It is important to remember that if it happens, it is a normal part of recovery. People in recovery sometimes gain a lot of weight.
This can be due to having an insatiable appetite in early recovery, uncontrollable sugar cravings or a shift in the addiction from drugs to food. When eating during recovery, the goals are to 1 set up a normal eating pattern, 2 keep levels of sugar in the blood as steady as possible, and 3 eat lots of healthy foods that replenish the body.
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CATIE ensures that these resources, developed to help prevent the transmission of HIV, hepatitis C and other infections, are written and reviewed by health experts for content accuracy. Jump to Navigation Jump to Content. Search the site. Hepatitis C Subscriptions Become a Member. Active use Detoxification Recovery. Drink high-calorie fluids like meal replacement drinks, milkshakes, chocolate milk, fortified malted drinks or soy milk.
Take a daily multivitamin-mineral supplement. Unfortunately, sugar likes to hide in lots of places you might not expect. Processed foods and sugary drinks are both high in sugar. Watch out for these ingredients on your food and drink labels:.
Starting the day with a healthy breakfast and increasing protein intake can help you manage sugar cravings all day long. Stock up on healthier alternative snacks like nuts, yogurt or fruit, and curb dining out as much as possible. Getting plenty of rest and taking supplements like a multivitamin can also help maintain appropriate appetite and nutritional health.
Be sure to consult with your physician before making any major dietary changes, though. Risks of eating too much sugar may lead to:. At Footprints Beachside Recovery, we treat addiction by dealing with all aspects of wellness , including physical fitness. We know what it takes to get through this, and we can help you or your loved one recover, too.
Are you having trouble talking to your loved one about addiction or seeking treatment? Overcoming addiction stigma is one of the main roadblocks people encounter before getting help. But death is very much a reality in his life. His last serious girlfriend also used drugs and died from an overdose. Over the past six years, he's lost seven people he cares about to addiction. He'd like to find love, build a relationship and have a family but says, "It would be dishonest, and I never want to hurt anybody.
That's the biggest problem. He knows that he has a lot to live for, but he often forgets that and struggles to imagine a future. And because he can't stray far from his dealer, a dream he does have remains on hold indefinitely. The sign of an addict. The sensation Todd had the first time he popped a Percocet, that feeling he wanted to hold onto for the rest of his life, was the giveaway.
What offers no special high for most people or may even make them feel queasy became Todd's aspiration. And part of the problem, says Gitlow, is that "you don't know in advance what person you're going to be. Todd may be functioning now, but Gitlow warns that tolerances and doses often change. As an addictive disease progresses, it is also influenced by life events and stressors.
What happens if Todd loses his job someday or can't afford his preferred pills? Safe injection sites in San Francisco could be first in the US. It's only in the end stage that they're nodding off in an alley and have a pretty good shot of dying. What Todd needs, Gitlow says, is help from a doctor who is certified in addiction medicine and can treat his disease. Not a unique story. It didn't start with a pill for Lisa. Her first addiction took hold at 12, when she began cutting herself.
Carving into her flesh released dopamine in her brain, giving her a high, she says. The first time she did it, she never anticipated a rush. She was overwhelmed emotionally and simply acting out. But cutting became her way to self-medicate because it offered her solace, easing the emotional pain of living in a household full of screaming.
Now, at 23, Lisa opts for heroin. And because of it and other opioids she's used, "I hurt myself a lot less. The difference now is that she, like Todd, no longer seeks a high.
When she shoots up each morning, she insists, "I just do enough to stay well" through the day and not feel physical pain. She works hard, always has. She excelled in her college-prep private school, where she was dubbed "gifted and talented," she says.
She takes her job as a store manager seriously and enjoys a supportive marriage. No one at work knows that her day begins with a call to her dealer. If she has track marks, a simple long-sleeved shirt hides the evidence.
How she found heroin, she says, is not unique. Long plagued by tendonitis in her knees and two herniated discs in her back, Lisa tried everything. Steroid injections gave her migraines, and her stomach couldn't handle anti-inflammatories.
Physical and aquatic therapies offered little relief, as did deep-tissue massage. Finally, four years ago, a physician wrote out a prescription for pain pills. She found comfort in those legal opioids. But then came the crackdown on opioid prescriptions, she says, effectively ending her lawful pain management.
Once her pills ran out, she turned to buying them on the street. They were hard to find, though, and the cost became prohibitive. An old friend, a heroin user, suggested that she give his drug a try. Where she lives in Texas, near the Mexican border, the price of heroin can't be beat. The same product, she says, would cost up to five times as much in other parts of the country.
Her husband doesn't do drugs. He barely drinks. And although he'd prefer she kick the habit altogether, he's committed to being by her side -- so much that he keeps Narcan, the overdose antidote drug, in their home and has watched training videos to learn how to administer it in case she overdoses.
Lisa says a small handful of friends know that she uses heroin. Everyone else, her family included, believes she's hooked on "just pills. Pills and other vices don't come with the same sort of judgment.
You do heroin, and you're the scum of the earth," she says. Everybody's problem. Heroin users weren't always "the scum of the earth. Today, there are politics behind which drugs are demonized and which aren't, and much of that is rooted in racism, says Dr. Police officer adopts homeless mother's opioid-addicted newborn.
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