The Recovery Playbook: Conversations about Addiction & Recovery

Why Diet and Exercise Positively Impact Your Recovery

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Ever wish the “runner’s high” came with instructions?  Our hosts, addiction and recovery expert, Dr.  Daryl Shorter, and former NFL quarterback, Ryan Leaf,  break down a practical, science-backed plan to use movement, food choices, and micro-mindfulness to ease cravings, lower stress, and make sobriety more sustainable. No macho workouts, no guilt—just small steps that add up.

We start with why exercise works: endorphins lift mood, while lower cortisol steadies your nervous system. Then we get tactical. You’ll hear how to begin with minutes, not miles; why a quick doctor check and basic labs protect your progress; and how listening to joint pain and sleep can guide smarter training. We talk real-world routines—walks, gentle stretches, mobility work—and the research-backed dose that delivers results: 20 to 60 minutes, three times a week, for eight to twelve weeks.

Food becomes your ally, not your enemy. We swap processed snacks for unprocessed, plant-forward meals, lean into Mediterranean-style cooking with olive oil, and share budget wins like a single weekly cook day that beats takeout costs. You’ll learn how lowering dietary inflammation can calm pain and brain fog, making it easier to stick with your plan. We also explore recovery for the body—why aging athletes and beginners alike need more mobility and less ego lifting to stay consistent.

Finally, we bring in cold exposure and meditation as compact tools that train calm under pressure. A few minutes in a cold plunge or a 60-second breathing break can reset your day and help you ride out urges. We talk environment design—shoes by the door, a favorite park loop, a quiet chair in the sun—because the right setting makes healthy choices the easy ones. The message is simple: personalize the toolkit, take what fits, and build the life you want one small, repeatable action at a time.

If this playbook helps, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a quick review to tell us which habit you’re starting today.

You can also find The Recovery Playbook by video on YouTube.

Follow The Menninger Clinic on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to stay up to date on new Recovery Playbook episodes with Ryan Leaf and Daryl Shorter, M.D. To submit a topic for discussion, email podcast@menninger.edu. If you are a new or regular listener, please leave us a review on your favorite listening platform!

Visit www.menningerclinic.org to learn more about The Menninger Clinic’s research and leadership role in mental health.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Welcome to the Recovery Playbook, brought to you by the Menninger Clinic, a national leader in mental health and addictions treatment. I am one of your hosts, Dr. Daryl Shorter.

Ryan Leaf:

And I'm your other host, Ryan Leaf, and we're here to discuss topics around addictions treatment that is exciting and hopefully very informative for those of you who are watching. And today we will be talking about diet and exercise.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Diet and exercise have been shown to be important adjuncts to addiction recovery. They improve abstinence rates, reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings, and they enhance physical and mental health outcomes and well-being.

Ryan Leaf:

The endorphins produced, I think, is the one thing that I started noticing when I returned to exercising. That you forget some some reason. The drive home after a gym session with the music blaring and the windows down. Like there is a high to that. Yeah. And if we could bottle that and encapsulate that. Well, they have. Yes, they have. Cocaine.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Just not legally.

Ryan Leaf:

Not legally.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Yeah, I mean all of the all of the things.

Ryan Leaf:

That for me is something that has become so important to what what is next. You're always looking for that feeling, that repetitive feeling, and it's uh something that's really helped improve my recovery over the last 13 years.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

And what you're talking about actually is scientifically backed. So uh the increase in beta endorphins that people get as a result of exercising, as well as reductions in stress level, stress hormones like cortisol, uh is uh is another aspect of what we get from exercise, and one of the reasons why it's such an important part of a recovery plan.

