Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. Are you thinking about quitting or reducing your drinking? Well, you will not believe the changes that your body will go through. There's going to be unexpected improvements, surprising health benefits. Listen, your body will transform in ways that you would never expect. So stick around to find out the eight main things that are going to happen to you when you stop drinking alcohol. You do not want to miss this video. This could be the video that changes everything for you, because I promise you one thing you've got nothing to lose and so much to gain from getting that shit out of your life. So let's first look at how the cardiovascular system rebounds quickly Now. If you've ever tracked your heart vitals, notably blood pressure or resting heart rate, you know very well how harmful booze is to your heart. See, heavy drinkers almost universally suffer from hypertension, which in turn, predisposes them to premature death from things like stroke, heart attack and heart disease. Now, fortunately, your cardiovascular system will start to improve within a matter of days from your last drink. Only two weeks after your last drink, your hypertension will have fallen dramatically, typically within the normal range. Your resting heart rate will also drop another sign that your heart is rebounding. Now let's look at blood sugar and the cholesterolesterol Drop. So heavy drinking can raise total cholesterol and blood sugars, but only one month after your last drink, both of these will have dropped considerably. One study found that social drinkers who stopped drinking for 40 days had an average blood sugar drop of 23%, bringing their levels down to normal. The same study found that cholesterol also dropped by 5%. These are improvements that most people would be very happy to achieve through something like prescription medication, and you will get them for free, without a single side effect, alongside a range of other health improvements Pretty good deal, if you ask me.
Speaker 1:Now let's have a look at sleep. Depending on how much you are drinking, you might be in for a few rough nights of sleep after the first few weeks of abstinence. This is obviously something that you won't particularly enjoy, but it is, after all, an inevitable part of the recovery process. You see, alcohol has seriously compromised the balance of various neurotransmitters that regulate sleep and wakefulness, notably GABA and glutamate, and the first few nights after your last drink, this imbalance will be exposed, as there is no alcohol anymore to prop the system up. But depending on how much you are drinking and for how long, a few weeks is all that it will take for your sleep patterns to normalise. Now here's the cool thing for the first time in years, you might find yourself consistently getting enough deep sleep. That's the part of the nightly sleep cycle that is so important to physical health, cognitive function, emotional wellbeing and just overall vitality. It's not a coincidence that around the one month mark, you might notice that your energy levels are higher than you can remember in a long time.
Speaker 1:Now let's look at the gastrointestinal flora rebalancing. See, most of the alcohol that you consume is absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract, and particularly the small intestine and the stomach. Unsurprisingly, this is also one of the body sites that takes the heaviest damage from drinking. The mucus lining of the gut is heavily affected, compromising the barrier with the rest of your body. As a result, pathogenic molecules enter circulation from the gut, leading to problems like inflammation and even autoimmunity.
Speaker 1:Another casualty of drinking is your so-called gut microbiota. This refers to the countless microorganisms that reside within your gut and are essential to proper digestion and nutrient absorption. Even moderate, sustained drinking can severely disrupt and imbalance your microbiota, leading to the proliferation of so-called bad bacteria at the expense of good ones. We know the multi-billion dollar probiotic industry that's constantly trying to sell us stuff like yogurts, drinks and supplements. Well, that's all to support your microbiome, and many of the same people who consume these products in the morning then go to the bar in the evening and start dropping literal nuclear bombs on their microbiota. It's Alice in Wonderland stuff. Now here's the good news your gut will start to recover remarkably fast with abstinence. Only three weeks after your last drink, your gut barrier will have made a near-complete recovery. By that point, your gut microbiota will have also dramatically improved, though a few more weeks or months will be necessary for a complete recovery.
Speaker 1:So next let's look at fatty liver and how it reverses. See, after alcohol is absorbed by the gut, it eventually makes its way to our liver, which is basically our body's detox factory. Our liver is then tasked with breaking down alcohol into less toxic chemicals that will eventually be expelled through urine and sweat. Now the problem is that the first chemical the liver will break down alcohol into is acetaldehyde, and acetaldehyde itself is far more toxic than alcohol, according to some estimates, up to 30 times. So, though acetaldehyde will only stick around in the liver for a very short amount of time before being metabolized into less toxic molecules, that is still enough to cause severe damage, see.
Speaker 1:Liver disease progresses through various stages, and the first one, fatty liver, is almost universal among all heavy drinkers. Over 90% of drinkers will suffer from this, see. The liver cells accumulate fat and the whole liver literally swells in size, something which is actually visible on an ultrasound or an MRI. Due to the damage, liver enzymes like ALT and AST will also start leaking into the bloodstream, leading to elevated levels that can be detected in a blood test. Now, though, fatty liver on its own doesn't usually have any symptoms, if the person keeps on drinking, it can progress to an inflammatory condition called hepatitis, and eventually this can lead into full-blown cirrhosis. In cirrhosis, the healthy liver tissue has been damaged so extensively by the acetaldehyde that it starts to convert into scar tissue, so-called fibrosis. This is an irreversible and usually terminal condition. Now the majority of people are probably still in the fatty liver stage and, remarkably, if you stop drinking alcohol now, your fatty liver will reverse in as little as 3 weeks, and I do mean completely. You'd be able to see on a scan that the liver will have shrunk back to its healthy size and your liver enzymes will have reverted to baseline. See, no other lifestyle measures are necessary to achieve this. No changes to diet, exercise, nothing just stopping drinking will do the trick.
