Looking Back on Addiction & Recovery – Featuring Coach Tana

Coach Tana: It's kind of like a broken bone. And when you take the time to heal the bone, take care of it, give it what it needs, it heals and where it heals, it's so much stronger. Just like in everything in life, remember why you're doing it. What are you working for? And do you really want it? If you really want it, then go after it. And it is going to be hard in the beginning. But long term, man, it just gets better and better every day.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Elevation Recovery Podcast. You're hub for Addiction Recovery Strategies, hosted by Chris Scott and Matt Finch.

Chris Scott: Welcome everyone to the Elevation Recovery Podcast. I have a guest who I have not had on for a while and she's been an integral part of the Fit Recovery team for years now. And this is Coach Tana. And Coach Tana and I, if you've been following us for some time, you may know that we have some YouTube videos, versions of episodes we've done in the past with many thousands of views. And Tana is a lovely person. She is a mom, and again, a new mom again, I don't know if that's that phraseology is correct, but I recently had another child and she joined our course, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0 I think around five years ago. We were trying to pinpoint the exact date and she's had an incredible journey since then. It's been able to help many dozens of people, maybe hundreds I haven't counted. But Tana, thank you so much for joining me today.

Coach Tana: Yeah, no, I'm so happy to be able to do this again with you, Chris. So I'm excited to get started and kind of get back into Fit Recovery world. And yeah, it's been about five years since I joined your course and I still remember it very clearly. I was Googling something random, which I'm sure a lot of people have Googled before. Why am I craving french fries and then ice cream so much after drinking? You just Google the randomest things when you're trying to quit and you have these weird symptoms and your website popped up. And that's how I found you. And really, I think I was at my most desperate time in trying to quit when your website popped up and you had your Drinking Sex book as like a PDF or something online at that time. And so I had printed it off, read the entire thing that night, and then joined your course the next day and literally went to the local nutritional shop and purchased all the supplements I could.

Coach Tana: I had written it all down. At that time, I had no idea really what any of these things were. So I bring in my list and I'm reading the list to the young clerk behind the desk. He probably has no idea either. He's like, "I'm just trying to get a job during school when school's out." And I'm like, "Do you have gluttony? Do you have this?" And he's like, [inaudible 00:03:04], but I was able to get most of them. And it was like it changed the whole trajectory of my recovery. And all of a sudden I realized, oh my gosh, I haven't even counted the day since my last drink. And I think at that point is whenever I kind of reached out to you with just utmost gratitude for the information that you had provided, that literally changed my life.

Chris Scott: I remember that email. I think I saved it somewhere. And at that point I had been considering thinking, this project that I'm doing, which started off as a little humble blog, just fit recovery. It is turning into something that is helping people. It was amazing to me. I'm not that I started it thinking it wouldn't help people, but it's one thing to have the intention and another thing to see some of the results. And I remember you saying that you wanted to be involved. And the first thing I thought was, this is some weird universe thing, right when I'm ready and I've been pondering my own ability to expand this project and maybe take some other people on to help out, you then just reached out. And I had been thinking, I'm going to have to find people and set up interviews. It's going to be arduous.

Chris Scott: I don't want to hurt people's feelings if they're not the right fit, but I could just tell from your energy that you were the right fit. And I could tell you're super sharp, you were motivated, you transcended alcohol, first biochemically as you said. And I think that was your missing link to a large degree as well as mine, so we could understand each other there. But even throughout the biochemical, psychological, social, spiritual pillars where we try to identify missing links, we are on the same page with all of that stuff, even if we have had different lives and different experiences, no two people are the same. But you were really like the first team member. It was me and Matt Finch for a little while, but Matt Finch was largely doing some other projects and this was well before the podcast. And then you started helping people out with coaching.

Chris Scott: You got certified in amino acid therapy and time flies. It's crazy. A topic I wanted to get into today, and this will be a relatively short episode because I know you've got a lot of things going on and we're really grateful that you're able to make some time to chat with us today. But I wanted to talk about the bird's eye view that you develop after several years away from an active addiction versus being stuck in the weeds, being focused in a sort of myopic way on your mental or physical states or deficiencies or lack of wellbeing in that early phase, it's a lot. It's really hard for a lot of people to realize that the cravings come to an end, the physical cravings. The psychological cravings can also come to an end and to a large degree, something I've realized with my clients is that psychological cravings are often a product of ruminating and not proactively making the choice to focus on something else, not necessarily to distract yourself to just something.

