Mental Health conversation centered around 12 step recovery and related topics. We talk about spiritual living, living with addiction and growing in the 12 steps. Find us on our home at https://recoverysortof.com/. If you want to join the conversation, email us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RecoverySortOf, Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recovery_sort_of/, or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Recovery-Sort-Of-112376247161866/?view_public_for=112376247161866.
How do we eat for recovery? How do we make healthy choices around what we put into our bodies? We have all seen people leave the drugs behind but continue to consume chemicals in the form of food. We might be those people. What is your plan for eating in a way that promotes health to your body, mind and spirit?Recovery needs to involve our mental, physical, spiritual and emotional selves. Do we replace the drug with food? Are we eating to fill the void? Did you put down the spoon only to pick up the fork? Did you know that eating processed food is linked to increased mental health problems and decreased quality of life? Do you track your food intake at all? We aren’t so much talking about counting calories, as making calories count. Do you read any of the labels on the food you eat? Do you know what’s in what you take in? We discuss the idea that if we don’t have a plan to end up in a particular destination, nutrition wise, we can end up any old place. And most of us don’t want to be in any old place. Having a history of drug use puts us at greater risk for having an unhealthy relationship with food. Join us as we talk about general ideas of having a nutrition idea, monitoring what we take in, and try to eat for life. Join the conversation by leaving a message, emailing us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, or find us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, or find us on our website at www.recoverysortof.com.
—
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/recoverysortof/message
How do we eat for recovery? How do we make healthy choices around what we put into our bodies? We have all seen people leave the drugs behind but continue to consume chemicals in the form of food. We might be those people. What is your plan for eating in a way that promotes health to your body, mind and spirit? Recovery needs to involve our mental, physical, spiritual and emotional selves. Do we replace the drug with food? Are we eating to fill the void? Did you put down the spoon only to pick up the fork? Did you know that eating processed food is linked to increased mental health problems and decreased quality of life? Do you track your food intake at all? We aren’t so much talking about counting calories, as making calories count. Do you read any of the labels on the food you eat? Do you know what’s in what you take in? We discuss the idea that if we don’t have a plan to end up in a particular destination, nutrition wise, we can end up any old place. And most of us don’t want to be in any old place. Having a history of drug use puts us at greater risk for having an unhealthy relationship with food. Join us as we talk about general ideas of having a nutrition idea, monitoring what we take in, and try to eat for life. Join the conversation by leaving a message, emailing us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, or find us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, or find us on our website at www.recoverysortof.com.
Here is the episode with Recovery Cafรฉ
Transcript:
recovery sort of is a podcast where we discuss recovery topics from the perspective of people living in long-term recovery this podcast does not intend to represent the views of any particular group organization or fellowship the attitudes expressed are solely the opinion of its contributors be advised there may be strong language or topics of an adult nature
welcome back it’s jason i’m the guy in recovery i’m with billy i messed that up i’m not with billy i am billy i’m a person in long-term recovery as well billy’s had a rough week uh so we’ll excuse him for that and and so i’m dropping the long term i’m just that i feel elitist now now the more we talk about this stuff and inclusion and i yeah i’m just in recovery yeah eventually i’m just gonna say i’m jason i’m a human it’ll be the easiest way maybe then i’ll feel like i’m leaving out fish and i’ll be like i’m jason i’m have a heart that beats or i don’t know yeah but isn’t it important that you identify for
uh to reduce stigma and all that remember that was a thing for you a while back that’s past now i mean yeah i don’t know but you gotta have a recovery addict in there somewhere do i unless you’re done with that i’m not that anymore right now i’ve moved on yeah i’m doing something else now i’m just a person we’re gonna name our podcast human sort of anyway i’m uh i’m excited i’m excited to be here chatting with you uh i was excited to talk sunday and then it didn’t happen billy had some unfortunate events happen that that led us not to be able to talk sunday and totally diet related yeah imagine that maybe um and so now it’s wednesday and i woke up this morning and one of my friends from my teenage years who i spent a good portion of my teenage years with passed away in the middle of the night and you know i don’t i don’t think it has anything to do with drugs per se but it was just one of those and look i i haven’t talked to this person in quite a long time doesn’t hurt hurt you know it’s sad of course but i think more it’s just made me think like here i am sunday like oh man it’s sad that we can’t record i hope he feels better but like i i have this stealth expectation that you’re just always gonna be alive and show up and we’re gonna record and woohoo right like i don’t ever consider the fact that maybe you’re gonna die one day and we won’t record and and so i just i take a lot for granted is what i’m getting at and so i’m even more excited to record tonight because you are feeling a little healthier and you’re not dead yeah that’s and my wife brings that up to me all the time like in that’s a weird balance to try to strike like i can’t live my life like i’m gonna die tomorrow every day you know like i have to make some sort of plans for future and i mean i don’t have to but right i it’s it’s rational to think of like saving some money for a rainy day or or you know building up for a trip like every day can’t be you know treated like my last day on earth but it does it can help me to appreciate the people that i have around because i i’ve learned just being in recovery like how the people that i’ve been close to have changed you know over the years and how friends that in the moments we were best of friends i thought this is just the way it’s always going to be and then it’s not that way now and how weird that is sometimes right so do not hold us up any further we’re going to talk about nutrition today nutrition nutrition and recovery yeah why right why are we talking about nutrition in recovery so i think if you don’t know why uh one of the things that i learned quickly at least in a 12-step fellowship they talked about this being a mental physical spiritual and emotional disease right and in order to combat that we also needed to have mechanisms of combating it that are mental physical spiritual and emotional we couldn’t just like go into this and say i’ll work the 12 steps and i’ll be totally healthy like hey maybe we need to see a doctor and get checked out because we don’t know we haven’t seen a doctor in years and maybe it’s good to go to a dentist and maybe we should start some kind of exercise plan even if that’s just like moving and walking and i don’t want to say just walking but like you know anything really because when we’re out there using we’re usually in a pattern of doing the bare minimum energy-wise and movement-wise to get what we need and that’s the sole purpose of life really and so we’re not looking at our physical emotional mental physic spiritual selves and health-wise and so it can’t just come in to recovery and only focus on oh i’m not using drugs it’s all better now and i think even though i heard that to some extent i didn’t listen or i missed it right we we make some jokes one of the jokes in recovery you know you you put down the spoon and picked up the fork uh it’s been heard many times for anyone who doesn’t understand a lot of people cook their drugs on spoons and so you put down spoon and then you come into recovery and you start eating many many many reasons for this one addictive behavior doesn’t just go away because we stop using drugs food becomes a very quick fill-in for dru where drugs used to be part of our life all day long food can be part of our life all