The Real Guide to Health After Alcohol

You've stopped drinking. Congratulations – that was the hard part. Now what?

If you're like most people, you're probably drowning in advice. Everyone's got an opinion about what you should do next. Hit the gym. Try keto. Buy a meditation app. Start journaling. Get a massive water bottle. The list is endless and exhausting.

Here's the problem with most health advice: it treats all problems like they're equally important. They're not. Some problems are massive roadblocks that derail everything else you're trying to do. Others are tiny speed bumps that barely slow you down.

The difference between getting healthy and staying stuck is knowing which is which.

This isn't another article about the latest superfood or trendy workout. It's not going to tell you that if you just drink lemon water every morning, everything will magically fall into place. Instead, it's going to give you something much more valuable: a system for working out what your biggest problem actually is, and a roadmap for tackling it in the right order.

Because here's what nobody tells you about recovery: getting sober was just the beginning. Now you get to build the life you actually want to live. But you can't build a house by starting with the roof – you need a solid foundation first.

The unLEASH system isn't complicated, but it is systematic (because it’s a system!). It's designed to help you identify your number one health problem and solve it before you get distracted by everything else. Because when you solve your biggest problem first, everything else gets easier.

Ready to stop spinning your wheels and start making progress that you can actually see and feel? Let's get started.

The Big Thing About a Sober Lifestyle

The big thing is the big thing. Sounds obvious but it's one of those ideas that gets ignored. Often we run around chasing something because it’s new, because some influencer told us to, or because our friends are doing it. But it’s usually not the big thing.

If there were five words to live by they would be, “solve your number one problem”.

On one level we know this, you’d never ask someone who’s just broken their leg if they have filled their tax return. In some contexts, dealing with the largest issue first is obvious. But it’s always true, if you work on the biggest problem that you have you will go a long way to improving your life.

That’s doubly true for health because you’ll never solve all of your health problems. Progress is worrying about things that you never thought were problems. Success isn’t not having any more problems, it's wondering if you put too much cinnamon on your overnight oats. When you hit that level of health problems then you know you’re getting there.

On top of never solving all your problems, there’s the issue of return on investment. Big problems have big impacts so solving your number one problem gives you way more return on your effort than solving your 16th biggest problem.

It’s not just a recipe for getting the biggest bang for your buck. It’s a way to notice the benefit of your actions. If you deal with a small thing: you only get small results. Small results are much harder to spot.

For example, if you spend 30 minutes carefully weeding one flower bed, it doesn't help. When you look at your garden all you can see is the overgrown lawn. You don’t notice small changes, if you need to make big ones. So start with the big ones. Mowing the grass will provide a change you can actually see. Then you can start to improve the beds and this effort won’t go unnoticed.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with your health. You can’t feel the small changes. Even if they aren’t very much effort they still don’t produce enough of a change to be sustainable. Take the widespread advice to get a big water bottle. It’s not a bad idea to drink more water. But if you have bigger health problems then you won’t notice the benefit – it’ll be lost beneath the problems caused by the poor diet and lack of exercise.

Unleash Good Health

Which begs the question, what’s your biggest problem?

To answer that you need to understand the unLEASH wellbeing system. It’s a systematic way to look through your current health and wellbeing so that you can identify your biggest problem. It’s divided into five sections that spell LEASH but it’s called the unleash system because that sounds aspirational, with a hint of high performer.

In the diagram below it’s shown as a pyramid. The thing about pyramids is that you have to start from the bottom and work your way up. You don’t need to know much about Egyptian architecture to know that they didn’t start building pyramids at the top. Building a solid base is your number one solution.

Lifestyle

This covers other substances and activities that are prone to abuse. Most obvious would be nicotine and other drugs. But this would also include gambling, pornography, gaming and social media. All of which have the potential to cause addictive behaviour that gets in the way of the other parts of the unLEASH system.

Eating

Once you have no more lifestyle problems then you should start to work on your diet. What you eat is about 80% responsible for your weight and how you feel. In most cases it’s actually more responsible for diseases of excess such as: metabolic problems like diabetes, most heart issues and inflammatory diseases like eczema and gout.