Chris Scott: Because if you know that you're just distracting yourself from a craving, then the elephant in the room is still the craving. But really finding other things that genuinely knock down alcohol to or whatever their substance is, or the addiction to a lower level on the list of priorities in your own brain. And for you and me at some point in our lives, I'm sure alcohol was number one or in the top three and that's why it kept occurring. And that's why we ended up drinking regularly. And for me, getting to the point where I had broken my 5:00 PM rule, no alcohol until 5:00 PM.

Chris Scott: I started drinking closer to noon, then I would drink early in the morning and then the next thing I knew I couldn't go to work. And that's how the whole Fit Recovery project started because that started my long transformation. But what are some things that you've noticed in terms of your overarching view, now that you've gained a lot of perspective since you first joined my course and became an amino acid therapy expert and helped people versus your mindset or mentality on a day to day basis back when you were really struggling?

Coach Tana: There's a lot there to dive into, for sure.

Chris Scott: It's a totally open ended question.

Coach Tana: The first thing that pops in my head is kind of like what you were talking about, the rules and things like that, or what can we do in replace of alcohol? And I think that's key there because, I'm sure most people especially struggling with alcohol addiction are similar to me, don't like to be told no. In fact, if you tell me no, I'm probably going to go and do it. And fortunately that's something within me that I've had to kind of fight and overcome. But the point here is, instead of saying no or putting these rules on us, giving ourselves options, we all want to have options in life. In fact, people even tell you, "Give your kids options." I'm not very good at that because I think my kids just need to follow my rules. But giving yourself options to say, and I remember this in early recovery too, and this is why I always give my clients a little toolbox worksheet to start putting down things that they could do instead of drinking.

Coach Tana: And for a lot of them, it takes a lot of thought because it's like, "Okay, well what do I enjoy doing? I'm so used to drinking. I'm so used to using alcohol as a crutch for when I'm happy, excited, sad, depressed, anxious." Thinking about what could you do instead? And so a big trigger for me was things that were stressful in my life with having a ex-husband and kids. And there was one point that was a big trigger for me and I had already started this recovery and started taking baths. I hadn't taken a bath since I was in swim team as a young girl. And our coach told us, because the water was so dirty, don't go home and take a bath, you're sitting in your own dirt. So I never took a bath, but I had started incorporating baths just for relaxation, not for hygiene purposes or being able to go for a walk and didn't have my kids at this time.

Coach Tana: And so I remember laying on the ground and being like, "Okay, I really want to go get a drink right now because I'm really frustrated." And I was like, "But I know there's something else I could do instead." It gave my brain some time to be able to stop and analyze the situation instead of just acting on auto drive. I was able to stop and assess, "Okay, how am I feeling? What would be best right now? Oh, I don't have my kids. I can literally just walk out the door and go for a walk." And I did that. And actually, I even remember telling myself, "You go for a walk and you take a bath and if after that you still want to drink, then go for it." And so I went for a walk, I took a bath and I didn't want to drink. It was amazing.

Coach Tana: And clearly now I don't have to tell myself that, I'm on auto drive for doing the things that automatically help me. I think that's a big key factor there is saying, "Okay, what are my options?" And that gives you growth too. It gives you something to look forward to and it gives you more of a sense of purpose like, "Oh, I enjoy doing the things that I do. I don't feel bad after I do them. I don't feel guilty, I don't feel sick." Things like that. And I just think that that is more empowering than telling yourself no or giving yourself rules and much more helpful in that area too.

Chris Scott: I totally agree and I love all of that. And I've always been perplexed when people have said things to me, and this is an understandable thing to say, I probably said it at one point back when I was in the very strict 12-Step Oriented Rehab where it was said seemingly often where people will say, "I don't know what I'm going to do, but drinking is not an option." And I understand the sentiment there. What they mean to say is that drinking is not their best option, but it's not true. It's simply false to say that drinking is not an option and you're going to drive yourself nuts if you think that way. And moreover, I think most importantly when you say that drinking is not an option, it prevents you from realizing that as an obvious option, which you've chosen many times before, and which you have the freedom to choose or not in the future, drinking is a suboptimal option.