day long another aspect of it is we don’t eat when we’re using a lot of times and so when we get clean it’s like oh maybe i should start eating again that’s probably a good thing and we don’t know what level of intake per day equals our ideal self right so we just kind of eat a lot because we’re like oh i haven’t eaten in forever i need to stock up other aspects to this is that people eat a lot to cover depression it’s a coping skill right so depression feels like an emptiness and a void kind of like addiction feels like a void and so eating actually gives us like a physical image of what we’re trying to do with the depression we’re trying to fill that emptiness similarly but a little different anger does us the same thing so anger is another emotion that the world tells us we’re not allowed to feel and so we use food to visually stuff anger down by eating on top of it and so just things that we don’t think about when we get here right and and so i think when we get clean it’s like man what tastes good what’s easy my life was all ease and comfort can i eat uh fast food every night because that’s way easier than making [ _ ] right and and i think that was it for me i mean when i was using i ate the bare minimum of food and what i did eat was all garbage and then when i got clean i didn’t necessarily understand that my eating habits were terrible and bad i just you know i kept eating the stuff that i liked pizza and fast food and chicken nuggets ice cream yeah cheese steaks yeah so i wasn’t really making good food choices because i didn’t really know any better you know the last thing i cared about was my physical health when i was out there using yeah yeah i wasn’t like coming out of a nod looking up tips for you know how to eat healthy for dinner that right was not my concern i remember actually i i would eat at some point i had a bowl of ice cream and i noticed that cake underneath of ice cream was really good and so what i realized was it wasn’t really the cake it was the icing and so i would get out a tub of icing and a gallon of ice cream and i had my ice cream scoop and it would be like three scoops of the tub of icing and then three scoops of the ice cream and then like hershey’s syrup on top and i i mean i was in heaven well the sugar rush must have been well and so i i don’t think there was a sugar rush because i was very much on heroin oh okay but i think my body was so lacking in nutrients that like all that sugar was it was probably like oh thank god just give us something something carbs right so i actually tried to eat that clean one time oh it was sick yeah it was scary but it was incredible when i was using and so yeah we don’t have healthy ideas when we get here uh and one of the things i think we miss sometimes i definitely miss this is that the old idea if you fail to plan you plan to fail right and and i think this happens to a lot of us it’s not that we come in recovery with the idea of yeah i’m gonna you know work steps or work my recovery program whatever that may be and [ _ ] exercise and diet i don’t care about them they’re stupid nobody really says that it’s just we don’t ever come up with a conscious plan of what we’re gonna do for exercise and diet and i think that’s ultimately what this episode for me is about right it’s about we need to find some sort of nutrition guidance it’s not about the right and wrong nutrition it’s not about what you need to be eating or how you need to eat when you get clean or or what’s good for you or what’s bad for you like i’m not here to decide that right i just think without having some destination you don’t know where you’re going to end up you know what i mean yeah and it’s the old saying like left you know to my own best choices like i make terrible choices i make terrible decisions for myself and i if i don’t like you said set out a plan or or what i do is typically you know learn about some new diet that’s going on and then kind of set that as like a guide post or a guide marker um because if not you know [ _ ] rita’s every day sounds great i don’t like readers well coldstone yeah there you go go cold stone every day sounds just as great and i can just of you know i’ll justify oh i worked hard i did this i whatever and i’m shooting heroin i consistently you know will make poor decisions for myself until and not like i’ve never really i wouldn’t say eaten in an addictive way i’ve never struggled with food in that way i know people that have for me it’s almost been the opposite like i’ve always been thin i’ve been able to eat whatever i want and and not really put on any weight um which people are always like oh that’s great but the the downside to that is i ate like complete [ _ ] for the first probably 10 or 15 years of my recovery and i mean i’m like oh i don’t like vegetables so i didn’t eat them like i mean i mean once a day maybe like maybe once a week yeah fruit was okay if it was on top of ice cream or something you know that’s just their lettuce on a you know cheese steak but that was it i like the fruity syrupy cheesecakes yeah and it’s cereal and processed foods and and all that stuff and i’m like well i’m fine because i’m you know 160 pounds and i’m not overweight and everything is fine you know like i’m good not understanding that i was just consistently putting garbage into my system you know i’m picturing like only ice cream every day for three weeks and then look in the mirror and be like i’m the epitome of health and that was about i mean i literally ate ice cream every night you know if not six nights a week you know that was my thing did you have a holy day a sabbath you took off from ice cream that was we went out to dinner i had whatever dessert they had a restaurant i had cake on the seventh day yeah so this is very little about like how healthy you need to be it’s very little about measuring out every gram of broccoli you’re gonna eat right this has nothing to do with that to me this episode is about find some sort of direction find some sort of gold destination no matter how slightly vague it may be just to have an idea of which way you want to go because without that you’re going to end up somewhere that you didn’t plan to be most likely i mean maybe you’d end up somewhere and you’re like oh my god this is great i totally meant to get here but i think for most of us without direction we just kind of wander and don’t know what the hell we’re doing right or or end up in places we don’t know how we got there you know it’s like the the ice cream every day was never like the goal it wasn’t like hey i’m gonna eat ice cream every night you know it was like oh i enjoy ice cream of all ice cream before bed is good and then that just becomes the routine like then that’s just and it wasn’t ever a plan it wasn’t a goal i didn’t set out to be there but that was just my thing you know and so i think i’m a little ashamed i don’t eat ice cream every night but for quite a stretch there i have done some snack that’s not good for me every night well i would switch to cereal too you know which is probably just as bad as ice cream when you look at it because it wasn’t good cereals like fruity pebbles or captain crunch or like i mean it was tasted good but it definitely wasn’t healthy i can remember times in recovery just feeling like i needed a sweet shot at the end of every meal to like almost be the signal that the meal was over so i would have something sweet at the end it wasn’t like oh you had dinner and now you’ll have dessert it was like lunch and dessert breakfast and dessert dinner dessert snack dessert i was like what the hell am i doing but yeah i so i don’t i don’t know if it’s just being blessed with uh the the genes the dna i have or whatnot i have not eaten extremely healthy for a good portion of my life i did a lot of working out i don’t think that totally mitigates the stuff i ate at all especially for the purpose of health it might have like helped me for looking alright but it didn’t like really help the way i felt uh and what i mean by that is a lot of these as a lot of websites and information out there describes a lot of eating uh can tie into mental health right like if we’re not eating in certain ways we start to feel certain ways and and i don’t think many of us are in touch with that idea i remember sitting down for a meal with a guy who talked about how he doesn’t eat much red meat anymore and i was like oh really why not and he said oh well cause if i have red meat i can kind of feel i’ll feel sluggish the next day and i’m like this was a while back and i was like are you you’re [ _ ] making that [ _ ] up like you don’t know how you feel to that minute degree right where you can tell the difference but he thought he could right i don’t know i still struggle with that kind of thing