Thread: 30 days
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Old 01-01-2018, 09:51 PM
  # 19 (permalink)  
JustTony
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Originally Posted by PalmerSage View Post
Way to go, Tony! 30 days is amazing, not to mention eating well and working out too?! You're my hero!
LOL - I'm certainly no hero to anyone but I did want to reply to this - specifically the exercising and dieting bit.

When I first came on here a lot of the 'old timers' kept talking about recovery and not just sobriety. You know what? I didn't have a clue what the difference was or what they were talking about. Sincerely I had no idea - and at the time (arrogantly) I couldn't be that bothered to ask. I suppose - if I'm honest - I thought it might be some AA mumbo jumbo...... (DISCLAIMER - I'm not in AA, but it clearly does a fabulous job and it certainly isn't mumbo jumbo - I'm just describing what I was thinking over a month ago).

Being a tremendously vain person, one of the things I hated most about drinking was how I put on weight and lost my fitness. So in some ways, giving up alcohol had as much to do with vanity as it had to do with my liver dying inside of me (stupid eh?)

So after a few days I really started to think about diet, exercise, wellbeing etc as my primary concern. I also found more time for mindfulness as I woke early each morning - noting down things I wanted to do that day as well as exercise (read, sleep, shop, coffee, visit parents etc). I started to fill my days with things I wanted to do and not just one thing I didn't want to do (drink). It then began to creep up on me that this MIGHT be what people were talking about when they said recovery and not just sobriety? (I still don't know if this is what 'they' meant by the way). I was rediscovering and recovering my LIFE.

So far from being a multi-tasking hero, I think I stumbled across my version of recovery and not just sobriety. In other words I had to have all these things going on concurrently or I would have just caved in one night and started drinking again.

So my strong encouragement and advice to anyone on the start of their non-drinking journey is to find all the other things in life that you love (or used to love) and reintroduce them to your life as soon as practical. Then (perhaps) the drinking/non-drinking is just part of your existence and not your whole existence?

I hope that made sense and is helpful to someone?

Regards,

JT
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