Recovering from an addiction can be a tricky yet rewarding process. This personal and transformative journey helps you achieve and maintain sobriety, so it’s best to ensure that all you do compliments that. Taking good care of your overall well-being by eating healthy makes the process more seamless and can hasten your recovery to restore your former self.
This article explains why eating healthy is essential when recovering from addiction.
Addiction And Recovery: An Insight
Addiction is a multifaceted and complex condition that can occur due to prolonged exposure to substances, including alcohol and drugs. While it’s mainly associated with substance abuse, certain habits, including binge eating and thrill-seeking, can also spike dopamine levels. While these habits can be incredibly compromising, recovering can still be possible.
The good news is that help is always handy. Centers like westcoastrecoverycenters.com provide outpatient recovery treatments with varying levels of care, including partial hospitalization (PHP) and the intensive outpatient day program (IOP). These programs aim to address all drug addiction forms, including cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and marijuana.
While on your journey to addiction recovery, whether doing it independently or with some help, it’s best to pair it with an excellent, healthy diet.
Reasons For Taking A Healthy Diet When Recovering From Your Addiction
A healthy diet helps protect you from diseases and improves your mental health and overall quality of life. It’s also among the holistic approaches that quickly get you out of your addiction, as food can vastly distract you from the negative thoughts of getting back to taking drugs and relapsing into the habits you’re striving to break away from.
Below are the reasons for eating healthily during your addiction recovery journey:
Supports Physical Healing And Restoration
Eating healthy helps spearhead the physical healing and restoration process during addiction recovery. Chronic substance abuse can cause immense organ damage, weaken your immune system, and lead to nutritional deficiencies. Besides, it can cause some hormonal imbalances and get you nursing cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and heart attack.
Nutrient-dense foods that contain sufficient vitamins, essential minerals, and antioxidants can help reverse physical damage by repairing cellular damage. Moreover, they restore organ function and improve your immune system, helping you achieve optimal health.
Promotes Mental Well-Being And Emotional Stability
Particular foods help improve your brainpower, including fatty fish, green, leafy vegetables, berries, and walnuts. They contain vital nutrients for the brain, including all B vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, and antioxidants. Including these foods in your diet can tremendously enhance your mental well-being and stability.
Moreover, some foods’ minerals, including magnesium, iron, and zinc, help with neurotransmitter synthesis, including hormones like serotonin, which regulate your mood.
Being emotionally stable allows for a more seamless addiction recovery process.
Enhances Energy Levels And Overall Vitality
Better energy levels from healthy eating support your recovery by enabling you to participate in exercises and therapeutic activities actively.
Taking wholesome foods, including fresh fruits, leafy green vegetables, and carbohydrates like brown rice and oats, directly impacts your energy levels. Besides, they help enhance your focus, boost your energy, and enhance your physical stamina.
With addiction recovery comes a constant lethargy that can disorient you. This lack of motivation and laziness can get you thinking more about your old ways, putting you at risk of relapsing. Nonetheless, being more energetic can improve your enthusiasm, making the tedious recovery process tolerable.
Manages Cravings And Reduces The Risk Of Relapse
Resisting your old ways during your post-addiction recovery journey can be tempting. During this period, your cravings can also be high, and losing your grip to satisfy them can quickly get you into a relapse. However, eating healthy helps drive this feeling away, enabling you to pull complete focus into your addiction recovery process.
A diet containing carbohydrates, healthy fat, lean proteins, and fiber helps stabilize your blood sugar. Moreover, it improves your satiety and eliminates the urge to eat uncontrollably. That can help you maintain discipline and stay on the right track, eventually recovering from your addiction.
Fosters Social Support And Connection
Getting more involved in communal meal preparations and sharing healthy meals with others can help you discover an exciting side of life. Moreover, participating in groups with themes centered around healthy eating for post-addiction individuals can also help you enhance your recovery by promoting healthy habits. Furthermore, these relationships create a positive influence around you, enabling you to be more optimistic and eager about your recovery.
