What’s the Best Diet for Newly Sober Alcoholics and Addicts?

When Yahoo News approached New Directions for Women about the importance of good nutrition in early sobriety, we were excited and humbled to share our experience. Our clinical team takes pride in nourishing our women, their children and their families with bountiful, flavorful, and colorful whole foods. We believe that good nutrition is not only crucial but imperative in healing the mind, body and soul from the disease of addiction. At New Directions for Women, we believe sugar is another form of a drug, which is why you will not see any foods with added sugar on our menu. Sugar creates elevated levels of dopamine – a neurotransmitter that helps control the brains reward and pleasure centers similar to drugs and alcohol. Sugar gives you that fast high and deep crash which gives you depression. In other words, because of these similarities, when one is in early recovery and feeling depressed, one will begin to crave the drug they have just detoxed from. Thus, it is critical for people in early recovery to develop a foundation of good eating and create those healthy boundaries. For this reason, our menu typically features lots of fresh vegetables, fish, lean meat, and whole grains – but no refined sugar.

In preparation for the article, we met with our Chef, Salvator Calandrino as his main goal is to elevate the meals we offer to the highest standard of wellness, and to educate our women on a healthy nutrition plan throughout their recovery process. He believes that ‘you can’t live healthy on short-term diets alone. You have to make it a commitment to eat and live healthy and clean’. This mantra is a pinnacle of how we seek to help our women. We want healthy food to be something they crave. We want them to know how to prepare healthy snacks, and to cook fresh and delicious dinners that don’t break the budget. We want this be second-nature for them. We want our women to feel confident about their health and to be proud of their ability to feed themselves and their families a nutritious meal, low in saturated fats and loaded with vitamins and minerals, every day. When our women eat better, they feel better, and the change in their health is noticeable.

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New Directions for Women (NDFW) is a drug and alcohol rehab and detox treatment provider offering services for women, pregnant women, women with children up to thirteen years of age. For nearly 4 decades, we have expanded to become a internationally recognized, comfortable, luxury, attractive 30-bed residential rehab located in Southern California (CA) in Costa Mesa, near Newport Beach’s Back Bay and Nature Preserve. State licensed and certified, our award winning facility touts a very high recovery rate.