You Think You’re an Alcoholic BUT You Might Not Be
Attn: Female entrepreneurs of the world.
You run a business – in fact, you run a REALLY successful business. However, after a day of being the boss woman, you go home and you’re mum, you’re wife, you’re cook, you’re cleaner….
After everything, you just CRAVE a glass of wine. It’s your reward, you tell yourself.
It starts off being a glass.
Then it quickly becomes a couple of glasses…
And then, a whole bottle.
Deep down you’re extremely concerned.
“Is this the path to alcoholism? Am I becoming an alcoholic?”
But here’s the thing.
In between being the awesome boss lady at work and being the domestic goddess at home – where is the time for YOU?
Since I’ve started working with high achieving entrepreneurial women, I’ve noticed a pattern – they’re all highly disciplined women.
These women have their shit together.
I mean, they didn’t go from having nothing to building a multi-million dollar empire by not being disciplined. But their problem with discipline isn’t that they have none – in fact, it’s quite the opposite: they have too much of it.
Their discipline is turning them alcoholic!
Now, I know that sounds a little crazy, but let me explain.
When you run a highly successful business there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. These women are always under the pump, with a million and one things to do every single day. They mostly eat at their desk or on the run. Sometimes they don’t eat at all.
Over the years, they notice they’ve stacked on weight, which they’re not proud of. They’ve become extremely tired all the time. They’re often irritable and grumpy.
They recognise that this is having a negative effect on their relationships – both at work and at home. They feel guilty that when they’re at home they have no energy to have meaningful conversations with their husbands or children. They’re annoyed that they’re so good at keeping it together for work and at home, but when it comes to themselves – they feel like they’ve lost control.
But this is their dilemma.
Looking at themselves in the mirror, they see the 10kg they’ve gained in the last 10 years. But, rather than seeing it for what it is – a sign of all the sacrifices they’ve made to build their business, the late nights working and nursing their baby, the never ending list of commitments they have every day – these women see it as a sign of FAILURE.
They feel responsible for their weight gain, and believe that if they got the weight down, all their problems would go away – you know, the crappy sleep, the stress, the low energy, the irritability.
They embark on a weight loss challenge.
500kcal a day for the next 30 days, kickboxing 3 times a week. Surely, that would do it, right? I mean, if they cut calories in, and increased calories out, surely they would lose weight?!
Wrong.
They do lose a bit, and their energy levels even improve for the first couple of weeks.
And then shit goes south very quickly.
Their weight loss stalls, their energy levels are back down, they’re hungry ALL THE TIME and they become moody.
Then. The weight starts to creep back up. They’re hungry all the time, and they can barely drink enough coffee to keep themselves functioning at work. Then at home, they find themselves not just looking forward to a glass of wine to simply wind down at night.
They are CRAVING alcohol.
Like, they have an insatiable need for it. The scariest part is, having the wine actually makes them feel BETTER. And this freaks them out.
What they don’t realise at this point is that their body is burnt out. That they have a dysfunction of their HPA-Axis, and the fix isn’t to check into an alcohol rehab centre, but rather to start actually taking care of themselves.
Because what’s really happening?
They are under-fuelling their body, leading their body to burn alcohol as fuel.
So the less they eat, the more desperate for alcohol their body gets.
The alcohol is there serving as energy that the body is dramatically lacking in. It is also serving as a relaxant to help them get SOME sleep, so they can somewhat function during the day.
But the problem with alcohol is that it is non-nutritive, and whilst there is alcohol in the system, the body will preferentially break down the alcohol and metabolize that in favour of anything else you eat or drink.
What we have noticed is that when the HPA Axis function is restored, the craving for alcohol typically goes away within the first 3 weeks (we just had a client last week lose their alcohol cravings after 5 days of eating right for their body!). Funnily enough the women we work with also start to notice other positive changes – improved energy levels, better sleep, weight loss, improved satiety. What fixing the root-cause does is it allows the regulators of all the hormonal and metabolic pathways to restore, and that in turn will help the body function optimally again.
The reality is, if you are in burnout, and your perceived alcoholism is indeed a symptom of a bigger problem, you will be exhibiting a whole host of other signs and symptoms too.
So, if you feel like this sounds a bit like what you’re going through then it’s worth us looking further into this, so just shout out to us here we’ll work out a time to chat!