but i can tell if i eat too much my stomach hurts and i don’t feel like moving i feel weighed down i can tell if i eat lighter meals i feel more active and energetic and i think the more i meditate and the more i get in touch with like how my body feels i have more of an idea of what foods do to me if i pay attention and i think that’s part of the problem is that generally when we eat we don’t pay attention we’re not paying any attention to anything we’re not looking at nutrition labels we’re not even questioning like what chemicals or not chemicals are in the food we’re not we don’t have any idea where we’re going so we’re not counting any kind of calories we’re not looking at how often or frequently we ate today or the volume at each of those settings we’re just doing like just and that just seems so irresponsible to me when i just described it like that right i’m like oh my god we’re irresponsible we’re teenagers yeah when i go out for the day and i don’t really plan what i’m gonna do or you know where i’m gonna eat or what i’m gonna have or anything and i’m out at the store and it gets to be a time that i’m hungry and so what’s around fast food wawa rofo you know i mean there are salad places around but i don’t really know where they are are there salads i’ve never even heard of them i think there are salad places around there and there are probably healthy choices in some of those places i just described but i couldn’t tell you what they are right i can tell you what my favorite things are that’s funny and so we have actually both been on a specific not the same but specific-ish diets recently um and so i thought we’d talk a little bit about that and not that anybody for sure needs to follow my crazy invented diet but just you know it gives people an idea of what we’re doing in our lives and maybe they can come up with their own great idea or follow something that they look up or that sounds interesting to them i think part of society’s problem with the word diet is that we take it to mean a restriction right and the word diet by itself is just the total of what you eat regularly like it doesn’t it’s not anything like your diet is whatever you eat regularly um and i think i would say before you even consider a diet the most important thing to do and i’ve heard that the best thing you can ever do to change behavior is track and write down and become aware of what you currently do because when you see that you’re more likely to be like oh [ _ ] is that what i’m really doing right like i need to do something about that and so you know hey maybe that’s the first step maybe the first step in in our nutrition program that we’re creating as we talk just track what you eat for a week the nutrition sort of program yeah nutrition sort of i like it uh so you want to start with your diet yeah and i just like to say that the only reason i really got into any kind of diets over the last several years uh had to do with you know like i’d say a lot i like listening to podcasts that are educational and informative and i came across a few that were on different like how different things affect like my mental health or my you know mental well-being one of the first big ones i remember listening to that had a big impact although i didn’t change a lot of behaviors at the time with sugar and how sugar you know is is bad for us and affects all sorts of uh things in our brain and you know has all these negative effects you know physically and mentally on us and yet it’s in everything that we [ _ ] eat and everything’s loaded with you know high fructose corn syrup which is sugar you know in these different forms of sugar and that you know how i was like wow like and i i know it was tons of sugar that i was consuming every day and because i wasn’t really like overweight and i didn’t feel unhealthy i was still physically pretty active you know i thought that none of that applies to me but over the years of just listening to that information and uh losing some of that ego as a result of recovery and realizing like no dummy you know you’re just as there’s nothing special or unique or amazing about you like all the [ _ ] that you eat the the negative health impacts on me are the same as they are on a 300 pound person just they have some other impacts from being overweight but as far as cholesterol and the strain on your heart and your mental health like all those things are impacted by this terrible food i’m just picturing you walking around like oh man my body is so amazing it actually converts sugar into vitamin c yeah every time i eat it full of vitamin c yeah and and like you know i don’t know i would say all the time people you know would say oh you should be so grateful that you’re you know don’t gain weight i’m like i don’t know if that’s such a good thing i don’t know if that’s a liar yeah but after you know hearing information over and over and over again and sort of exploring some of that i sort of started to ask those questions like could i feel better if i started eating better like could i start you know mentally and physically feeling better changing the way that i feel by what i eat and the answer to that was yes that i could feel better by changing the way i eat so then i started looking at all these different weird you know diets this was probably i would say it started probably five or six years ago where i really started to take it pretty serious um with nutrition and you know what i was putting into myself and like you said just keeping track logan like one of the big things for me in the beginning was looking at labels and looking at like how many carbohydrates does something have in it and then when you take like 46 grams of carbs and convert that into like tablespoons of sugar it’s like 18 tablespoons of sugar and just looking at that thing and going holy [ _ ] like i know what a tablespoon of sugar looks like and just a pile of 18 of those and then just scooping it into my mouth like that imagery you know came from looking at these labels it sounds delicious and just thinking [ _ ] that cannot be good for me like there’s no way that can be good for me and i know that poor nutrition affects your cognitive response to stuff like you are stupider if you don’t eat well like if you’re yeah if you’re i know if you’re malnourished if you are undernourished then you your brain is not working like it should you know it it’s not working at its optimal so i might as well have told you if you ate bad your penis was gonna shrink oh i’m eating healthy from now on david i can’t be done and uh just those things well i don’t know i mean for me [ _ ] life is hard enough as it is i don’t need to be dumb thinking about every decision i make i already make bad enough decisions on a daily basis you know add another two or three because i have mcdonald’s for lunch and i’m [ _ ] but uh yeah so then i started looking at different you know and there’s lots of them out there i’ll throw a couple words out that the ones that appealed to me the most in the beginning and a couple that i’ve tried um one of them was like what they call the paleo diet sometimes it’s been called like the caveman diet and it seemed real simple and it is a the the simplest way to explain it is think about what people would have done whatever ten thousand years ago as hunter gatherers you know during the paleolithic time what they would have went out and found in nature to eat it would have been you know fish some lean meats fruits nuts you know vegetables and that’s basically it no processed foods and this would be before like uh before farming and agriculture so you don’t really eat any dairy uh you stay away from carbs especially processed carbs breads that kind of stuff wheat products you might need some whole grain stuff in nuts but basically [ _ ] you would find if you went out and roamed around during you know the paleolithic time what would you find and you could eat that and so that all seemed pretty simple pretty basic you know yeah it’s all [ _ ] i could go out to a store and find almost anywhere that was easy to eat um i like sweet stuff so you know i didn’t really i and i never really committed to that i just i tried it for a little while messed around with that then there’s a mediterranean diet which is somewhat similar to that but it uh you can add in fish like this would be more modern but what we people would eat around the mediterranean sea uh so you’d eat some fish and seafood again lots of vegetables healthy stuff fruits nuts less red meats you know more lean meats things like that or the keto diet which is really high not high meat but high fat and sort of really low carbs which is no processed foods and so for me that concept of not eating processed foods like processed breads processed grains anything in a