Chris Scott: It kind of keeps alcohol as in the forbidden fruit zone as something not to be considered, even though the elephant in the room is that you're considering it. It turns you into a bit of a walking, talking contradiction and you start to negate the own element of free will that you have in designing your lifestyle proactively. Drinking's been an option for me since 2014, of course it has. All sorts of things have been an option and yet I only choose options that I believe are optimal. And I was able to naturally extinguish the desire to exercise that option because on my priority list of things to do or things that are desirable, alcohol slipped from number one, to number three, to number 10, to number 100, to number a million at this point. And yet I don't think it would be helpful for me to say, "Drinking's not an option."

Chris Scott: And I like what you said because you don't want yourself to be focusing on a negative. You don't want yourself to be obsessed with the forbidden fruit, with the thing that you're pretending is not an option. What you really want to do is genuinely and authentically transcend the desire that you used to act upon and maybe start thinking about the option of alcohol in a much different light. Instead of allowing your conditioning to determine that you associate alcohol with glamorous parties and billboards, with beautiful people and vacations and cruises and celebrations and being sad and oh, you're going to a funeral, well, you have to drink. Your friend who you drank with in the past coming over, you have to drink. Instead of thinking that way, you could think, "Well, you know what, I've been there and I've done that and I remember my face getting bloated, my eyes being red in the morning, my stomach hurting, having weird pain under my ribcage, which was probably minor pancreatitis or liver inflammation or fatty liver.

Chris Scott: I remember not having good energy, not sleeping well." We know now that one drink, I've said this a million times and I'll keep saying it, "One drink will disrupt REM sleep." And REM sleep is our inbuilt evolutionary emotional therapy. So to the extent that we don't get REM sleep, we feel like hell the next day. Was your little 20 minute escape from reality one drink at a time worth the compounded effects of multiple drinks to destroy your REM sleep and feel terrible the entire next day? Probably not. And so we can do a little trade off calculation, we can pull it out of the subconscious realm and put it in the conscious realm and think about our options. And I found that when a lot of people do that, they go, "Oh wait, when I see this thing that made me want to drink, maybe it was a sign on a bar, a neon sign that was funny on a bar where I've gone and gotten wasted a bunch of times, I don't have to think about the people there that I associate with having fun.

Chris Scott: Maybe I could have fun with people without ruining my body and my brain chemistry. Or maybe I can think about the mornings after I woke up. The mornings that I woke up after being at that particular place." We can take control of the symbols and the frames through which we view alcohol. And over time then this may might require a leap of faith for some people, but your brain is highly adaptive. There's something called neuroplasticity. Your brain can rewire itself. It takes some time. My personal view is that it's supported by biochemical repair.

Chris Scott: And I think the research supports that the more you do other things, the less your brain is going to seem to make you have thoughts pop into your head that associate with or correlate with old thought patterns, old neural pathways. For me, I was telling a client the other day, if I'm in an airport and I walk past a really pretty, duty free shop with beautiful glass bottles and marketing, the first thing I think to myself, rather than being pulled in a magnet, which I used to, is, "Oh wow, look how good the alcohol industry isn't marketing and I wonder how much money they make there. Look at this beautifully packaged poison in a bottle. It's amazing how they can make a liver toxin look and a brain toxin look so sexy."

Chris Scott: And that's the kind of thought that I have and I appreciate that, and then I kind of move on. And the idea that ethanol is something that I would want to put in my body at this point doesn't even occur to me. And yet I wouldn't have believed that if I heard this years ago, back when I was addicted to alcohol. I wouldn't have believed that kind of "trigger" would've been something that I could ever transcend or get over. But eventually with repetition and accumulation of positive emotional experiences, new experiences with a new mindset and an increasingly balanced biochemistry, you start orienting your subconscious autopilot that guides your life and your desires in a totally new direction. And I think that's really the crux of what I wanted to convey today, because it's so easy for people to feel hopeless and think, "These cravings are never going to go away. I'm never going to stop idolizing this elephant in the room." You absolutely can, but it starts with baby steps.