Activity

No more diet or lifestyle problems? Great, it’s time to think about being more active. We don’t just use the word activity because it fits the acronym, it’s about being more active, which might or might not include exercise.

Sleep

Next up is one of the most underrated things in our society – sleep. There’s still a myth that the way to be successful is to sleep less. This isn’t true: less sleep = worse health and more burn out. It’s incredibly important to get enough, good quality, sleep.

Hydration

Next up is one of the most underrated things in our society – sleep. There’s still a myth that the way to be successful is to sleep less. This isn’t true: less sleep = worse health and more burn out. It’s incredibly important to get enough, good quality, sleep.

Lifestyle After Alcohol

If you are currently smoking or vaping, then it’s your number one problem.

This might run contrary to what some people in recovery say but putting nicotine into your body has a huge impact on your wellbeing, as well as your health. Which you already knew.

What will probably surprise you is that smoking and vaping affect your chances of staying sober. According to National Institute of Health research, stopping smoking increased the chances of recovery by 30%.

It bears repeating: stopping smoking can improve your chances of staying sober by 30% – that’s a worthwhile investment.

There are many factors which affect your recovery: severity of dependence, physical and mental health, financial stability, motivation, social support, access to healthcare and ongoing support. Not all of these are within your control.

So grab this big one that is.

The good news is that there’s a lot of crossover between stopping drinking and stopping smoking. Many of the limiting beliefs you had about alcohol apply to smoking too. For example, we believe that smoking (and drinking) help us deal with stress. Neither is true and having dealt with one dealing with the other is easier.

I recommend checking out the Easyway to Stop Smoking (there’s one about vaping too). To be totally transparent I do some work for the Easyway clinics but I don’t have an affiliate relationship with them. If you read (or listen) to the books I don’t profit. If you do an in-person or online session I almost certainly won’t profit. Clearly if I am running the session you attend, say hi!

I don’t profit from you clicking this link. But you will profit from stopping smoking or vaping.

If you are taking any other street drugs – stop. It’s that simple. Taking drugs contributes to alcohol relapse. As well as having huge associated health and wellbeing consequences.

There is one exception to that very black and white statement. While I wouldn’t advocate consuming marijuana I’ve met people who have made California sober work.

Cali sober is when you stop taking all other drugs (including nicotine and alcohol) but you continue to consume marijuana. If you’ve never had a problem with cannabis and you’re taking it infrequently then it might well be worth the impact. Of course, that’s a personal decision and if you are in any doubt: don’t.

Eating for Addiction Support

After drink and drugs, your diet is the most important thing. At least 80% of your health comes from what you eat. It’s worth getting it right because you will start to feel the benefit quickly.

The analogy that everyone uses is fuel for your car. You won’t expect your car to go very far if you put water in your tank – it needs petrol to fuel it. Why do we think that we can fuel our body on junk? It needs the right fuel.

The irony of this comparison is that petrol stations don’t sell food. They sell junk made of salt, fat, sugar and artificial flavouring, that bears a passing resemblance to food. They sell us the right fuel for our cars but not our bodies.

And it’s worse than simply miles per gallon, what you put into your body determines how you feel. Seriously, for most people the main source of discomfort and tiredness they feel is because they’re not giving their body the nutrition it needs.

This article isn’t going to advocate for a particular diet. Because you don’t need to be told what to do, you know you should cook more, eat less processed food and more fruit, vegetables, whole grains and legumes.

The problem is that it’s becoming harder and harder to recognise actual food. Let’s briefly consider the processing of food to understand where we should draw the line.

Consider the humble apple. If you pick up an apple and do nothing more than bite into it then you will be rewarded with a tasty treat. You’ll also get less than 100 calories, some fibre and a complex blend of vitamins and complex sounding secondary chemicals that go to support your health.

If instead, you grab a glass of apple juice you’ll get nearly twice the calories, none of the fibre and almost none of the vitamins or nutrition. That level of processing has taken out everything that was good for you and left you with the calories.

But it gets worse. What “food” companies do is they boil that apple juice down so all you're left with is the sugar. This product is almost identical to table sugar but it goes into products that contain the words “made with real fruit”. What they should really do is say "contains all of the calories of fruit with none of the benefits”.