box that’s a bit of you know sort of theme with all of those like you don’t need anything that’s in a box you know nothing in a box um that sort of theme has ran through my attempts at different diets at different times it’s like trying to eat natural stuff and the whole idea behind that which resonated with me was if you think of what your body was designed to eat what we were raised to eat it’s all those natural things you know we aren’t made to process these uh processed carbohydrates these gras i mean uh these corn fed cows you know and and all this processed meat and basically processed meat that we have now you know we aren’t made to digest those things and so that’s why we see these huge increases in like heart disease and malnutrition and vitamin d deficiencies and obesity and diabetes like if you look at you know the american diet compared everywhere else and so you know looking at some of that it seemed like a no-brainer just to try to like hey just eat [ _ ] that would grow in nature like that seems kind of easy it does but it doesn’t sound like it tastes good this episode has been brought to you in part by voices of hope inc a non-profit recovery organization made up of people in recovery family members and allies together members strive to protect the dignity of those that use drugs and those in recovery by advocating for treatment harm reduction and support resources and mentoring please visit us at www.voicesofhopemaryland.org and consider donating to our calls
so i i’m a i’m a pretty picky eater i call it a selective eater now because picky’s got such a negative connotation to it and i am fine with it and also i didn’t ask [ _ ] for it right i didn’t wake up in one day when i was three and be like you know what i want to be really picky about what i eat today like i’m it’s just who i am i put stuff in my mouth and it tastes bad so i spit it out like i don’t know what else to do so stop shaming me for being a picky eater guys and i’ve tried to be that guy that’s like i just gotta eat it because it’s healthy you know oh it’s so tough that is bad i don’t like to taste that yeah i don’t like to eat things that i don’t like yeah so i i struggle with a lot of the healthier foods it’s just not stuff that’s appealing oh yeah [ _ ] kale right uh spinach i guess if you don’t cook it i’m already with it but oh and i only like it really yeah when it’s all gushy oh no no i’ll put it in like the bottom of a salad some spinach leaves but i’m not don’t cook that it just looks like green mush yeah anyway uh getting away from it so yeah i kind of ran into the diet idea i mean i’ve done some some off color not healthy diets throughout my life just to try to meet my nutrition needs for working out and stuff and putting on muscle but actually coming to the idea of a healthy diet because i want to be a healthier individual a couple years ago maybe almost five at this point a little less probably i took a biology of obesity class and for that class we kind of had to do a project my idea was i would make up these two random diets and i would try them out for three weeks because i think i’m brilliant and i can solve every problem so i was going to solve the health weight loss problem and so i tried two different things the first three week session me and two other people ate two ounces i think it was two ounces two ounces of broccoli before anything we took in our body besides water so you wanted to drink a coffee he was eating broccoli you wanted to drink a milkshake he was eating broccoli you wanted to eat breakfast you were eating broccoli like no exceptions was it i mean why broccoli specifically any reason or just because it was a healthy vegetable no broccoli is high in fiber and my theory was that if you took in fiber you would not only feel fuller so you would eat less but that the fiber would help process everything else that you ate afterwards right makes sense doesn’t [ _ ] work don’t do it oh my god you want to talk about the most miserable three weeks of my life i mean look at that was the only restriction you could eat anything you wanted to eat broccoli i did not want to eat anything else i was done with it i was like it ain’t worth the broccoli so tired of eating broccoli whatever you’re offering me is not worth eating more broccoli first not to cut you off there but i have heard a similar there’s something and i think this was a russian thing or something but it was called the potato diet and the idea was the same you could eat you know potatoes with butter salt pepper and eat as many of them as you want as as much as you want and that’s it and that’s it yeah and that’s another piece of what i was trying to look for right because i’m a guy who struggles to stop eating like i can go long periods without eating if i choose to like i’ll just go all day and i’ll eat dinner okay i can do that but once i start eating dinner i want at least two plates of it right so i know that about me so i didn’t want any restriction for amount in any of my diets and so i was like yeah i’m going to solve it without restricting the amount so i’m going to fix weight loss for the entire world and yeah don’t eat broccoli before everything you eat it did nothing except make me very unhappy and hate broccoli oh yes so the next three weeks was a different idea the idea in general was don’t eat processed food right but i don’t know a lot about foods and where the [ _ ] they come from and my teacher kept making it sound so easy like oh well if you if you know where it comes from in the process of how it’s made and all that you can get it i’m like i don’t know any of that i don’t even know what the hell plants are these fruits come from like i have no idea i don’t know for some reason i’m like food stupid so i had to make it easy so i picked out five different things that i knew were not processed and that’s fruits nuts vegetables brown rice and egg there’s no processing done to those five things and so my rule was i could have as much as i wanted at any time i wanted but it had to be those things now when i did this i was hesitant because i didn’t know a lot about seasonings and if they were processed or not or what was in them so we really limited the amount of seasoning we used and let me tell you how [ _ ] boring that gets yeah now one of the tips my teacher gave me was don’t look at what you can’t have look at what you get to have right and i’ve heard this in a lot of other ways for other scenarios right like i don’t have to go to a meeting i get to go to a meeting and that sounds good but like it really did help it was less about oh man i can’t have cupcakes tonight it was more like man you know what i haven’t had pineapple in a while and that is actually really good and tasty right so i tried to enjoy the experience kind of sucked because it happened to be we went to hershey park during that experience and there’s nothing to [ _ ] eat at hershey park that fits that requirement um but basically what it turned into was i would eat fruit at breakfast i would eat like fruit and nuts at lunch and then at dinner i would make this plate of like almost like a stir fry it was basically rice with scrambled eggs and fruits and nuts and [ _ ] thrown on top of it veggies like whatever and that was what i ate every goddamn day for three weeks but let me tell you highly effective highly effective i ate as much as i wanted which i didn’t want a second plate because it was kind of bland um and then i lost like i don’t know it was like eight pounds in three weeks or something like that and i didn’t have a whole lot of weight to lose right i wasn’t like large or obese or anything like that so i was already pretty in shape still lost eight pounds in three weeks and i actually felt better mentally my anxiety felt lower my depression felt lower i don’t know maybe i was doing like a [ _ ] non-processed food high or something for a minute but i felt really really good and that kind of blew my mind more than anything yeah and and there are plenty of studies out there i mean we didn’t dig too deep into that but there are plenty of studies out there that’ll tell you that like processed foods and and refined sugar and all that stuff are definitely linked to like depression anxiety you know other mental issues like there is a direct relation to that you know and what you eat all the [ _ ] i like i know that’s all the [ _ ] everybody likes well and that’s the problem they’ve spent millions and millions of dollars in laboratories mixing out these chemicals and everything else to get the exact perfect version of their food that tastes as delicious as possible and like [ _ ] apples just doesn’t compare to that bro like what are you gonna do right the apples don’t have millions of dollars in a factory in a lab to do testing