I Quit Drinking… and Found a New Problem
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. I'm excited to get going on this one because I'm gonna be sharing a little bit of my own personal story here in this episode. And let me just start with this, that when many of us cut back, take a break, or even stop drinking altogether, we sorta expect everything to feel better. We're gonna have more energy, clearer sleep, sharper focus.
Speaker 1:Our relationships will get better, more confidence, everything. Right? Like, everything sort of we expect to change. And for a lot of people, that actually does happen. However, sometimes, even when you're making real progress in all those things that I just mentioned, sometimes something unexpected slips through the back door.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna give you a little example of my own life. So when I quit drinking for almost a year, I didn't plan that. I've shared this story many times that I just started with a thirty day challenge. I went to 60. I went to 90, and I just was, like, kept going.
Speaker 1:And so through that time, I had a lot of things going. I was feeling great. I was making more money than I ever made. My relationship was way better. I was in touch with my spirituality.
Speaker 1:And on the surface, everything seemed to be dialed in and actually not just the surface in my own mind. However, I wasn't eating perfectly, but I also I wasn't eating junk. I've never grown up eating junk. Through my adult life, I didn't eat junk. I don't drink soda.
Speaker 1:I don't eat a lot of fast food. However, I guess, I'll say I live a little, and I'm not on a restrictive diet in any means by the definition. I'm not counting calories or macros. I just basically took care of myself, but at the same time, I wasn't restrictive when it came to my diet. Here's the interesting part.
Speaker 1:So I went through a tech accelerator in Chicago called Techstars. It's pretty well known in the tech community. And while I was there, there was another company called Nutrisense. So what Nutrisense does is they send out continuous glucose monitors. They're a little thing that you slap on the back of your arm.
Speaker 1:Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you've seen somebody wearing them. And, traditionally, people that are diabetic would wear these. However, a lot more people are starting to wear them to get more insights into their health. And so I was curious, hey, another Techstars company, I'll order this.
Speaker 1:And in my mind, just thought, I'm gonna slap this thing on. But what I found was really surprising. It actually shocked me, kinda depressed me a little bit, and that was I was insulin resistant. Now if you don't know what that is, that's basically your body is not responding to glucose the right way. So even though I wasn't spiking, high glucose because my diet wasn't terrible, it wasn't returning to a baseline that was healthy, and that's basically prediabetes.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing. I wasn't drinking for almost a year, and I'm thinking, I don't have to worry too much about my health right now because I'm doing all these things right. But it really wasn't the case. And so it wasn't when I was drinking that was the issue. Now, actually, after I quit drinking for a while, I'm having these health issues, which was quite a shock.
Speaker 1:And what happens is is that when you have too much glucose, that affects the liver. So my liver enzymes began to climb for the first time in my life. And my liver was just fine when I was drinking alcohol, which was such a surprise. And what happened was is basically when I looked in retrospect, I was a lot more lenient on my diet than I was when I was drinking. And that drift in my diet eating out more often more processed carbs, the occasional soda was putting pressure on my metabolic health in ways that I didn't know about.
Speaker 1:So that moment changed on how I thought about health and alcohol because what I learned is this. Cutting back on alcohol is powerful. It's a great move for your health, but it doesn't automatically make your body thrive once you remove it. Sometimes sugar can quietly fill the space that alcohol leaves behind. And this isn't just my own experience.
Speaker 1:I hear it all the time, and it's also in the science that when you remove alcohol in some form or fashion, whether it's completely gone or you start to cut back, that sugar cravings come in stronger. And so that's what I wanna talk about today because everyone here is sort of on this same journey. However, I'm gonna give you my own insights so that you can either look at your own current habits or so that you can put things in place so you don't end up kinda in this shocking situation that I was in. So I wanna talk about why this happens. So when alcohol goes away, your brain doesn't just shut off that dopamine faucet.
Speaker 1:It looks for something else to fill the gap, and sugar is right there waiting. So it usually starts really small, a dessert here and there. I remember my kids came in with Halloween candy and those little mini Snickers bars and the mini Reese's Pieces. Yeah. Those things were calling my name, and that was just around the same timing.
Speaker 1:You might have more sweetened drinks or sodas, extra bread and processed carbs, or maybe just that you're rewarding yourself because you're making progress around the alcohol, and you might not give so much weight to what you're putting into your body in other ways. And it really doesn't feel like a problem. I know that's what was going on with me, and in fact, it often feels more like balance. Hey. At least I'm not drinking.
