Comedy Centered: What’s With The Sugar Cravings?

Hi. Hello? Is anybody out there? It is comedy centered. Hello? Hello. I am coming to you today. Different location, obviously. I am in northern Minnesota. I'm in the northern Minnesota, just outside of Duluth, for a little camping, a little relaxation, and I needed it. You can't really see it in the picture, but behind this cabin, there's a little pond there. Hey. And the frogs are so loud at night. And it's awesome. You think they're, like, right there with you. Hey, Chrissy. Hey, jewels. Oh, Jules, I was hoping.

Jewels, it's our celebration. I told you I'd wear a hat. Um, when I was packing, uh, I stopped at Walgreens because I needed some bug spray, and, uh, this hat jumped out at me, so. Right. Take it easy. For those of you who don't know, Jules is celebrating their one year sobriety birthday. Yay. Big ups. That is huge. That is amazing. That is doing the. The work, whatever that is. I hate it when people are like, are you doing the work? That sounds like I'm being lazy if I don't. But congrats. In fact, I'm glad you're here because I did want to have something official for you, jewels.

Oh, gosh, no, it won't work. Right. Dang it, dang it. I'm trying to light you a candle. I think it's too windy. Here you are. There you are, my dear. Candle in the wind. Literally, candle in the wind. That's you. Fantastic. All right, so let's get down to busy, busy. Hey, JC. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to talk a little bit about what are some of the things that become roadblocks from us making change. Right. And this came up out of just my normal life. Right. Having conversation with a girlfriend of mine, and she is interested and cutting back on alcohol, maybe abstaining for a period of time.

But she said that in the past, what she's really struggled with is that she is. She's worked very, very hard to lose some weight, right. And she's been managing to keep it off. But she said that in her past experiences, whenever she has given up alcohol, that she gains weight. Now, there's that. And it's funny because that can happen, too. A lot of people say, oh, well, as soon as you stop drinking, well, then you'll save all those extra calories and you'll automatically lose weight. That isn't necessarily the case for everybody.

First of all, when you quit drinking, you are saving those calories. And that's good. And it's good for your body, and it's good for all that kind of stuff. Right. But your gut health takes a while to heal and to reset. Also, one of the things with heavy alcohol use, there is a term, and it's not really a scientific one, but it's basically drink orexia, if you heard that term. And that is where someone is getting most of their caloric intake through the alcohol that they're consuming, like wine or beer or whatever.

And so they're not actually taking in as many calories. Well, what that does to the brain is it's the same reason why, like, yo yo diets and stuff kind of don't work very well sometimes is the fact that your body now is in a state of preparing for starvation. Right. And it's used to you not giving it what it needs or as many calories as it needs. And so abstaining from that alcohol at the beginning, if you've been under nutritionalized and you have been, you know, that kind of thing, boy, that can.

You can put weight on right there. You know, another thing that can happen, obviously, we get sugar cravings. Sugar, sugar, sugar. Well, what's alcohol? Sugar. It's sugar. It's yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, sugar. Wine. I was big wine person. Love my wine. Oh, your first sober, but not one year. Oh, your first sober birthday. Oh, I got it. Well, Jules, whatever. It's your first sober birthday and you. Sober birthday. Fantastic. I love that. You still get a hat for that. Still get a hat for that. I'll have to figure out.

Yeah, I should send it. But the sugar cravings, they will come hard for you. And you'll notice, at least I did. Boy, the sugar craving comes right at my normal happy hour. Isn't that strange? About 04:00? I swear, I need eating a lot of also, too. Then you're having emotional eating, right. Once you stop using alcohol, a lot of feelings come up, things that maybe you were suppressing. And, you know, boredom is something that we struggle with coping with as a society. And, you know, munching can help with that as well.

But it. The sugar cravings will. They will be there a lot of. For a lot of people. At least they were for me. And so a good friend of mine who was my sobriety coach early on, Keola said, reese's before relapse. Okay, so if the decision is have four ice cream cones in a row or a bottle of wine, have the four ice cream cones. You know what? Because once your body starts to reset and once your gut health starts to reset and all of that stuff starts coming back online, your liver functioning and all that stuff.

You're actually going to feel like doing stuff again. You're going to feel like going out. You're going to feel like walking and burning more calories. So, you know, but initially, you may not. You you. A depressive state might fall over you and you might. Maybe the struggle is just to keep it together that day. And you're. You're being very sedentary, and it will pass. It will pass. So do not worry about the weight gain. That's. Don't let that be the thing that holds you back. I remember years ago, and it still stuns me, but I understand the mentality of it.

There was a study done that said that women would rather, when polled, and I believe the age of the women polled were under 35 or something like that, and they gave them the control group, two options, basically. Would you rather live ten years? Would you rather die ten years early or gain or. Yeah, live ten years earlier or longer or gain ten extra pounds? There, I said it. Right. Would you rather live longer but you have to gain ten pounds or would you die earlier without the ten pounds? And overwhelmingly, that people would volunteer the women polled to have a shorter lifespan at a lesser weight, that's.