and inject stuff like right it’s hard to combat but i think what’s tough nowadays is the just even our mainstream food supply industry i don’t know if that’s even a thing but you know just mainstream media whatever you want to call it like you don’t see a lot of advertisements for healthy food you know what i mean if you’re sitting around watching tv there’s not a lot of advertisements for [ _ ] salads you know who’s gonna advertise for donald’s and dairy queen right right and it’s that’s the problem you know like there’s a tremendous amount of money spent and i almost think because food companies know like this [ __ ] food that we’re gonna sell you one it doesn’t really fill your craving for food it feels a different craving that you have to satiate your sugar addiction but it doesn’t satiate your need for food so you’re gonna eat this and in two hours you’re gonna to eat more like this isn’t this isn’t healthy it isn’t good for you it isn’t anything but gratification for a temporary basis and then in a little while you’re going to need some more so it’s like a manipulation of our diets to like you would think a drug dealer would do you know i’m actually really disappointed at the dinner i had like an hour and a half ago so where are we getting dessert after this because this is making me hungry yeah but no i i agree i mean you know there is the avocados from mexico commercial that sticks in my head but i don’t even need avocados so that’s sucky for me i try i don’t like them yeah i can’t just doesn’t look good i was doing i’m like in a shake in the morning
well it had like half an avocado in it just to get it in there i think you’re braver than i am food-wise yeah yeah anyway well i i won’t eat stuff i don’t like i mean i gotta be able to you’ll try some [ _ ] i will try [ _ ] i don’t mind trying i know i don’t like it so and people would tell you i used to be pretty weird about food i’ve gotten way better in the last several years i used to be one of those people that if my food was on a plate it couldn’t touch and things couldn’t be mixed together like stews or different like pies that had like vegetables and meat and [ _ ] in it all thrown together like none of that like i had my stuff had to be separate on a plate and when i ate it i had to eat all of the one thing before i would eat the next day yeah i just had weird and i don’t know why it wasn’t it just was like a weird eating habits and i became aware of them and and broke them i don’t know if they came from as a kid for some reason but i grew up eating because my father always taught me get this [ _ ] you don’t want to do out of the way first and so i grew up eating the thing i liked the least first but then i didn’t care about the rest of it but i actually am the opposite while i only like specific food so i won’t eat anything that’s got stuff i don’t want mixed in with it but i want all my foods mixed together yeah at all times i love it i like the the contrast of the different textures yeah all in the same yeah see that’s what i think would freak me out like i would see people mix like their corn with their mashed potatoes like how the [ _ ] can you like the textures are two opposite things you can’t have that it’s like that jello where they have the carrot slices in it and stuff i love it yes so weird i couldn’t even i don’t even know if i could eat that now i think i ate some greek food one time and like everything on the menu was some different form of meat with mashed potatoes on top and then something else on top it was like the whole menu was just that i was like huh i like it though that’s cool but now i have gotten to be way more brave in my food stuff because i i’ve learned to cook somewhat you know i think i’m a pretty good cook and i’ve learned what seasons i like and what spices like what flavors i like what what my flavor palette is so i can take a lot of different things that i’m willing to to sort of experiment a little bit all right not me different kinds of fish or different and we’ll have stuff we don’t like it happens you know cook things that suck i don’t eat stews i don’t eat soups i don’t eat any kind of salad dressings i don’t eat any kind of runny creamy liquids at all honestly i love condiments i do like condiments maybe mustard ah barbecue sauce a1 i don’t know yeah i don’t like a whole lot of stuff and and i’m yeah no i look at food and oh my god if you’re out there telling your kid you don’t know if you like it till you try it [ _ ] i know a whole lot of foods i don’t like and i have never tasted it yeah some things when you smell them you know you’re not going to like it from i will look at food and tell you i don’t know that [ __ ] looks mushy i don’t like mushy food nope i’m out
there’s definitely food i have not tried that i i’ve never had a tomato i will never have it the [ _ ] no it just looks gross why i don’t know it’s mushy and juicy looking there’s different kinds of tomatoes whatever same thing i don’t know wow that’s weird no i i’ll try almost anything yeah see that’s not your breakfast and i’m willing to like i’ve experimented with different diets one of the things that i found with myself on trying some of these different diets and i i heard this somewhere and it helped in the beginning of most of this diet trying eating healthy stuff what happens is i would get on whatever the newest kick was it would last for like three or four weeks and then by then i’d be like [ _ ] this man i just want a bowl of [ _ ] ice cream or i just want you know a piece of cake like you’re somewhere and you’re trying to talk yourself out of it like oh no man you’ve been doing so good you know just don’t do it don’t give in and uh then eventually you give it or i give in maybe some people are way more disciplined than me but eventually survey says they all give in yeah right so eventually i give in and then as soon as i give in that one time it’s like [ _ ] it i’m out now and then i go to eating shitty for the next four weeks you know and then it’s like four years
the floodgates open and it’s you know game on like whatever and all the what i was doing for the last couple weeks goes out the window and then i heard this concept i read it somewhere online it was like the the sort of 80 20 principle where it’s like if i can just you know i’m shooting for a hundred percent but if i like eighty percent of the time can do well which that’s just a i’m gonna call that a marginal number what i mean is for me what that looks like is in a week like i can have ice cream or a piece of cake or whatever like once a week it’s not going to kill me you know i can go out once a week and have a cheeseburger for lunch you know i don’t like to eat the process breads and [ _ ] but if i have one cheeseburger in a week it’s not going to kill me it’s fine i don’t need to then give up my whole diet and start eating cheeseburgers every day you know and i can give myself that little bit of cheat room or that little bit of you know break room so that i don’t have to deny myself of things that i really like you know i can have them it’s just the moderation that helps me i don’t want to [ _ ] you up but if you did each of those twice a week you’re still pretty close to that 20. yeah like two sevens isn’t too bad well i mean realistically i i don’t know i can go a week or two you know and be perfect if it’s everything lines up you know good that week but then the next week you know it’ll be somebody’s anniversary so it’ll be cake so you have to eat the cake at the anniversary even though it’s always shitty cake it’s not even usually good no so a couple not just a couple it’s probably been a month and a half two months now ago i decided i want to look better again right not that i look terrible or bad but i wanted to look even better again and so i was like you know what i’m going to try that not processed diet i did a few years back but i’m going to modify it a little bit because basically what you just said i find that i can only stick to things purely for so long until i just can’t and so the idea this time was same exact thing eat as much as you want fruits nuts vegetables brown rice and eggs for dinner we’re gonna have our normal healthy family dinner and that was partly borne out of the fact that i don’t feel like trying to make two dinners right i don’t want to make the dinner the kids can have in the dinner that i can have and then watch them eat something that looks good and
