Marijuana: Vote "NO" on legalization for recreational use and keep it out of the hands of addicts and people struggling to stay sober.
Getting Healthy in Recovery? Not so fast!
When we get sober, we often perceive ourselves as we were before we started using, healthy, spontaneous, strong with a dependable instinct, good coordination and eager to take on the world. Most of us learn very quickly that our bodies will not respond to us as before. Even though we eat healthy, we gain weight. As a matter of fact, in the first six months of our recovery, we might gain up to 20 pounds or more. Baffled we wonder how this is possible.
The answer is not that hard to understand. For years we starved our body with poor nutrition, supplementing our breakfast with drugs, our lunch with sugary snacks and our dinner with more drugs and alcohol. We would eat a real meal maybe once or twice a week. Lack of vitamins would deplete our body, lack of food would put serious metabolic strain on our bodies and because we starve ourselves to save money for the sake of drug use our bodies adapt to our demands and learn to live in starvation mode.
When we get sober and we introduce a real regimented diet back into our system, our metabolism is not ready to just switch over gears and therefore processes food very slowly because our colon muscles have not had to do their job for a very long time. Just like the rest our body, the colon is not ready to run five miles after not having had so much as a walk around the block in years. And so food moves slowly through the body and the body converts everything it can into fat because it tries to save itself thinking it is still in starvation mode.
After about a year and in some cases more depending on the level of stress in ones life, the body begins to readjust. If proper vitamins and hydration are part of a healthy diet, chances are, recovery will be a lot more pleasant. Bathroom habits will be difficult in the beginning with a colon that cannot do its job properly. However, over time the body will heal itself and with plenty of sleep, healthy food, vitamins and water, the body will function again in the way it did before and in some cases even better.
Taking away a food group, not a good idea
People in recovery should be cautious to take on new frontiers such as becoming a vegetarian. To take away a food group from a body that has already been put through enough can cause anemia, which is irreversible (in some cases) as well as an iron deficiency. It is good to follow the rule of the blood type to see if a vegetarian diet is right. Typically, blood type “O” is better off keeping animal protein in the diet. When blood type “O” is exposed to a vegetarian diet, the body slowly atrophies in its muscular tissue and wound healing and infection is a lot harder to control as the body needs protein to restore muscular and skin tissue. A good book on blood type diets is “Eat Right For Your Type” by Dr. D’Adamo.