That’s the problem with processing. It removes the bits you need while concentrating the bits you don’t. Apples are good for you but if you strip out the sugar it just becomes sugar – lot’s of calories, no nutrition.

The solution is to eat stuff that comes out of your kitchen rather than stuff that comes out of a factory. Buy food as close to the way it grew as you can and then cook it

I get that this isn’t as easy as shoving a pizza into the oven. It takes effort to eat only food you’ve cooked from scratch (I know because I do). But as you’ll soon see the effort itself has a benefit. You have the skills and the energy to cook more – what you probably have isn’t a diet problem, it’s a planning problem.

If you spend a bit of time working out what you are going to eat, when you are going to shop and when you are going to cook, you’ll probably find you spend no more time doing it than you would if you got to five o’clock each day and panicked about what to eat.

Even when you are well organised it’s not always easy. Some people might make biscuits from scratch, but no one makes their own crisps. It's not about removing all processed food from your diet, it’s about making processed food the exception rather than the rule.

Don’t try to be perfect, just try to be better.

Activity in Addiction Recovery

Once you no longer take drugs and you’re happy with your diet, then start to think about exercise. Actually it’s time to think about activity. The benefit comes from activity, while that can be exercise it can just as easily be vigorously dusting your bookshelves. Being more active doesn’t have to involve sweat and pain.

While Vilpa might sound like the name of your posh friend’s cleaner, it actually stands for vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. It’s all about climbing stairs and hoovering the floor – all the effort that your posh friend would expend if they didn’t have a cleaner. Vilpa is not actually exercise but it gives you the same benefits.

One of the great ironies of our time is that we save ourselves the time on cleaning, cooking, shopping and then we then spend that time in the gym to make up for the fact that we’ve removed all physical activity from our lives. We go to the gym and spend our time lifting imaginary shopping bags, stretching like we’re cleaning imaginary cobwebs, even climbing imaginary stairs.

Here’s a revolutionary thought for you…

…embrace domestic labour.

Go to the shop rather than ordering online, fire the cleaner, walk instead of drive, do some cooking (it’s movement with nutritional side effects!), park further from the door, get off the bus a few stops early. Cancel your gym membership and return to living like a human being – be active.

The benefits of this are big. Scientists found that people going from sedentary lives to doing just a little vilpa cut their risk of cardiovascular disease by 50% and their risk of cancer by 40%.

Once you’re done with the vilpa, do some things you enjoy. Much of the fun stuff counts as activity and has huge additional benefits: dance, skate, walk, play sport – it doesn’t have to be sweat and pain in the gym.

And don’t worry about the government's activity recommendations, just try to increase what you do. If you are only doing about ten minutes of activity a day then doubling it is easy.

Sleep for Relapse Prevention

Once you’ve ditched the drugs, sorted your diet and got active you’ll be about ready to go to bed. And you are going to love sleep.

Sleep can improve your attention and memory retention, protect your heart and help you maintain a healthy weight, boost your immune system, support your mental health, maintain your relationships and reduce your stress. Sleep is awesome.

So why isn’t sleep at the bottom of the pyramid? There are people who would say it should be, they’d say it is so fundamental to your health and wellbeing that it should be your number one priority.

To be fair, they tend to be sleep experts and people who sell blackout blinds. Which means they often miss one important point. Everything that you’ve already read has an effect on your sleep.

Smoking and vaping will affect your sleep – nicotine is a powerful stimulant, if it’s the last thing you do before bed you won’t sleep well. Diet affects your sleep through things like sleep apnea, discomfort, hormone imbalances and increased use of caffeine. Activity can have a huge impact too – tired people sleep better!

The point is that unless you sort these problems first, what you do to improve your sleep won’t have much of an effect. We’re back to solving your number one problem because it gives you a bigger bang for the same amount of Baht.

Once everything else is sorted, try thinking about these two ideas.