That's another subject. That's a whole other thing that's probably out of my area of expertise. But don't let the waking really be the thing. If you. If you can just lean into it, just go into it and say, I'm gonna gain weight, I want to because that means, that means I'm getting healthy, I'm getting the nutrition that I need. And the sugar cravings at 04:00 will stop. They will. But you will probably experience them. You can for a while. It depends on how often you were drinking. As we discussed last week, there's a lot of people that fall into gray area drinking, which is about 30% of the population.

The fall between non abuse, where, you know, they do not abuse alcohol, and people that are alcohol dependent or abuse alcohol. Right. But for 30% in there, if you're a gray area drinker, even having one glass of wine each night, right. You don't think that that one glass does all that terribly much to your system, but they've actually shown that even just having, like. So if you have one drink a night, right. And maybe you have two on the Friday or a Saturday. Right. So if you're at ten drinks a week, 1010 drinks a week, you can also start experiencing, unfortunately, and you won't be able to see it in this light.

But I'll take a picture and I'll post it on Cadre and show it to you. You can develop what's called wine face. Wine face. Yeah. It's kind of crazy to think about it. But, you know, we all know that alcohol dehydrates you, right. It's a diuretic. Right. And so one of my points being is a lot of times, too, once we abstain from alcohol, and especially if we've been using it really heavily, we're going to start hydrating ourselves. You might be also bloating. You're getting some water weight. Right.

But wine face actually corresponds. There are certain. I don't know if you're gonna be able to look at my hat. One of the trademarks is deep lines here, in here. Right there. And having, like, a ruddy complexion and redness and all that. I got it all. I got a wine face. And it does get better over time and all that stuff. I know, right, Jules? I didn't know that either. In fact, I'm super mad. I don't have. Maybe someone has an Android out there. I don't iPhone. But I found that there was. There was something that you could download and I think it was called something mirror, anyway, but it would.

It would put your. It would. You could upload a photo of yourself and it would show you. It was an anti drinking campaign done out of scotland, I believe, but it will. It would actually age your face and show you what you would look like. And that's just consuming as little as ten drinks a week. So again, there is no safe amount of alcohol. There really isn't. It does stuff, you know, but as you start to reset and a lot of people, too, aren't necessarily interested in. That's it. I'm never touching a drink again.

A lot of people want to say, hey, I want to manage this. I want to treat this, you know, you, sarah silverman, if you're familiar with her famous comedian, much more famous than I am, but I think she's. I think she's a hoot. She would. She says, make it a treat. That's what she says about using cannabis. But, you know, if you can. If you can make alcohol, you know, if you can. If you're not in the abuse category and. But you want to make some of these changes and you want to be able to moderate or cut back, whatever.

Whatever the path is for you or you're just. You're just curious, you know. Yeah, I lost my train of thought for a second. I started thinking about wine face. I want to look. I want to see what it looks like, but I'm also terrified to look at have you. I don't like those face aging things. Or, like, have you anyone else? I had one. It's like, upload a photo and we'll guess your age. It gets me two years older than I actually was. I'm like, ha, thanks a lot, stupid AI. But, yeah, it's wine face. So there are all these little things that are, that are happening on such a microscopic surface in our bodies when we ingest alcohol, right?

And so when you're eliminating alcohol or you're cutting back alcohol because you want to reframe the relationship with it, you want to, you know, I don't know control is the right word, but if you feel like you can, I encourage you to do so. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of great, you know, resources for doing it, too. For me, I know it's not my best option to indulge in, but that's for, that's for a variety of reasons. But, yeah, the, the, but the sugar cravings, I guess, is really what I was trying to, trying to get at having the.

Oh, here comes the part of that's what's distracting, too, is I got a smoky fire. The sugar, the weight, all these things can keep us trapped. They can really keep us trapped. And it's the best stew is there, are there. There's a japanese philosophy, and I'll kind of close on this, but there's a japanese. A japanese philosophy of artistry, right. Some people believe that a sculptor creates, you know, a piece of sculpture. Right. This japanese philosophy is that the sculpture already exists. You just have to reveal it.

And the process of sculpting it is revealing it and removing it. Right. And so try to think of yourself that way. Try to think of yourself in those terms, is that you are a treasure, you know, and you've got stuff on you. I also like to use the metaphor of barnacles, because barnacles, if you're not familiar, they're little guys that hang on to the bottom of ships. And periodically the barnacles have to get scraped off the sides of the boats because the boats don't, you know, operate as smoothly, and you get in, they don't.

It's not smooth sailing. Right. So sometimes we have to either scrape off the barnacles or keep removing the clay until us, our work of art, you know, can appear because it already exists. It already exists. You're already doing it. You already have it. It's. It's revealing it yourself to you one little layer at a time. So, um. Wow. Once again. Man, the time always goes so fast. I love meeting up with you guys every Sunday, and, yeah, I feel like if you. Do you guys like the television show Sunday morning?

I do. They always have. Like, here's a minute of nature. I'll give you just one. I'll exit on some. I'll exit on some nature. Now the frogs are gonna be all quiet.