggestions were not a bit more ambiguous than he was willing to discuss in public, once the compromise had been reached and certified. Certainly the paragraphs of chapter five of the Big Book which introduce the Twelve Steps are full of language that would be utterly appropriate as a preamble to a set of action directions, but is not as nearly as fitting as an introduction to a group of suggestions. Following is the beginning of chapter five, with the no-compromise key words and phrases in (our) italics:
Highly favorable press coverage of the AA story was also a major factor in the spectacular growth pattern. A series of enthusiastic articles on AA appeared in the fall of 1939 in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. These pieces produced a flood of new AA members in the Cleveland area. This sudden expansion was the first tangible evidence that AA had the potential to grow into a Movement of major proportions.
And it seemed to work. It turned out that many newcomers could get sober and stay sober without anything like the full and intensive practice of the whole program that had been considered a life-or-death necessity in the early years. In fact alcoholics in significant numbers began to demonstrate that they could stay off booze on no more than an admission of powerlessness, some work with other alcoholics and regular attendance at AA meetings.
This is not to say that all AAs began to take this very permissive approach to the Twelve Steps. A great many continued to opt for the original, full-program approach. But now for the first time the workability of other, less rigorous approaches was established, and a tendency had emerged which was to become more pronounced as time went on.
Sometime between 1939, when the Plain Dealer articles were published, and 1941, when the Alexander piece ran in the Post, a major shift in philosophy occurred. No one in AA was much aware that it was taking place at the time, and to this day the process that went on remains almost totally unacknowledged throughout the Fellowship. What changed was the importance of the roles assigned respectively to the recovery principles and the recovery Fellowship in AA.
Up until 1939, AA was a small, unknown organization whose success record, though excellent, applied only over a tiny group of cases, and had not yet stood the test of time. Recovering alcoholics in the young Movement relied upon each other and worked closely with one another. But the principles were the primary life transformers. The Movement as such was not large enough or well enough established that it could be depended upon primarily instead of faithful work with the Steps.
Here is how recovery-by-mimesis worked: In joining AA the newcomer joined himself to a big, successful organization, like the Elks or the Kiwanis. One of the customs of this particular club was that you did not drink; so if the newcomer liked the people he had met in AA and wanted to stay associated with them, he gave up drinking. He came to the AA meetings. AA people and AA events became the focus of his social life and his leisure-time- activities, and he stayed sober, largely off the power of the pack.
When you compare the above statement to the statement which introduced the Twelve Steps in chapter five of the Big Book, the difference in tone is astonishing. Chapter five rings with a series of booming affirmations that the goal of the program is a life given to God and the way is an uncompromisingly spiritual one. In the later-added explanatory note there is virtually a full retreat from the earlier vigor and joy in God-commitment. The stated purpose of the explanatory note is to reassure people that the spiritual change accompanying an AA recovery need not be in the form of a sudden upheaval. The point needed making and was well made.
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