You plan a time to wake up, why not have a time to go to sleep. No one would suggest you need to set yourself an alarm like you do in the morning but what about aiming for a specific time and having a routine that builds to your sleep time? Maybe you want to be asleep by 11:00. In that case, your nighttime routine would probably look like this: no screens after 9:30, get ready for bed 10:00, stretch at 10:15, get into bed and read at 10:30.

The above elements might not appeal to you but you can create your own nighttime routine, what helps you to sleep? How can you get those things into the last sixty to ninety minutes of your day?

Secondly, how can you improve your sleep environment?

There’s the nuts and bolts of your bedroom. Is it dark enough? Should you invest in black out curtains? Is the temperature right? Is the bed as comfortable as it could be? Do you need new pillows or even a new mattress?

It’s also worth considering how your phone affects your sleep. Is late night phone use preventing you from getting to sleep? Is it disturbing you during the night? Is having it in your bedroom creating some background stress that is hindering rest?

All of these issues are easy to sort. Most of them just require a little bit of thinking, and possibly some research. But this can be an extraordinary investment in your health and wellbeing. Remember, sleep is awesome!

Hydration the Alcohol-Free Way

Lifestyle, tick. Eating, tick. Activity, tick. Sleep, tick. It’s time to tackle hydration.

Drink more water.

Simple.

OK, maybe not totally simple – how much water is enough water? And is it only water that counts?

How much is not an easy question to answer because it varies based on your body, how hot it is and what you are doing. As a rough guide men need to consume 3.6 litres a day and women need around 2.6 litres. Which sounds like a lot but don’t forget there’s water in food (not just watermelon either).

This all washes out to the advice that you should drink six to eight glasses a day or aim for about two litres. You should try to drink as much of that as water as you can but other drinks still count. Even tea and coffee – but if you drink too much of it you’ll mess up your sleep.

Which means staying hydrated is easy. That’s why so many people start with it. But if you do it once you’ve solved the rest of the unLEASH puzzle then you will notice the benefit of getting hydration right.

But if you want my advice, which presumably you do as you’ve read this far, don’t buy a really big bottle. Buy three smaller bottles, around 0.5 to 0.75 litre. If you have three you can have one in the fridge, one you’re drinking from and one being cleaned. It’s the perfect system, I just need to figure out how to patent it and make my millions.

Health as Sober Inspiration

Here's the thing about getting healthy after ditching alcohol: you can't do everything at once, and you don't need to.

The unLEASH system isn't just a cool acronym (though it is that too). It's your roadmap for tackling health problems in the right order so you actually notice the benefits. Start at the bottom of the pyramid and work your way up. Don't skip steps because you think it sounds a bit hard – that's how you end up spending a fortune on a fancy water bottle while still smoking a pack a day.

Lifestyle First

If you're putting nicotine, street drugs, or any other addictive substances into your body, stop. Full stop. Remember, quitting smoking improves your chances of staying sober by 30%. That's not small potatoes.

Eating Second

You already know what good food looks like – it comes out of your kitchen, not a factory. Cook more, process less. Don't aim for perfection, just aim to be better than you were yesterday.

Eating Second

You already know what good food looks like – it comes out of your kitchen, not a factory. Cook more, process less. Don't aim for perfection, just aim to be better than you were yesterday.

Activity Third

Embrace being human again. Walk to the shops, clean your own house, take the stairs. You don't need a gym membership to move your body – you just need to stop automating and outsourcing everything.

Sleep Fourth

Once you've sorted the first three, you'll actually be ready to sleep properly. Create a routine, fix your bedroom, put your phone in another room. Sleep is awesome, but only once you've given it a fighting chance.

Hydration last

By all means, drink more water. But only after you've tackled the big stuff. And when you do, buy three smaller bottles instead of one massive one. Trust me on this.

The beauty of this system is that each step makes the next one easier. Good food gives you energy to be active. Being active helps you sleep better. Better sleep makes it easier to make good food choices. It's a virtuous cycle that starts with solving your number one problem.

Stop chasing the latest health trend and start with the basics. Work through unLEASH in order. Your future self will thank you for building that solid foundation instead of trying to construct a pyramid from the top down.

Remember, the big thing is the big thing. And your biggest thing right now is the thing that's actually holding you back – not the thing that sounds most interesting or easiest to fix.