How Nutrition And Fitness Can Help You Overcome Addiction
You might not think so, but diet and exercise can make a huge difference for people in recovery from addiction. There are many reasons why focusing on your health can help you make huge strides in overcoming addiction. For one thing, you find yourself more focused on something other than your addiction, which can help on its own.
Simply being a healthier person can make a big difference in a person’s life and habits. You will also be working toward improving your brain, your heart, and even your liver and kidneys – all things that can be affected by addiction. If you’re ready to get healthy, and clean, here are ways food and fitness can help.
Nutrition and Addiction
You may be surprised to learn that some addiction recovery places actually offer nutrition courses for addicts. In fact, addicts will get specialized diets that can help them stay clean and stay healthy. Eating a planned and healthy diet, and knowing what foods will keep you at your optimal health are good things to learn for everyone.
Things like sugar and caffeine are addictive, so they are some of the items that addicts should avoid when they work on their healthy diets. Foods like fruits and vegetables can help with vitamins and antioxidants that will work with brain health, making them better at battling addiction. It’s important to learn about what foods could be triggers to addiction, and which foods can heal your body.
Sports and Fitness
Even more so than nutrition, fitness can be a great way to battle addiction. Sports can even be a way to help kids and adults avoid addiction in the first place. With sports, you’ll find that staying fit and being able to play and stay focused can sometimes be enough to keep you from wanting to stray to drugs. That’s not to say that some sports celebrities don’t get addicted to drugs, but it can give you something to keep you, and kids, off the streets and out of trouble.
What sports, and fitness in general, do is help your brain release feel good hormones, which have been comparable to the high from some drugs. This natural high, from endorphins in the brain, is a safe high and a good high. It’s sometimes called the runner’s high, and comes from cardio fitness.
Once you start to get into that healthier mindset and spend more time focusing on eating healthy and staying fit, it will be that much easier to stay away from drugs. It might not be the complete answer, and you still should successfully complete a rehab program and go to therapy and /or NA or AA meetings as part of your recovery process.
