Newbies Nest

[KENSHO]

Newbies Nest

Wow, eating sugar TOTALLY cuts my cravings! Gives me a killer headache when I crash, but I'm totally ambivalent to alcohol. Interesting......

[Pavati]

Newbies Nest

MAE, all:

Wow - Kensho - you said a mouthful. The key for me was absolutely taking the choice off the table. Many have pointed out the analogy to a toddler. Keep saying no with absolute certainty and eventually he will lose interest. Give in a little now and then and the whining just gets louder and more persistent. Using the tools is key - and now for me it is remembering to use the tools even when I don't feel the cravings - reminding myself daily of the sober journey.

Congratulations on your 7 days, Honey! I'm so happy for you - I read about your conversation with your kids - very sweet.

I went through a low carb year that was great - a lot of people at work have "candy bowls" and I can't stop once I have one. I still rewarded myself with ice cream pretty frequently during that first month - it felt good to reward myself with something other than a drink...

Good night, all. Tomorrow is Friday - a day like any other day, but a day that often needs an air tight plan for us newbies. I'm looking forward to a sober, deep sleep and a Saturday and Sunday free from hangover.

Pav

[DreamThinkDo]

Newbies Nest

MAE Nesters!

Coffee - I need coffee!



Honey, well done on seven days - little by little, it becomes easier from this point on - just hang in there and put you AL blinkers on at all times!

Jane, I don't think I'd be able to stick to that lemonade cleanse for more than a day - :goodjob:

Kensho, I'm sure a sugar headache is a lot less severe than a hangover, so I'd rather have that...

As Pav said, Friday is just another day - not the starting gun for the race in seeing how much we can drink over the weekend. There's extra-strong butt velcro for the weekend - help yourself (and take some for your Nest neighbour, too). I think I'm going to copy Byrdie and indulge a bath with lots of bubbles and a DVD tonight - once I decide which one should come first. Friends are coming over for our movie night tomorrow, and I still have to decide on the menu.

Have a lovely AF Friday, each and everybody in the Nest - and thanks for making it such a joy and a learning experience to visit!

[Lavande]

Newbies Nest

Good morning Nesters,

Happy Friday to everyone
Menacing looking outside, tons of rain on the way I'm afraid.

Jane, wishing you a safe trip!
I deal with shorts by leaving them in the stores these days

Wishing everyone a great AF Friday! Get your plans together - you can do this

Lav

[DreamThinkDo]

Newbies Nest

Jane, dinner tomorrow will be a Moroccan chicken thing with sumac, cinnamon and lemon in filo - thinking of making them individually in a muffin tin. No decision yet on the movie, but I'm thinking of opera. Shorts - grin and wear them - have a lovely break! Will you be able to post? I've some coarse salt from last year's olive preserve project - been thinking of turning the salt into a scrub, maybe with lavender oil? Advice?

[DreamThinkDo]

Newbies Nest

Lav, your "weather" seems to be never-ending! Have a lovely Friday - hugs to the Stellas from me. Are you on Granny Lav duty this weekend?

[Kailey]

Newbies Nest

I've been around MWO for a while but haven't really posted much in the Newbies Nest. I didn't drink in February and got to 30 days for the first time. It was hard but I loved my new life and planned to never drink again.

My husband had joined me in not drinking the last week or so of February. One night early this month we both decided to give ourselves a night off. Worst decision ever. We're both back to our daily habit. For me, anyway, that ends today. I am not going to spend my weekend in a drunken haze. Instead I will spend the time getting back on track and sticking close to MWO.

I learned that as much as I hope my husband can also stop drinking, I need to protect my own quit no matter what.

[NoSugar]

Newbies Nest

jane27;1642599 wrote: I need to find a way to get around feeling deprived, or like sugar is off limits...

Hey, Jane. Eating shouldn't be as complicated as it has become, should it? In an opinion piece a couple of days ago, Mark Bittman put forth a pretty reasonable, simple approach that would be enough of a change for most people to be very healthy:

"Rather, let?s try once again to pause and think for a moment about how it makes sense for us to eat, and in whose interest it is for us to eat hyperprocessed junk. The most efficient summary might be to say ?eat real food? and ?avoid anything that didn?t exist 100 years ago.? You might consider a dried apricot (one ingredient) versus a Fruit Roll-Up (13 ingredients, numbers 2, 3 and 4 of which are sugar or forms of added sugar). Or you might reflect that real yogurt has two or three ingredients (milk plus bacteria, with some jam or honey if you like) and that the number in Breyers YoCrunch Cookies n? Cream Yogurt is unknowable (there are a few instances of ?and/or?) but certainly at least 18."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/op...f=opinion&_r=1

[NoSugar]

Newbies Nest

Welcome back, Kailey! I followed your personal thread. It was clear that you really loved your AF life but you went on a personal retreat to gain it. Are you going to do that this time or work it in to your "regular" life? As you know, there is so much information here and people who really want to help you if they can. :l

[NoSugar]

Newbies Nest

Jane, a paleo diet is more of a concept than a specific diet and there are many interpretations. A book that is pretty useful for helping people figure out what foods make them feel the best (and not unnecessarily restrict foods that they are just fine consuming) is The Personal Paleo Code by Chris Kresser.

[DreamThinkDo]

Newbies Nest

Kailey;1642671 wrote: I didn't drink in February and got to 30 days for the first time. It was hard but I loved my new life and planned to never drink again.


I am not going to spend my weekend in a drunken haze. Instead I will spend the time getting back on track and sticking close to MWO.