Coach Tana: Yeah, I like how you said that it's like now millionth on your list. You're right, it is always an option to turn to. And the longer you're in recovery, the less it becomes an option. Because I think about today and all the things I've gone through to get to where I am today and how good I feel. Having a newborn and lack of sleep, I'm feeling pretty good surprisingly and I know it's all because I've been taking care of my body and my brain and I don't drink. And it's amazing. And so even when those life circumstances come where you're like, "I am just going to give up on everything." You know what I mean? And you're like, "No, I can't. The life is really too good." You remember that life is really much better than that circumstance you're in. You remember, "Oh gosh, I don't want to feel like crap tomorrow."

Coach Tana: That's what I think of when I think of alcohol. Even if it is an option on the list and maybe you glance at it, you're like, "Nope, can't do it. I don't want to feel like crap tomorrow." But that's the key there is, just remembering what you're doing everything for. Because in all of life situations, there's choices to be made. You can make a bad choice that's going to lead to consequences or you can make a good choice that may be hard to do, but the consequences are they're not going to be as detrimental or you're going to reap a harvest for the good choices that you make. In anything, in all life circumstances, what are you really dedicated? Being able to say, "I am dedicated to getting better and I trust what is being said that I will get better. I will overcome these cravings, but I have to do the work."

Coach Tana: You can sit there and you can get all this information all day long, but if you don't put it into practice and you don't work at it, then you probably won't see the results. You can't just sit back and sit wallow in your sorrow or your depression. You have to get up and say, "You know what? I'm going to get up and I'm going to fight against these today and I'm going to give myself options and I'm going to move closer to my goal. And if I fall, then I fall and I'll get back up." I like to say, I am the queen of falling and getting back up. I can fall and get back up and move forward and get stronger. I just said this to somebody the other day because I heard it the other day. Going back to life circumstances like in marriage. I was listening to this thing on marriage.

Coach Tana: Marriage is hard. And there are times I'm sure when everybody's like, I just want to give up. But do you have to remember the long term, why you're doing this. Why are you persevering? How can you make it better? Don't just sit there and say, "Okay, well it's never going to get better, so I'll just deal with it, or I'll get out or I'll run." You work on it and you heal. And I heard this the other day. It's kind of like a broken bone. And when you take the time to heal the bone, take care of it, give it what it needs, it heals and where it heals, it's so much stronger. Just like in everything in life, remember why you're doing it. What are you working for? And do you really want it? If you really want it, then go after it. And it is going to be hard in the beginning, but long term, man, it just gets better and better every day.

Chris Scott: That's the key. And I think we have a quotable segment right there, thanks to you, for this episode. And I think with that the thought that just conjured in my own mind was that, most people don't drink because they want to be bad or because they're trying to do something to disrupt their lives or the lives of other people, they drink because for them it's a subjective pursuit of happiness, as silly as that sounds. And eventually as it becomes an exhausted resource for people or something that is taking more than it's giving back, it's on that person to come to the conclusion that their overall level of happiness is not being served by continuing to drink it. And I think that realization can help people who might have a tendency towards beating themselves up or self-loathing, guilt, shame, self-flagellation. I've seen it, I've been there, I know what it's like to make a written promise to myself.

Chris Scott: I did this as early as college. Say, "Look, I'm going to this party. I'm only having two drinks," and I'd have 16 drinks and feel like hell the next morning. And I would think, "All right, I did that because I'm a bad person." And I don't think we even need to wade into, I've done this in other episodes, but of course the disease theory of addiction, which is accepted in by the mainstream rehab industry as a self-evident truth, all we have to say is that if this is something that is taking more from you than it's given you, then why not explore other alternatives? And if you happen to have a slip or if you happen to resume drinking or fall back into active, some level of physiological dependence, you don't need to start thinking about how bad you are. I think just get back up on your feet, try to heal your body and your brain, return to the basics like sleep, light exercise, things that you can do for yourself that will help you feel better.