this is like the second or third time i talked about me making dinner or making food and i got to be real my wife makes most of the meals around this house so let me at least give credit where credit’s due and stop being a liar it didn’t seem fair for her to make two different dinners all right so we were like we’ll just eat our regular dinner together as a family and then the rest of the day you do what you do and what that has looked like because i’ve just fallen to patterns i’m not good at thinking through [ _ ] every other day i just do the same thing every day so every morning for breakfast it’s an apple and a banana and then for lunch it’s that kind of that dinnerish meal from before only this time it’s it’s more of a stir fry not fried or anything but it’s got a little more taste to it because we use like chinese five spice and stuff which is good um and then we have dinner and then at night i’ll eat like an orange every once in a great while some like pineapple bits or blueberries or strawberries gets thorns in thrones in thrown in uh but not that often and and that’s generally what it’s looked like but i have not been so strict that i can’t deviate right my birthday happened during all this yeah we’re [ _ ] having cake right i’m not gonna deny myself uh we we go out somewhere or we go to see my mom and there’s desserts okay i’m eating dessert if i feel like it at home and they got something good i’m gonna eat it i just ate ice cream like three nights ago with some chocolate on it that we melted down from easter it was like i and i i’m not going to feel bad about that is where i’m at with it right and it’s still been effective could it have been more effective if i was perfect maybe but chances are what would have happened is it just stopped i will say i do run into this prop i don’t want to stop once i start so once i have the ice cream three nights ago like last night and the night before i wanted ice cream or something sweet i’m like oh man but i i don’t want to do it every night yeah that’s the hard thing about sugar sugar is definitely addictive like that i mean i was gonna say like for me it was fast food you know like i would eat fast food for lunch all the time you know there was just there’s a lot of fast food places around and i can run out from work and it’s five minutes away and cheeseburgers are delicious and french fries are delicious and chicken nuggets are delicious you know all that stuff’s good and then i stopped eating it for probably literally months you know it had been a couple of months i stopped eating it and i missed it and then you know my wife and i were like yeah let’s go just you know we’re gonna splur this will be our splurge night and we’re gonna get some mcdonald’s and whatever and just eat fast food and [ __ ] it you know we both missed it
fast food and [ _ ] it sounds a lot like the new version of netflix and chill and it was not good i mean it tasted like i expected it to taste but i noticed how it made me feel and i’ve had fast food i think once more since then maybe twice more since then and because i’m not denying myself of it i don’t really miss it all that much you know it’s like i know i can go have it but now i’m sort of making a better choice not to have it because i don’t like the [ _ ] way it makes me feel you know it’s like uh i can eat that double cheeseburger with bacon but eh i’m not gonna feel too good about it afterwards yeah and and i think it’s a really excellent point right i worked with this guy some years ago in construction we were both working out he and he would come in and he had like this super strict diet everything was weighed out measured out three ounces of broccoli two ounces of like oatmeal flakes that were had no flavor in them and all this stuff like had to be a baked potato with no butter and this that any other and we would talk about that and he was extreme with how locked in he was on his diet and what i saw with him was that he would do that for three or four months and be in like great shape but then he would like in the middle of the night raid the cabinet and eat like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all night and and just lose it and then you know uh gain a lot of weight for six months and then he’d get back on steroids and get back locked into his diet and i would say things to him like you know i just can’t do a baked potato without butter right i’m gonna have butter on my baked potatoes i’m gonna have mashed potatoes i’m gonna have oatmeal that’s got you know seasoning or flavor in it from the from the store and he’s like oh well that’s you that’s not gonna work and i’m like but mine’s way more sustainable than yours right i can do mine forever right you can do yours for about three months until you break down and that’s what i think part of this is too and that’s as people in our population who struggle with like i can’t go get one heroin right i’m just gonna do heroin one night a week i mean maybe i can i don’t know i haven’t tried it and i’m not going to um but that’s something we struggle with is a healthy relationship with being able to do something for ourselves and then not do it for a time yeah and more is always better you know like if this is good more is definitely better like that’s just how my brain works you know what i mean and if i like something i like it every day you know i want it all the time well and maybe that’s where the problem comes in i think of having a piece of cake as treating myself right am i really i mean would i what i look at eating a piece of garbage off the ground is treating myself because like that’s what i’m doing to my body right what i would i take my car to the gas station and fill it with water in the tank and be like oh i’m treating you yeah i’m treating you good good car and and some of those concepts i have to remind myself of just you know like i said the water in the car it’s like the sort of it’s an old computer term but i always thought about it with people it’s like garbage in garbage out and that was like a data entry term that you would use like if your input of your data is real shitty then your output you know on the other end is shitty and it’s the same with you know me like if i just put a bunch of shitty stuff in myself whether it’s food whether it’s ideas whether it’s people’s you know bad decisions or my bad decisions if i’m consistently feeding myself a bunch of that’s what i put out that’s what i become i mean technically you could feed yourself anything and you’re going to put out [ _ ] yes that one part of me is going to put out [ _ ] right but yeah you mean like the way you feel the way i feel the way energy i love the way i act and and so that’s where a lot of these healthy habits you know come into play it’s like is meditating like great and exciting and and wonderful all the time no you know no it’s become a part of what i do almost like brushing my teeth you know i don’t brush my teeth because i love it you know i kind of treat myself with meditation i’ll i’ll meditate you know seated posture silence for like three days in a row and then there’s a day like today where i’m like i just [ _ ] can’t i’m gonna lay on the floor and put on a guided meditation and that’s the best i got today like that’s my treat for doing well those other three times and that’s so with meditation like i mix it up all the time like i you know now i’m back to doing just almost a silent uh like i do a bell and then 10 minutes silent just sitting in silence but different times i’ll go through different guided meditations i’ll use different apps with different guided like programs on them i just i switch it up when i get bored because i know like i’m gonna get bored of this it might be great fascinating wonderful now but in two or three weeks it’s going to be boring and so i can try something else and that’s okay sticking with it you know as long as i’m sticking with it and it’s the same with my healthy eating like i was doing keto for months and i knew when i went into it i wasn’t doing it forever i just said i’m just gonna go real strict with keto for a couple of months and see what happens see where it goes and and it was fun i mean i got the carb counter thing on my phone and and all that [ _ ] like say it wears out really quickly when you’re trying to like log everything you eat and get pictures of labels so you can see how many [ __ ] calories it has and then the one doesn’t show up in their database