I need to protect my own quit no matter what.
Kailey, you've just made the best decision of your life in deciding not to drink. Sol posted this in the AA thread this morning - I'm sure she won't mind me reposting it here:

Solitaire;1642614 wrote: Last night at a newcomers group, we had a topic discussion:
The chairman asked: when did you accept that you can not drink anymore?
When did the penny drop?
Not those morning-after guilty, empty promises....
It was very interesting!
I shared that I was 4 months into my programme when it hit me, that I will NEVER have a drink again. I was sad for a moment. Similar to saying good bye to a long-time friend...
Have a lovely week-end!
Sol xxx

You already know how good an AF life can be - you've lived it for 30 days (and huge congrats on that). The moment I was reconciled to the idea that I would not ever again drink, everything became so much easier. There was no more bargaining to be done, no more internal monologues about modding, about having just the one to be sociable... Yes, I still do miss it from time to time - Al was a good friend, but a bad influence - but the party is over, as far as I'm concerned. Have a great weekend, one where you decide what to do, and not Al.

[KENSHO]

Newbies Nest

Though my sugar experiment was interesting last night, I have no intention of swapping one addiction for another. I was wondering why my knee joints have been hurting so much during the last 11 days (I have eaten the heck out of carbs). Going to look seriously into Paleo. Read a bunch last night - makes a lot of sense to me.

Have a wonderful Friday! Lest us not forget how the sneaky AL voice speaks a little louder on the weekends!

[New Dreams]

Newbies Nest

jane27;1642684 wrote:
I have no plans to give up coffee and im hoping milk is ok. Do you use any sugar substitutes, and could you recommend 1 Paleo book that is concise and simple?

I ran into this when I was researching the Paleo diet

The Beginner's Guide to the Paleo Diet | Nerd Fitness

The premise as I understand it is, we have of 150,000 yrs as hunter gatherers & only the last 10,000 yrs as an agricultural society... our diets changed with grains and even further with refined sugars, but our genetics have not.

I will probably borrow from the great array of no sugar recipes for desserts, but I am probably not ready to make the whole paleo change as I like my cheese too much. :H
I have started making my own whole wheat honey bread..which is not paleo as they use nut flours instead...but at least I've dropped the refined flour & additives.
I have noticed craving if I eat sweets ( girl scout cookies) and refined pastas...but the whole foods seem to set fine w/o setting off my triggers...so I looking to follow a whole foods route rather than the paleo.

[New Dreams]

Newbies Nest

Kailey;1642671 wrote: I
I learned that as much as I hope my husband can also stop drinking, I need to protect my own quit no matter what.

That's a great resolve... my DH & I quit together (28 days now)...but I have wondered what I would do if he fell off the wagon. I would like to think I wouldprotect my own quit no matter what...... but i know it would be harder. Good job!

[Byrdlady]

Newbies Nest

[QUOTE=DreamThinkDo

You already know how good an AF life can be - you've lived it for 30 days (and huge congrats on that). The moment I was reconciled to the idea that I would not ever again drink, everything became so much easier. There was no more bargaining to be done, no more internal monologues about modding, about having just the one to be sociable... Yes, I still do miss it from time to time - Al was a good friend, but a bad influence - but the party is over, as far as I'm concerned. Have a great weekend, one where you decide what to do, and not Al.

Dream....
Believe it or not, as I get ready in the morning, I think about what I'm going to post when I check into the nest. What 'THING' can I possibly say to someone new (or old) to help them make this journey easier? That is my constant mantra! What can I do, on this day, to make someone's quit stick? As we know, if I knew this for sure, I wouldn't be sitting here on a Friday morning with 74 emails from customers and a house that needs cleaning!! I'd be RICH on a yacht somewhere with my diet coke served with a tiny umbrella in it! But THIS morning, I was thinking about what separates the chronic relapsers (of which I was one) from the long termers who don't seem to struggle at all? WHAT is the [i]thing that separates these two groups? Then it hit me like a speeding ticket for Lindsey Lohan:

ACCEPTANCE.

As we all know, there are 5 stages of grief. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. When I was struggling so, I just couldn't quite ever give in that this had happened to me. I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that I am a common alcoholic. I couldn't GRASP never drinking again. So all the while I was holding out hope, but I was really sabotaging myself. In THIS case, HOPE is not our friend. I only began to succeed when I accepted that I will not drink again and I took the choice OFF the table, like Dream said. Just like the peanut allergy people, I'm sure they long for a peanut every now and again, but they push that thought OUT, realizing that the one peanut could kill them. This is exactly the same. We have to tell ourselves, NO, HELL NO! AL will NOT take another day of my precious life! To me, the choice IS off the table just like peanuts are for the others. It was a relief! Blessed, relief. The burden of choice had been lifted.

The folks you see on this site who are successful, and I won't mention any names but her initials are LAV, she has a ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY. I just thought she was a hardass, until she kept making it and I didn't. When I became a hardass myself, I understood this. We MUST be hardasses when it comes to AL....Not one, not ever! You will never see Lav saying....'at least for now, I won't drink' You never see her waiver and THAT is the key to this thing! As alkies, just the slightest bit of HOPE keeps that addiction alive and simmering just under the surface. It makes every single day an uphill battle. You can surrender to it now, or wait 10 years, I believe the result will eventually be the same. At some point you are going to have to STOP drinking or it is going to kill you. When you ACCEPT this, the road really does gets easier. MUCH easier, too.
Rahul asked me yesterday what the key to success is in this battle. It is acceptance [/i]that we will not drink another drop of AL no matter what and no matter who.

If what you havet tried in the past hasn't worked, try it this way! Say NO MORE, and mean it. You will be amazed. Go out and make the most of your precious life today! If I can do this, I know you can, too! xxoo, Byrdie