Chris Scott: Because if you don't feel physically good at all, good luck working on your spirituality or your psychological processes. And start thinking, what is something that I could try to implement here that might make this different this time around? For a lot of people it's nutrient repair and starting supplementation and just giving themselves that biochemical stability, that eventually enables things like euphoria and taking pleasure in other activities that they might have lost because alcohol seemed to monopolize their dopamine and endorphins and GABA and other feel good chemicals in the brain. But I think it's important for people to not get down and stay in the mud. And if they can get up, start thinking about what are the things that I used to enjoy when I was a kid, for example? When I was a little kid, I used to run around. I would go to social events all the time.

Chris Scott: It was awkward for 20 minutes and then the kids start playing or throwing each other into walls or whatever and the ice gets broken. Was alcohol really a necessary factor there? Start questioning your assumptions about the necessity of alcohol, because that's something I hear a lot too. "Well, I would quit drinking or I tried to quit drinking a few times, but it just wasn't practical," which is another thing. And I think my life's been incredibly practical. I've been in a flow state for the last, what? Eight years now.

Chris Scott: And it never seemed to me that the practical course of action would be to drink. And if I did drink though, I would be very careful, first of all, assuming that I drank a lot and it was like I felt terrible. I would think to myself, you know what? I don't like feeling terrible, so I'm probably not going to do that again. I would be shooting myself in the foot if I thought I am a bad person. This is my identity. I am the type of person who says I'm going to do one thing and I don't do it. I'm a hypocrite. I let people down. Because that kind of thing will just push you further into escapism.

Coach Tana: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's so true. And everybody wants to live up to their own expectations of themselves. If you have this idea of the values and morals and the person of integrity that you want to live, and then you go the opposite direction of that, that brings on so much guilt. And then it can bring on so much shame. And so just realizing that you're human, you're going to make mistakes, but ultimately to remember why you're doing what you're doing. Why are you giving up alcohol? Why are you staying strong as a mother for your kids, even though you feel like everything's flying apart? Why are you staying strong in your marriage? Why are you continuing to get out there and work out hard for this goal? Whether you're body building or training for a Spartan, when it just feels like you're not getting anywhere.

Coach Tana: It's because you want to continue working towards those expectations that you have for yourself that align with your values and morals. Why do you continue to get into the Word of God if you know being a Christian, that's what I do. Why do I continue doing that whenever things seem to just not be going the right way? Or why do I continue to get up and strive to do better, to be better? It's because I understand that I'm human and I'm going to fall, I always am. But the more and more that you pick yourself up and the more and more you say, "I'm going to strive to live towards the person who I know I am, and I'm going to do it for the reasons that I'm doing it for," whether it's your family, it's your health, whatever, you just get back up and you say, "I'm going to keep doing it better."

Coach Tana: And ultimately at the end of the road, you're going to look back and you're going to be like, "Oh, I fell because I needed to learn this lesson. I needed to get rid of this hurt or this stronghold that I've been holding onto in my heart. I fell because I needed to learn a hard lesson and I'm much better because of it." And our mindset can really bring us down or it can get us moving. And I was talking to someone the other day and they're like, "Well, why am I so sad and depressed all the time?" And I said, "Because you allow yourself to be." I've been there, I still struggle with that. It's like you get sad, you get depressed, and then you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to keep feeling sad and depressed. You know what? Yeah. That's why I'm sad and depressed.

Coach Tana: That's why, gosh, everything just keeps going worse." And then you just feel more and more sad and depressed. Well, guess what? You change your mindset and you start moving forward and putting into action what you talk about instead of focusing on the bad things, maybe that thing that has hurt you is still there, but the pain isn't as strong, and you have hope versus despair. In all of this, if you're just starting out with overcoming your addiction, just keep moving forward, keep persevering, and not everybody's recovery looks the same. And I tell that to my clients, I'm very patient with my clients because I know that one client isn't the same as the other, they're all different. And I'm very patient, I don't expect them to be on my timeline. Just remembering that we all have different recovery journey because we have our own lessons to learn and we have our own growth to grow.