yeah it’s crazy i hate that and uh but like it’s novel in the beginning and it’s a little bit fun and that’s kind of how i go into most of that with these healthy eating things that i do and and i know it won’t be forever and it’ll be temporary but that’s fine like i’m making the consistent effort to try to you know make myself feel better you know think better function better and uh you know then we got lazy we took some vacations and you know on vacation it’s always you know i choose to throw things out the window i was like it’s a [ _ ] vacation you know i’m gonna enjoy myself i’ve earned it whatever it’s vacation i’m going to make my body feel like [ _ ] right but you know the the point is i i remind myself like the reason i’m doing those things isn’t out of some sort of punishment of myself or i feel like i need to suffer it’s like this is good and healthy for me and when i do it consistently i feel better about myself i physically feel better i think better you know and i’m a better person and i don’t have to deny myself things in my life um we had re so the reason i didn’t come sunday and i don’t know if this is a result of the keto diet you had mentioned reading something about it so i was like oh [ __ ] i didn’t even i didn’t research it that way but i ended up with a kidney stone i was in the emergency room friday night with a kidney stone and uh i just made some self-assumptions knowing enough i mean i’ve educated myself a lot about you know my diet and what i eat and those sorts of things over the years and i know that i lately have been in taking way too much caffeine and creatine in the form of pre-workout drinks and energy drinks
energy drinks billy drinks energy drinks he needs to pick up a one-day key tag and coffee and not drinking near as much water as i’m supposed to um and the co i mean i’m gonna blame the combination of those things on why i think i got this kidney stone could be nothing to do with that it could be totally just hereditary but i don’t no one in my family that i know of has suffered with him my dad hasn’t um my brother or no one else that i know in my family suffered with him although i don’t know if that’s the kind of thing you run around and talk about at a family event like i’m not hey i just had kidney stones right you know yeah i mean just doing a quick search i there’s plenty of websites that say keto and kidney stones are you know related correlated uh none of them say anything specific they just say increased risk blah blah blah but none of them are like you know they’re not the national institute of health or anything right their website so i i’m not gonna dig deeper because it’s not my kidney story yeah and another thing i’ll just say about any kind of diets and it’s almost like you talked about with yourself being a picky person like it’s important for me to know myself and maybe keto doesn’t cause kidney stones in everybody but if it [ _ ] causes them in me it’s probably a good reason to not do that i did it one time and i [ _ ] hate it because i don’t like fat yeah so i was miserable i didn’t mind it the hardest part with most of this kind of eating is you really almost have to be prepared to eat this way like i can’t when i go to work now if you look we have a refrigerator at work i have like two bags worth of like snacks and [ _ ] in there because the only stuff at work is a [ _ ] lance machine loaded with potato chips and chocolate and whatever other kind of you know starbursts and [ _ ] like that and when i’m at work if i’m hungry and that’s what’s there then that’s what i eat you know i’ve spent hundreds of dollars in that lands machine on starbursts and skittles and snickers bars just i just won’t eat i’ll see i get hungry and i need to eat but that’s another thing with again just me being the person i am i eat the opposite of you i will never sit down and eat two plates of food ever i’m the like buffets love me because if i go in and pay 12 i’m eating one [ _ ] plate of food and then possibly some dessert and that’s it i’m done i’m tapped out now in an hour and a half i could eat another equally sized plate of food but you know it’s just the way my body works i don’t have a huge stomach to hold a lot of food but i burn a lot of calories which is why i’m thin i guess a high metabolism or whatever you want to call it so i need to eat a lot i’ve tried to do the intermittent fasting yeah at times and that’s kind of tough for me just because i get so [ _ ] hungry you know so fast and i can never like gorge myself enough at dinner to make it through to the next morning it’s like by nine o’clock i’m laying there with [ _ ] hunger pangs in bed trying to drink a bunch of water so that i can go to sleep see when i did intermittent fasting what i found was uh you know it’s not that like i cram so much in at dinner though i do uh but that i didn’t feel like that killed me the whole day i just felt like when i got hungry the next morning and early afternoon what would happen is i’d get hungry it would start to feel a little funky in my stomach and within 15 minutes to at most a half an hour it was all gone it just stopped oh well see i get angry i’m one of those that snickers commercial where the guy turns into a diva yeah that’s me totally gentle though when i’m running around at home working on projects i won’t eat i’ll be out like working in the yard in the morning because i don’t like breakfast i’m not a breakfast person so i’ll get up in the morning and i like breakfast at like 11 o’clock i’m a brunch guy i want breakfast all day yeah that’s fine too but i don’t like to eat in the morning i guess i’m not a morning eater until like 10 o’clock so i’ll get up in the morning and i might go start working in the yard whatever mowing the grass or doing whatever especially in the summer when it’s hot and then i just don’t eat because i can work through being hungry but then by lunch i’m like ripping everybody’s [ _ ] head off and angry as [ _ ] i ain’t hungry i’m just angry i think where i’m at now my biggest difficulty right so i did this this two months of this you know specific diet that i thought was good for me and i still think is a really healthy way to eat non-processed i’m a believer in that more than anything and i appreciate that if nothing else it’s not been so much about what i’m restricting but more about just paying attention right it’s like just pay attention to what you’re putting in your body but now i’m at a point where okay i i exceeded whatever goal i was going for i don’t know what the hell that was like i guess i could lose another pound or two and get a little more cut but like for what i don’t know i’m 41 i don’t have a whole lot of purpose to run around my shirt off anyway so it’s not doing me a whole lot of good so i’m happy with where i’m at but i don’t have the ability to move back into somewhere in the middle right like i can stick with what i’m doing for a while longer at least it is kind of getting old but i could stick with this but then i’m going to lose more weight and i really don’t need or want to like i went to come here today and i usually wear these pants without a belt can they just stay up and they were like starting to fall off my crack was hanging out i was like oh [ _ ] all right that’s enough of that right but i don’t know how to move from this place and not end up back where i was before i started and that’s where i always go every time and even on keto i have been within i haven’t been outside of 10 pounds since my high school weight i’ve been the exact same you know range of i’ve been a little heavier a little but i mean within like five pounds either way like i’ve 160s like the heaviest i’ve ever been in 150s like the lightest i’ve been even on i did keto for all those weeks and i mean i was pissing on the strips so i know i was in ketosis every day if you don’t know you can buy these strips at the store they let you know if you’re in ketosis and so just to to make sure you need to check yourself there’s another way you can do it with blood sticks but i’m not sticking myself and measure my blood like i wasn’t that into it i’m pretty sure billy was high in just taking pregnancy tests i’m not pregnant perfect but uh so i know i was in ketosis for all those weeks and i didn’t lose any weight none at all well i just think it’s that problem that people run into like how do i form a healthy relationship with food right so okay i did my two months of my of my time so to speak and now i want to eat more and open up my my intake but i don’t want to go back to where i what but i feel like any time i open up and and like create new softer rules i just automatically fall back into that where i was and that’s what i don’t want to do and it’s like how do you find that middle ground where you’re not eating a snack every night but you’re also not eating a snack one night a week yeah i don’t know that’s that hard attic thing it’s like how do you just smoke weed yeah you know like that’s my problem if i knew how i could just smoke weed i probably would i just don’t think it would end up there so if i can just eat snacks three nights a week i can probably smoke weed is what you’re saying that’s what i’m hearing i might have motivation there well and even thinking of that i’m like all right so even if i could all right if let’s say i need to weed for my anxiety let’s just say that’s that’s what i try to talk myself into all the time and this high anxiety guy i could