Speaker 1:Right? But here's the thing. Those little hits, they can lead to frequent blood sugar spikes. And so when your blood sugar is bouncing up and down all day long, your energy dips, your moods swing, you get poor sleep. You have something called the dawn effect where your blood sugar will rise in the morning and wake you up probably earlier than you want.
Speaker 1:And here's a really important one is that cravings can follow with blood sugar that is not stable. And so this is actually gonna lend itself to making habit change more difficult when we're not regulating our metabolic health with healthy foods. So here's what happens. Alcohol itself disrupts blood sugar, so it can cause insulin resistance. It can raise cortisol.
Speaker 1:And as we all know, it messes with sleep, and it can train your brain to rely on quick dopamine hits. So when the alcohol goes away, sugar steps right in. Our bodies crave it. It's a different substance, of course, but it's the same system. And the brain doesn't care if it's a glass of wine or maybe it's a cookie or a candy.
Speaker 1:It just knows this makes me feel better fast. And the sugar can hit more often than alcohol. And a little something in the morning, a lot of sweet breakfast foods out there, maybe a treat after lunch, dessert after dinner. I call this the sugar slip in because it happens so quietly that you might not even notice it, but metabolically, it's actually loud in your body. So when your blood sugar spikes, insulin and cortisol rise.
Speaker 1:So we know that that has to do with stress, and then it crashes. And that crash can look like being tired and foggy by late afternoon. We all know that 3PM dip. Well, a lot of times, it's when we feed our body with things at lunch that then crashes around 3PM because that spike typically in a healthy person will last at least around, like, an hour and a half to two and a half hours. But if it's constantly under attack, it can be actually much longer than that.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times, what we'll do is feed that 3PM crash with more sugar. It can also cause irritability and stress that you just can't really explain. It can affect your sleep. And as I mentioned, that 3PM, 5PM happy hour time for both food and alcohol can be totally correlated right back to blood sugar management or lack thereof. And to give you a sense on how subtle this can be, there's a recent study that found that drinking less than one can of soda a day was linked to a fifty to sixty percent higher risk of developing fatty liver disease, and that includes diet sodas.
Speaker 1:Here's the one thing that I mentioned a little bit is that metabolic health and blood sugar is directly related to liver health. So when there's too much sugar in the body, then the liver takes on the sugar and stores that fat, and that's what can cause nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. This is all reversible, by the way, with proper diet, with good lifestyle changes, with exercise. So if you're a little worried, don't freak out. I'm not trying to scare anybody.
Speaker 1:This is all reversible. But a lot of us just think, you know, if I drink too much, that might have a bad effect on my liver, and there's actually a lot more to this. But back to that study. The reason is pretty simple around those findings is that sugary drinks spike glucose and insulin. And then artificially sweetened drinks, they can still drive that sweet cravings, and that can affect the gut in ways that keep this alive.
Speaker 1:However, the good news in this study, which big surprise, swapping soda for water lowered your risk significantly. So small habits really do stack up over time. This is something that we see a lot here in the Sunnyside community. Members are proud of their progress with alcohol and, of course, rightfully so, but maybe they're frustrated that their energy and their sleep and their mood don't improve as much as they were expecting. And often, it's not just because they're failing around alcohol or they're not getting that rebound, but it might be because sugar and other processed foods might be quietly taking its place and causing those improvements to be lackluster.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you kinda get the premise of this. So going back to my own story, when I saw this happening in my own body, I wanted to make these drastic changes, but I realized that I needed to have something that was sustainable. And I didn't wanna overhaul my whole life overnight. I just wanted to make small, changes that were leading towards improvement, which that's what we sit here and talk about every single week.
Speaker 1:And the first thing I did was I started changing my window of eating. So instead of eating early in the morning and I'm pretty guilty of eating late too late into the night, I changed that. So I shortened that window, and I started eating more protein in the morning. I moved away from breads, which was probably my biggest weakness. Not so much the sweets.
Speaker 1:However, I did like candies here and there, mostly chocolates, and I had to cut out the diet sodas. And that was before the report, but I just instinctively knew that diet sodas couldn't be good for me. It's full of chemicals. But instead of having alcohol, I was like, well, this is better. But it might not necessarily been much better.
