Can Food and Exercise Substitute for Alcohol?

I certainly enjoyed my alcohol through college and as an adult until I was 35. The continuous hangovers started to wear on me and becoming a husband and father gave me new direction and incentive to change my life style.

I am very concerned by the amount of alcohol consumed by college students and even by adults to any age. The point of alcohol is to change our mood by blocking our left brain thinking.

It has the same affect as pot and other drugs. We feel the need to get out of our logical, calculating, organizing left brain thinking and into our comical, intuitive, creative, loose brain thinking of the right brain hemisphere.

Some of the side affects of so much abuse is deteriorated thinking capacity, narrower range of interests, less exercise, more weight gain, and poorer performance the next day. It is as though we have gotten locked into the ceiling of our professional life and no longer see the need to learn more about what has proceeded us in the world and what is happening that is new.

Healthy eating and exercise can change our mood. Eating the right foods gives our body nutrition it recognizes and can digest easily. The body then does not need to store food and will release fat that has been used to encapsulate food it did not recognize.

When the body does not recognize food, it thinks it is going to starve so it starts storing more food. This encapsulated food is prevented from visiting and destroying our organs. Most of this stored food is acidic in nature which would rapidly deteriorate our important body parts.

Natural food is alkaline and creates optimum performance of all organs including the brain. The more natural alkaline foods we eat, the leaner and higher performance we get from our muscles, brain, and organs. Athletes will reach peak performance consuming an optimum diet.

Exercise can change our mood just as easily as alcohol. It is more subtle.

Exercise can create heavier breathing which then leads to the production of endorphins, oxygenation of the blood, and exhaustion of the muscles.  The result is a relaxed body that feels more mellow. Tension and anxiety produced by the days events are substituted with a relaxed nervous system that places the events at a distance.

The affect is much the same as alcohol, but with a healthy conscious feeling instead of a distancing consciousness losing track of who we are and our surroundings.

Everyone loves to meet people after work and alcohol is the leveler that brings everyone to the same consciousness where acceptable conversation is given more latitude. It gives us an excuse to say things we wouldn’t say in a conversation at work and we can give people more latitude for the intelligence of their conversation.

But when it comes to drinking after work to put the day away, exercise could certainly be a good start. After exercise, we don’t need to drink to the same mind numbing extent because we have already released the anxiety and tension. Now we can have a few drinks to be social and not to kill the pain.

Good food and exercise makes us feel better about ourselves. It makes feel gratitude for the opportunity to perform at higher levels both physically and mentally. As our desire to feel better naturally grows, our desire to engage in destructive behavior starts to lessen.

Can we make this transition in our daily lives?

At the college and work place level we certainly take the edge off our competitive advantage by numbing pain and releasing all our tension with only alcohol. In college we don’t learn what we could. In the work place, we might stop growing.

The world changes every few years and what we are doing and learning may be obsolete soon. We shouldn’t be complacent, we should be preparing for a new tomorrow. We should be building our personal capacity on a daily basis.