The “alcoholic metabolism” drives the physical addiction. This glitch in metabolism boosts the sedative effects of alcohol to your cells. It keeps the body bristling with high doses of sugar to counteract the gloomy side of hypoglycemia. And it creates excess toxins in the body that demand a little extra effort in your own struggle for survival.

Meanwhile, your mind keeps finding all kinds of uses for alcohol. It interprets the way you feel, moment to moment, and knows exactly why you “need another drink.” But the mind can’t always be trusted. Your body can be near death with alcoholic damage and your mind can want another drink.

But you can change. When you quit drinking and change to a healthy lifestyle, your cells begin to heal and your metabolism begins to revitalize itself. This is the key. After awhile, you begin to feel rejuvenated, strong, and healthy.

Almost all alcoholic drinkers suffer from malnutrition. Given the amount of alcohol in their diets alone, they don’t stand a chance of gaining proper nourishment. Why? Alcohol robs the body of vital nutrients.

This happens in two ways:

1. The alcoholic diet leaves little room for nutrient-rich foods. Alcohol is a food itself—with calories but no nutrients. When too many of your diet’s calories come from alcohol, you don’t have much appetite left for other foods but yet you haven’t received any nutrition.
2. When you burn calories, your cells require nutrients and burning the “empty calories” of alcohol forces your cells to use reserve nutrients they have stored—especially the B-vitamins and vitamin C. By drinking heavily on just one occasion, you can completely deplete these reserves.

Alcoholic malnutrition kills slowly. Cells weaken from starvation and become disease-prone. Your behavior can even become bizarre, your thinking impaired. After awhile, one of your organs will give out. If it’s a vital organ, chances are you’ll die. But if you change your diet, the disease process will stop. The latest research links diet to all major diseases (heart disease, cancer, stroke) and most minor diseases you can think of. But how does diet cause such a long-range debilitating disease as alcoholism? At the root of the dietary problem lies addiction. The alcoholic diet is unbalanced because of various food addictions. The alcohol itself is a dual addiction: a food addiction and a drug addiction.

Food addiction, like drug addiction, depends on a biochemical craving. Your body’s biochemistry becomes so dependent on a particular food that it grows to expect that food. As with drugs, some foods are more addicting than others. Also, when you stop consuming an addictive food, you experience withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms can be mild, such as headaches, muscle aches, back aches, cramps, diarrhea, constipation, confusion, irregular pulse rate, anxiety, nausea; or more acute, such as dizziness, extreme emotional upset (tears, anger, depression), paranoia, minor convulsions (shakes and tremors), and wild fluctuations in blood pressure.

Among “foods,” alcoholic beverages and sugar foods are probably the most addicting you can find. But the additional drug effects of alcohol make it more addicting than sugar. So when you quit drinking, you must withdraw from both addictions: the food (or sugar) addiction of alcohol and the drug addiction of alcohol.

You can withdraw from the drug effects in a short time. Depending on the amount of alcohol you drink, severe withdrawal symptoms will last for one to three weeks, and minor symptoms will continue for a few months.

You will begin your withdrawal from the sugar addiction if, when you stop drinking, you stop eating sugar-foods as well. In this case, cravings for both sweets and alcohol will diminish after a few weeks, and disappear after six months to a year. If you stop drinking, yet continue to eat sugar foods, your hypoglycemia will drive you crazy with regular cravings for alcohol and sweets.

Instead of toxic drinks like alcohol, coffee, and energy drinks, try drinking just plain water throughout the day. Caffeine is highly addictive on its own, and reinforces other addictive habits. For the best results, caffeine, in all its forms, needs to be cut out of the diet. Water can improve energy levels much more effectively than refined sugar, energy drinks, or coffee. Drinking water also increases metabolism overall, flushes the body of unhealthy toxins, and contributes to longevity. Most experts agree that a person should drink in ounces, half the weight of the body. For example, a 160 pound person should consume 80 ounces of water.

Make sure you start the day with a hearty breakfast. Breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day. Eat plenty of whole grains and fresh fruits to give you slow-release energy that will fuel your mind and body for the day. Eating a high fiber breakfast will help you deal with stress better and will lessen your cravings for sugar, caffeine, and snacks. Include plenty of healthy foods like greens, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds to help level out the extreme energy highs and lows and to improve mood, reduce cravings, and improve mental function. Diet, nutrition and plain water are the key to keeping the brain chemistry properly balanced for lots of energy throughout the day-- not sugar.

Understanding more about the brain chemistry demystifies the puzzling energy highs and lows, and helps the recovering alcoholic make smart choices about what he eats and drinks. Alcohol detoxification is not a treatment for alcoholism. The best treatment for alcoholism is making the decision to quit and changing your lifestyle and diet.

Yes, there is a cure for alcoholism.

Your basic goal: to change your metabolism for greater health. That means you need to eliminate alcohol and other addictive foods from your diet, and change some other parts of your diet as well.

But be patient: once the healing process begins, it takes time to recover. Your body needs time to repair the damage. But the best news is that you begin healing right away. In fact, the healthier your new lifestyle, the faster you will heal. You can heal most of your damaged cells, at least to some degree, because you have your body’s replacement policy going for you. Your body creates new cells every minute to the tune of about three to four hundred million per day! These new cells replace old and dying cells. When you stop drinking, the new cells your body creates will not be “alcoholic” cells. They will never have tasted alcohol. These new cells will be healthy, if you continue to follow a healthy diet.

Scientists say that every seven years the body replaces every cell (except nerve cells) at least once. That means the body renews itself and becomes a completely new conglomeration of cells. A new you.

This new you begins every day. Now.

Sources and Resources

• Living Free, Finding freedom from habits that hurt, Griffin, Musson, Allen, Kissinger. LifestyleMatters.com
• How to Quit Drinking Alcohol Without AA
• Potatoes Not Prozac by Kathleen DesMaisons, PhD.
• Addictive Nutrition, (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1998).
• Radiant Recovery is an "online community ... healing addiction through nutrition."
• Beyond Prozac by M.J. Norden, M.D. (Regan Books, 1995)
• Sugar Blues by William Dufty (Warner, 1975)
• Food for Recovery by Joseph D. Beasley, M.D. and Susan Knightly (Addictionend.org, 2001)