Speaker 1:And so I started paying more attention to my diet, my windows for eating, and I watched my CGM numbers. So that continuous glucose monitor, they started to improve day by day and then week by week. And by the end of it, my liver enzymes had come down. My energy leveled out, and my cravings got easier to manage. So not cravings for alcohol, but cravings for sweets.
Speaker 1:Have you ever been, like, maybe during the holidays, you eat a lot of sweets, and then it's like after every meal, you wanna have a sweet and you crave it. And then maybe you stepped out of that and you're like, I'm swearing off sweets for a while, and then maybe you don't have any sweets for a month, and all of a sudden you lose that taste for it. Right? You lose that craving after a meal. And that really all does relate to this blood sugar, metabolic health that we're talking about here.
Speaker 1:And that's why I like to talk about this with the Sunnyside members because so often, we do all the hard work of changing our relationship with alcohol, and then we unintentionally hand sugar and other unhealthy but addictive foods the keys to the same car. So if I've got you thinking a little bit about your metabolic health and blood sugar, I think that's good. Of course, this is me sharing information and my own story. And if you feel like you should talk to your doctor about it, go do that because it's definitely worth the peace of mind, and every one of us can get a little bit healthier. So if you're interested, here's a few quick tips around stabilizing your metabolic health.
Speaker 1:And number one is start your day with proteins and fats, not sugar. This smooths out your energy and reduces your cravings through the day. Number two is walk or move after a meal. Even just ten to fifteen minutes can help level and flatten glucose spikes out and calm your nervous system. Number three is cut back on sweetened drinks and processed carbs.
Speaker 1:I think we all kinda know that. But even diet sodas, they can influence your insulin, not your glucose, but your insulin response. And this can cause cravings also for many people because it has a sweet taste that you continue to crave sweet things and eventually have the real thing. Number four is eat earlier and slower. So this supports both glucose stability and also better sleep.
Speaker 1:That's my biggest challenge. I'll say that I have such a hard time at cutting off food at their proper time, but two to three hours before bed at a minimum is kind of the rule of thumb here. Number five is hydrate and manage stress. So high cortisol and dehydration both can spike blood sugar. Another one there I wanna tack on to that is proper sleep.
Speaker 1:I didn't know this because this was a contributing factor also outside of diet for me is that if you're only getting, like, five or six hours, not seven or eight hours, that can really have an effect on insulin resistance. So proper rest is essential. And then number six, if you're curious to try, you could use a continuous glucose monitor for a short stretch to see where you're at. Probably the biggest thing with those is try not to obsess on them because they're giving you real time feedback. And I was just constantly looking at it after every meal and between meals.
Speaker 1:Don't do that. It's it's craziness. It's right next to going to doctor Google and looking for answers. But if you wanna know exactly where you're at, that's a pretty simple way to do that. I started this episode with where I was at in the first time I wore one of these monitors about a year after not drinking and probably about five years ago.
Speaker 1:And ever since then, I've just I've never been crazy about my diet. I've just basically followed most of the rules that I outlined here for myself. And I'm happy to say I wore it for the first time a week ago, and none of those issues were reading. And in fact, I was in the top 5% of all the users that wear the the monitor as far as metabolic health. And so, yes, these do these things do work.
Speaker 1:It is important, and it's all changeable. So if you've been drinking less or maybe you took a break and you feel like it should be better, you feel like you shouldn't be so tired or maybe moody or, like, cravings are stronger than they should be, then it might not be about the alcohol anymore. It might be more around metabolic health and blood sugar levels. Because what replaces alcohol matters. Removing or cutting back on how much we drink, of course, that is so powerful both from a mental health standpoint and a health standpoint.
Speaker 1:But creating real sustainability underneath it that's contributing to our overall health and longevity has to go beyond just cutting back with alcohol and what else we put in our body and how we move and exercise and just take care of ourselves. So you deserve to feel good and not just drink less, but to thrive in all ways. So thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope maybe this got some new ideas or got you thinking about your health in other ways. And if you wanna reach out, of course, Mike at Sunnyside dot co.
Speaker 1:And if you got anything out of this episode, go ahead and leave a review. I read every single one of them, and it it just means the world to me. So thank you very much. Have a beautiful week, and cheers to your mindful drinking journey.
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