Chris Scott: Beautifully said, Tana. There's so much I could expand on that from multiple angles, but I will just say that you can even get to the point where if your life presently feels like it revolves around something called recovery, it doesn't need to in the future. You can get to the point where you're so excited to wake up every day and you're like me, at this point, so reluctant to go to bed sometimes because there's so much cool stuff to get done that the idea of drinking seems just superfluous and unnecessary. And it's like for me, I don't know when I would have time to get drunk. I have so many cool things that I need to do. I don't want to escape, that's number one. And for a lot of people, they find that they get there over time. They don't have the same type of linearity that I had where I went to a 12-Step strict rehab that scared the hell out of me and constantly talking about relapses and people that went there and died a few months later.

Chris Scott: And I didn't understand what was going on with that whole system. That really fear played a huge role for better or for worse, it was probably not the ideal way to go for me and not slipping up in early recovery or that phase such that I call it now. And yet I've had clients in the last few years, many of whom would spend a week away from alcohol and then two weeks and then they'd get three weeks and then they'd get maybe two months. And then especially in conjunction with biochemical repair, they would find that the alcohol did less and less for them as their biochemistry started to improve.

Chris Scott: I've even had a client recently who he gave me the funniest review of BioRebalance Restore, which is the supplement that I've helped design and that I talk about. And he said, "The weird thing is that when I take it, I feel like I've had two shots of vodka." I've never heard anyone say that. I'm like, "Wait in a good way or a bad way?" He was like, "Well, in a good way, I'm not drunk, but I just feel good. It's weird." And I said, "That's because you've been so deficient in your feel good chemicals that you now associate feeling good with drinking vodka." Think about that. That's an eye opener, which I'm not promising everyone that they should, I'm not saying go buy [inaudible 00:30:36].

Coach Tana: Everybody's got to go out buy it today.

Chris Scott: I wanted to share that because I found it to be highly entertaining and also not a bad thing if he's feeling good. Assuming it's not making him go under the store. I'm sure the 12-Step counselors would be like, "The BioRebalance is a cross addictive substance, so bring you right back to alcohol. You can't feel good ever again. Or you're putting yourself in danger." I want people to feel good because I want people to transcend the alcohol. I want them to make it a moot substance. I want them to see it as a past phase of life, and I want them to get to the point in life that I'm at where if that's something they want, everything's about what you want. You tend to attract the ultimate outcomes that you put your head towards, and I didn't want my life revolving around alcohol or recovery.

Chris Scott: The only paradox for me is that now the only time I think about recovery or alcohol is when I'm doing podcasts or working on Fit Recovery or in the course or with clients. But you can get to the point where it's kind of like a distant memory of a time in which you were less informed about a substance and profoundly mentally, physically, and spiritually unbalanced. And yet it's not a time that you're ashamed of because it was a learning experience. And you can't take pleasure or joy or spiritual satisfaction in things in my experience if you haven't had a lot of pain. So that's kind of the narrative that I've at least been able to construct around my experience, which involved a lot of pain a long time ago, it's that I'm grateful now that I went through all of that. Not that it was some kind of test of my character.

Chris Scott: At times, maybe there was some discipline or intestinal fortitude required, but I'm sure I had a leg up because of nutrient repair and support, my family members, wonderful parents, wonderful friends. But it was a necessary ordeal that I had to go through in order to reach the inner peace and level of understanding that I have about myself now. And of course, that's not even to say that I'm at the pinnacle of being enlightened, and I'm far from perfect. I have plenty of things to work on, but I have so much more compassion towards myself, and I understand the little processes that my body has from somewhat technical things like blood sugar swings to neurotransmitter depletion after a lack of sleep. I'm more easier on myself now if I get to the gym and my body is saying, "You can't do a huge workout today, take it easy."

Chris Scott: I'm more likely to listen than I was years ago. But it all accumulates into a valuable experience. And I think it's important for people to take control of that narrative for themselves. And if they're in that early phase now where it seems impossible, just remember that if you slip up and do something you don't intend to do, that's a learning experience. And a lot of people don't have a linear so-called recovery journey. But you can still get to the point where neither alcohol nor recovery, whatever that means to you is the purpose of your life. You can discover greater, bigger things like being a parent, running a business, climbing a mountain, whatever your goal is. It's important to have those things though. And I think it's very valuable to make notes and journal and excite yourself. Start infusing emotional intensity, positive emotional intensity with the things that in your ideal life, which you have the choice to start living now, your purpose will be wrapped up in.