Speaker 1:Now let's look at how bones restore their mass. See, one toxic effect of alcohol that drinkers are almost universally unaware of relates to their bones. You see, though they appear static and unchanging on the outside, our bones are actually in a never-ending state of flux. What this means is old bone is constantly being broken down and replaced with new bone through a dynamic and carefully balanced process. Heavy drinking disrupts this process and decreases bone density. It does this by both directly promoting bone loss as well as inhibiting the regeneration process. As a result, heavy drinkers are prone to fractures, and severe. Heavy drinkers are often walking around with multiple undiagnosed fractures, and often these fractures will be in the ribs and will come to light when these people have an x-ray for an unrelated reason. Other times, these fractures will be more severe, especially in older drinkers. Fractures of the hip can be severe, even life-threatening events, and recovery is often incomplete. The good news is that after you stop drinking, your bones will make a dramatically quick recovery. One study found that only three weeks of abstinence in a group of heavy drinkers were enough to raise levels of osteocalcin in the blood. Osteocalcin is a marker of bone formation, and the increase was so substantial that the osteocalcin levels of the former drinkers were at the same levels as those of a control group. Now let's look at cognitive functioning rebounding, see.
Speaker 1:Alcohol is a neurotoxin that damages the brain in various ways. Eventually, this alcohol-related toxicity leads to noticeable brain shrinkage, particularly in regions crucial for memory, as well as learning and executive functions. See. This massive brain cell death and related shrinkage inevitably leads to a decline in cognitive abilities. These include problems with memory, attention, learning, social cognition and decision making. Now, these declines are very similar in many respects to those observed in normal or even abnormal aging, for example in Alzheimer's disease. Indeed, at the extreme, the cognitive decline can transition to full-blown alcohol-related dementia. Here the person decline can transition to full-blown alcohol-related dementia. Here the person is unable to carry out even basic everyday tasks without assistance.
Speaker 1:Full-blown dementia is an extreme and relatively rare scenario, but there is simply no escaping the fact that heavy drinking will compromise your cognitive functioning. To put it very crudely, it will dumb you down. After you stop drinking, your brain will start to pick up the pieces, but the recovery process will be more drawn out compared to other organs. Now, the first few weeks of abstinence are a period of rapid improvement across multiple cognitive domains, and this happens as the brain cleans up the debris of long-term alcohol consumption. Recovery will then transition to a slower and more uneven trajectory. At the end of the first year, your brain will have recovered a substantial part of its lost volume, coinciding with a dramatic improvement in memory, learning and processing speed. After four or five years of abstinence, former drinkers will perform as well as non-drinkers in most tasks. Having said that, some deficits might never resolve completely, most notably spatial processing, as well as certain aspects of memory.
Speaker 1:And now let's look at cancer risks and how they fall off. So it's time to turn our attention to one of the most deadly and also most overlooked consequences of drinking, which is cancer. Although the public is largely ignorant of this, ethanol is a well-known, proven carcinogen. The relative scientific authorities place it in the same category as other proven carcinogens like tobacco, smoke, uv radiation and asbestos. When all is said and done, approximately 4% of cancers worldwide are thought to be alcohol related.
Speaker 1:Now, for most types of cancer, there is a threshold value of drinks that you must consume in your lifetime before your risk starts to creep up, but for other cancers this does not appear to be the case. For example, the risk of breast cancer in women starts to go up from the very first drink, albeit by a tiny amount. In other words, if you're a woman who is concerned about developing breast cancer, say because it maybe runs in the family, there is no safe level of drinking. Your risk starts to creep up with the first drink and complete abstinence is your only option. With more serious boozing, your cancer risks start to spike across the board.
Speaker 1:Compared to non-drinkers, heavy drinkers are around five times more likely to develop cancers of the mouth and the esophagus. They are also two to two and a half times more likely to get cancer of the larynx and liver and roughly 50% more likely to get breast or colorectal cancer. For the stomach and pancreas, their risk increases by roughly 20%. These figures reflect the interplay of various cancer-inducing mechanisms, including the effects of acetaldehyde, oxidative stress, inflammation and hormonal disruptions. Fortunately, as your body starts to repair after you stop drinking, your risk of cancer will start to decline.
Speaker 1:But there is one caveat. Unlike most of the other health improvements that we've covered here, this will be a long, drawn-out process. Depending on the body size, it will take several years or even decades for your risks to fall to the levels of somebody who never drank. For example, a study that looked at liver cancer risk estimated that the risk drops off by 6-7% a year. Based on this figure, it would take an average of around 23 years of abstinence for the risk to decline to that of somebody who never drank. That's pretty scary. Another study that looked at esophageal and head and neck cancers found very similar results, concluding that the risk for these cancers will fall to the levels of a never drinker after around 20 years. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.