just at the end of the day inevitably what would happen is it would get back to the place where even though i wasn’t smoking it all day i’d be thinking about smoking it all day you know i’ll be at work at nine o’clock in the morning drinking my coffee like man i can’t wait till nine o’clock tonight i would drink extra coffees to be more anxious oh man i definitely need some weed but that’s the same with yeah that’s like the same with food it’s like when i get myself on these diets it’s almost like you know abstinence based start arguing with my wife i’m thinking taking my pause look at my anxieties i better go get some of that right so yeah i don’t know i don’t know i i do okay well i can’t say that i was gonna say i do okay with the 80 20 thing but the truth is i don’t i’ve been pretty bad the last couple of weeks i mean we went on vacation and then we came back and then we went on another vacation and then i got lazy with cooking the food like the prep of keto is a lot of prep if you want anything decent i mean like i like tasty food and but i would have to [ _ ] make myself a separate dinner because the kids weren’t eating that [ _ ] so i would make myself a separate dinner from the kids and ha prepping lots of snacks and prepping lots of stuff to keep around the house so then like my whole sunday is sitting around cooking food for the week and then you know as soon as i get busy on a sunday and i don’t have that day to cook all that food like then i’m [ _ ] and you know and it’s like well you can’t really cheat real easy on keto like i mean you can’t eat celery and peanut butter or [ _ ] whatever but that gets boring pretty quick you know yeah so and i think i guess to to bring this to somewhere it’s just pay attention right it’s awareness like what are we really doing to ourselves and i get coming from a place of drug use and just being clean feels like enough at first but i see so many people get clean you know they’re they’re they’re stick figures and i’m not saying everybody has to be a stick figure or that everybody has to be a certain weight or not overweight or any of that like it’s this isn’t about my opinions about that i just know that i watch so many people who come in as stick figures are just happy to be alive right and off of drugs and before they leave the recovery house or within like three to six months of being in the recovery house they’re unhappy with the way they look it’s not about my opinion right they’re unhappy with the way they look because they’ve just taken on this new eating and not paid enough attention and and maybe that’s something we need to talk more about early on right we it’s nothing nobody was ever talking about their [ _ ] diet in a meeting when i was there early on right but maybe this is stuff we do need to talk more about like you know we talked to recovery cafe with last week like maybe you go into a program like that and they have like hey and i think they did say they had cooking classes and stuff yeah maybe you teach people how to cook and and how to make healthier meals and how to eat non-processed food and what these foods can do to like we need more education on this this could maybe even be in high school education like maybe all [ _ ] people should know that sugar is probably not good for you right like maybe all people should know that uh some of these chemicals in food can increase depression in populations yeah and one of the things and we don’t have to get into all these but one of the things i found in in researching some of this information um part of the the reason they even put this site up was exactly what you’re talking about it’s like in traditional recovery or traditional uh you know drug rehabilitation they don’t really talk about the importance of you know diet and healthy eating and and how that affects your mental health and so this you know website nsickness.org 27 studies proving impact of addiction and it basically goes through all these different studies that show how diet and different deficiencies affect us mentally you know and impact either our impulsive behaviors or the impacts of long-term addiction on you know different parts of our brain and bodies and like those things matter you know those things for me the reason i chose to use is because life sucked everything sucked and i hated myself alpha if it didn’t i probably wouldn’t be trying to kill myself every day right you know and then if i get clean and you know maybe i get a job maybe i you know start putting some things together but if i still physically feel like [ _ ] or my thinking is still you know pretty negative and shitty you know i want to try to do what i can to improve that and i think a lot of people don’t have the right information you know to make good decisions for themselves when it comes to food and nutrition and that website should probably be called 26 nutritional studies because at least one of them is like hey crackheads are lacking nutrients wow thanks yeah yeah some of them were weird and and they had to do with different drugs you know different effects of alcohol and some had to do with cocaine and wasted money on that yeah doing studies right can you believe heroin addicts are low nutrient levels ridiculous shocker um but the the last thing i would say is you know for myself and and the reason any of this matters to me maybe it doesn’t matter to other people but the reason a lot of this matters to me when i was out there using i felt like i was really just existing you know what i mean i was doing the the minimal amount i had to do to [ _ ] survive and as i got into recovery i realized like i could begin to have like a life that was worth meaning and and purpose-driven and that you know my life had some value and then i realized that if i put a little effort into a couple of things that my quality of life went up you know exponentially and those things are my mental health my physical health you know my spiritual emotional health all those things you talked about in the beginning and it’s taken me years of time to be like okay i came in i got involved with step work i addressed a lot of the drugs a lot of the immediate you know emotional like i want to [ _ ] kill myself stuff you know and my life got better but now i’ve realized by putting some work into all these other areas i can continue to get better in different ways and it’s been worth it you know the benefits have been worth it absolutely i mean i i am right now in a current cycle and i feel like i’m going to jinx it because it’s like the third time i’ve said it uh recently but just in a cycle of doing a lot of good stuff regularly for my body i have ran or walked every day for like the last nine days because i’m in this voice is a hope run thing or whatever we got a run team for some rage against addiction running race thing i don’t know what the [ _ ] i’m doing i’m running that’s all i can tell you right i’m running like three miles a day or more and and for like 45 or 46 days now straight i’ve been meditating and i’ve been doing this diet for like 60 days pretty thoroughly and so i’m like i am feeling the benefits of all that like i feel spiritually centered and like i’m about to float when i [ _ ] meditate and [ _ ] so yeah and look it won’t last right and i think that’s fine it’s kind of like the idea of the bicycle tire right like right now i’m at the top but i can’t just stay at the top if i want to move forward like you ride the bicycle tire you will eventually be at the bottom again and that’s just part of it and i’m fine with that but like right now i am definitely thriving with doing these everyday practices that are a pain in the ass some days that i do have to make time for they don’t just happen every day right i have to stop and be like [ _ ] i don’t feel like meditating today when can i fit it in right it’s just part of it but if i do those things i do reap the benefit yeah and for sure i mean life’s gonna give me some [ _ ] no matter what i’d rather it not be [ _ ] of my own making or my own decisions you know i’d rather just come organically out of life rather than me making shitty decisions because i’m not taking care of myself yeah so that’s all i got anything else about nutrition no all right get out there and [ _ ] eat right whatever that means for you maybe i shouldn’t have said [ _ ] get out there and eat right it’s nice be kind to yourself i should probably cuss less all right have a good week did you like this episode share it with people you think might get something out of it check out the rest of our episodes at recoveryswordof.com also while you’re there you can find ways to link up with us on facebook twitter instagram reddit youtube anything we’re always looking for new ideas got an idea you want us to look into reach out to us