Around the time of my early days in sobriety, I was invited to publish a chapter in a textbook on integrative approaches to substance use disorders. My chapter addressed the use of nutrition and supplements in the treatment of these disorders. As a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition with training in discovering and addressing the root causes of disease, it was my kind of assignment. I compiled all of the up-to-date literature on nutrition as it relates to recovery from alcohol use. I also started following sober accounts on social media to learn more about the alcohol-free world, something I was interested in both personally and professionally. The textbook chapter was published with a wealth of information, but what became evident to me was that there was a glaring gap in the discussions I saw out in the real world about nutrition in recovery, most of which excluded any mention of it at all. While many people were talking about the—also very important—tools for emotional recovery and abstinence from drinking, what was missing was a path for healing the damage that alcohol does to the physical body. This realization prompted me to dive into this world from a nutrition standpoint to strengthen my understanding of alcohol’s impact on key areas of the body and the ways nutrition could heal it. 

As a former drinker myself, I remember regularly trying to exercise, supplement, and [insert wellness trend here] my way out of my heavy alcohol consumption. It wasn’t until I quit drinking and started digging into the research that I began to understand just how truly toxic and problematic alcohol is to our health. We are mostly taught that alcohol affects the brain and liver, but the truth is chronic alcohol use has a negative effect on most areas of the body including the digestive system, the gut, metabolism, heart health, and, yes, the brain and liver. To heal all of this damage, I developed an approach that eventually became my online program which I named Functional Sobriety. In the Functional Sobriety approach, we focus on three key areas of healing: gut, hormones, and brain. These three systems, if unbalanced—no matter what the cause—are often the drivers of multiple symptoms of chronic and acute illness.

Let’s briefly discuss each:

The gut 

Alcohol consumption disrupts the balance of bacteria in the microbiome, which can contribute to digestive issues, skin concerns, immune, and autoimmune issues.