Coach Tana: Pain and trials definitely have a way of refining us and building our character. And that's another thing is, it's hard to overcome addiction when that's the only thing that makes you feel good. And the more and more that I feel better, the less and less that I want to go back to those things. And that's the problem is, as humans, we really want to decrease the pain that we're in. And we want to increase pleasure. We want to feel good, that's what we want to do as humans. And so I know that the biochemical piece was a big part of my recovery because ever since I was a girl, I don't ever remember feeling good until I met alcohol, and now I feel great. And in fact, even now, I kind of went through a health scare where kind of they called it fever of unknown origin.

Coach Tana: I had it for a year and a half, and then it just got so bad because nobody could figure out what was wrong with me. But anyways, I don't eat gluten or dairy to this day, to now. And I love a good cheeseburger and I love a good pizza with the gluten and the dairy, but now I'm to the point where once I've eliminated gluten and dairy, I haven't had alcohol in five years, I'm feeling even better. No more brain fog, things like that. And my husband, he said, "Do you wish that you could go back?" And I was like, "In the beginning when I first got rid of gluten and dairy, it was very hard, especially seeing everybody else eat it, but the more and more that I choose not to eat it and the better I feel, I don't have any desire to even eat gluten or dairy anymore."

Coach Tana: And I've also found really great alternatives anyways, so that is helpful. But we just don't want to feel that pain. Just knowing, and you don't have to pave your own path to figure out the recovery, people have already done it. Chris and I, we've already done this. We're telling you, "You can feel better." And so just remembering that and moving forward and saying, "I will feel better. I can feel better." And maybe you're like me, you've never felt good. You don't ever remember feeling good. And now I just feel completely different. No more brain fog, no more sadness that just glooms over me all of the time. And it's really thanks to taking care of my body, getting rid of those toxins like alcohol and the things that I'm allergic to, and just moving forward from there and keeping all of that in mind.

Coach Tana: And you're never too old and you're never too young to quit alcohol. In fact, I think that it really needs to be something that's like a revolution where we're saying, "It is now cool to be sober, to have a sober mind and a sober body." This should be what is cool. This is what should be catching on. This is what groups should be getting together to enjoy life and be active versus sitting in a sticky bar, which is so funny because I don't go to bars that I don't really have any friends who I meet at bars or anything. But I did have one friend who, she graduated from something, this was a while back ago, and her party was at a bar and was like, "Oh, go." And I remember one person was like, "Are you sure you want to go? You don't drink alcohol and you've had a problem before."

Coach Tana: And I was like, "It's not a problem being around alcohol for me. I promise you, I'm going to go." Everything was so sticky in there. The bartender was like, "Do you want anything to drink?" And I thought about getting a water, and I was like, "No. Why is everything so sticky and stinky?" I never recognized that about a bar. But anyways, just knowing that you're not too old, you're not too young, and you can do this for yourself and recognizing that life is so much better without it.

Chris Scott: Hey everyone, Chris Scott here. If you like the information on today's episode regarding supplementation and empowerment strategies for addiction recovery, then please subscribe to the Elevation Recovery Podcast and leave us a rating and review on iTunes. And if you've benefited directly from this information, I'm confident in saying that you'll love the information packed online courses that Matt Finch and I have created. Matt Finch's, Ultimate Opiate Detox 4.0 is a six module, 30 activity course that contains video lessons, written lessons, PDF downloads, worksheets, audios, and much more.

Chris Scott: And it has everything you could possibly need to know to conquer opioid addiction in the easiest and most comfortable way possible. My own course, Total Alcohol Recovery 2.0 is the most cutting edge resource for anyone who wants to transcend alcohol and build their best lives. To get these courses, to learn more and to read testimonials, simply go to opiateaddiction support.com/ultimate. Again, that's opiateaddictionsupport.com/ultimate, for Matt's course. Or for my course, go to fit-recovery.com/course. Again, that's fit-recovery.com/course. You can also go to elevationrecovery.com to see the show notes for this episode.