The best part about creating connections that revolve around building healthy eating habits is that it can help instill discipline, especially if you decide to resort to a better lifestyle. Even if you may pursue healthy eating solely, it can keep you on the right track by equipping you with habits that complement your addiction recovery journey.
Equips You To Cope With Stress And Triggers
Healthy eating provides a better resilience mechanism that helps maintain your focus whenever stress and other triggers for a relapse overwhelm you. Remember, stress can be the most significant deterrence to being consistently focused. However, the minerals and vitamins in healthy food can help you easily manage your stress and overcome the urge to fall back to your old ways.
Much better, healthy eating helps stabilize your blood sugar level, which leads to better mood and non-irritability that elevates your stress levels. Still, healthy eating can enhance the gut-brain connection, a phenomenon scientists have proven helps improve your mood and stress resilience.
Healthy eating also trains you to be mindful when consuming food, allowing you to enjoy the aromas, tastes, and textures. These are good distractions during your addiction recovery journey.
Improves Overall Quality Of Life
Dealing with an addiction can be stressful. It deteriorates your quality of life and strips away the joy of savoring the moments meant to excite you. Prioritizing proper nutrition and eating food that benefits your body helps your mental health and offers you more clarity, fostering a positive outlook on life.
When your body gets adequately nourished, it provides your body with the necessary energy to engage in activities you enjoy without feeling nagged. And apart from improving your quality of life, eating healthy food options help facilitate serotonin production. This hormone can be lacking when recovering from an addiction, making you more distressed and unwilling to continue rehabilitation.
Establishes New Positive Habits And Routines
When recovering from an addiction, the primary aim is to eliminate all micro-habits that fuel your urge to relapse. These tiny, negligible practices include ritualistic preparations involving gathering drug paraphernalia, time-based cravings, justification, and rationalizations for drug use. Those routines are often challenging to ditch and may get you back into your old and undesirable ways.
Having a healthy eating plan helps provide structure and routine in your life by eating regularly and healthily, which helps establish a sense of consistency and stability. Besides, doing so can facilitate your goal-setting and infuse the importance of self-achievement, self-care, and self-discipline.
Helps With Weight Management And Body Composition
Healthy eating helps you manage your weight as you recover from an addiction. That improves your confidence and self-esteem, infusing much-needed positivity that fuels your recovery journey. The best way to guarantee that is by ensuring balanced nutrition with a rich mix of essential macronutrients, including protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Moreover, portion control can also help you develop an awareness of the amount of food you consume, which helps your recovery significantly.
Reducing processed food intake can also help you ingrain in your mind the positive and beneficial habits you need to adopt for a complete revamp and restoring your older, conscious self.
Furthermore, healthy eating helps regulate blood sugar levels and improve your insulin sensitivity and lipid profiles, helping you properly manage your weight and enhance your confidence, which helps with your addiction recovery.
Enhances Your Resilience To Illnesses And Injuries
Drug and substance abuse can vastly impact your general health and increase your susceptibility to illnesses and injuries. The resulting nutritional deficiencies and an improperly functioning mental health system can all contribute to a weakened immune system, which puts you in a more compromised position.
When recovering from an addiction, your body will need time to readjust to your new ways and may not quickly repair your immune system. Eating healthily, however, hastens the process and enables you to build a robust defense against illnesses that might endanger you. The good thing is that a healthy diet can help you remedy gut microbiota disruption that plays an ideally vital role in your immune system regulation.
Conclusion
A healthy diet is vital in your addiction recovery in numerous ways. Choosing wholesome food options can help you recover quickly. In addition, pairing a good diet with regular exercise improves your resilience to the treatment.
Moreover, post-addiction recovery can be incredibly challenging if you opt to go this path alone. But surrounding yourself with positive influences creates a much-needed sense of community. Having people who fully support your healthy eating efforts, including your friends and family, can help remove obstacles.
With proper resilience and focus, you can overcome your addiction.