Ryan Leaf:

So we thought it would be a good idea just to kind of give you what my recovery plan looks like, what I do. And it's not different than from what I did as a professional athlete. Like there was regimented daily schedules, which I think makes it good in someone's recovery. And I think it set me up to be successful in recovery because I was so regimented in in what I did. So I have a calendar and I have a schedule, and this is what it is. And now, and it's gotten, it's evolved over time. Like when I walked out of prison, I was 325 pounds, if you can imagine that. I cannot. And I was about to stroke out from high blood pressure. The amount of salt that was in the food in prisons, of course, and and I was not reducing my cortisol levels while I was in prison. Sure. They were probably as high as they possibly could have been. I didn't do any blood tests at the time. But once I got out, it began, and this is for everybody who's starting out gradually. I just started walking, right? Just the time in prison I spent on my back mostly in in bed, not doing anything, but watching TV and eating poor food. And so once I got out, it was about being outside and then just simply walking. And I went to a park and started walking around the park, anywhere from you know three miles or so. The playlist I think lasted about three miles at the time, and so that's how it started.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

So for those of us who are not former NFL athletes, maybe not starting with three miles, but you know, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, you know, I was working with uh with a patient with a client, and I said, Listen, if I could just get you to get up and walk around your sofa a couple of times during commercials, that's more activity and more exercise than you've been getting. And so make it as easy for yourself as you possibly can. What feels possible?

Ryan Leaf:

When I speak a lot, I talk about sometimes breaking your day down to 60 seconds and breathing. Yeah. Right. You make it those 60 seconds when you're going through something difficult, all of a sudden a minute's up, another minute happens before you know it, an hour has passed, and now the end of the day is here and you're laying your head down and you accomplished another day sober.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Yeah.

Ryan Leaf:

We as human beings tend to make things incredibly complicated. It's just in our nature. Sure. And usually the simplest answer is the easiest one. And yes, getting up and walking around your couch, if you spend most of your day sitting there trying to figure things out, is a different kind of motivation. And I never thought of it the way you just said it. Maybe not start with three miles, like three miles for me was nothing. Like that was like I should be doing more. Where my mindset is, and you're exactly right. You have to start somewhere, and sometimes it's minute by minute and inch by inch, and gradual improvements every day is a climb to that new goal.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Absolutely. And if you're embarking upon a new exercise regimen, it probably isn't a bad idea to see your doctor, see your primary care provider, and make sure you are fit and ready to do so. We don't want you to have some health consequence as a result of it. So get your labs checked, make sure that from a cardiovascular standpoint it's okay and that you're clear and ready to go.

Ryan Leaf:

And once I started getting to that place, then it became, I won't say obsessive because it's a healthy alternative. Sure. But it can be one that gets you into negative trouble. So to your point, you know, you want professionals to help assist with this. And for me, it was all about my testing of my blood, to know where I was at, to know what things I may be allergic to, you know, that I may have not known. Things that, in particular, my cortisol levels. Like, am I living a life of high stress? And if so, am I more apt to, if I push myself too much, to get myself into trouble? You know, inflammation in your blood. That's a huge one for me. Huge. Almost, I'll be 50 this year. Understanding the inflammation in my blood and how that affected my joints for being beat up and having had so many surgeries my whole life. So those things were just really informative. And it's just like being diagnosed with your mental health or your substance use disorder. Like having those diagnoses just give you further ammunition to arm yourself to do what's best. And so that's where it really started for me on the medical side of things. Yeah.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

And I appreciate you bringing up inflammation as well, because there are, from an dietary standpoint, lots of things that you can do to reduce inflammation in your diet as well. So taking a look at a lot of the foods that you eat, increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables, reducing our fatty foods, our fried foods, the stuff that tastes really good. Gosh, letting the Doritos go is really difficult sometimes.

Ryan Leaf:

There's a reason why these things are marketed so profitably to all of us Americans. Another one of those things. So the medical side of it started there. Then understanding what that looked like, you had to find out some things I was deficient in. As a man who was growing older into my 50s, guess what? I was going to be lower in testosterone than I would. That's just a natural way of going. So I started doing some testosterone replacement. Now, listen, when I talk to you about this, you're like, oh yeah, former NFL player, he was rich and everything. I had no money. Where you invest the money is incredibly important. Like if you could invest it in anything other than your well-being and your health, isn't that the best investment you can make? It's just like when you're going to treatment or something like that, or seeing a therapist or a doctor. Like those investments are in yourself. So another thing we looked into, and this is going to sound very bougie, we looked into hiring a chef because of the thing you just said. I looked at a year's data from us living in Los Angeles on how much money we were spending on postmates and grocery shopping in the worst possible fashion. And you may not believe this, but we have a chef come in one day a week on a Sunday or Monday who cooks meals for the entire week. And the grocery bill and his services cost less than what we were spending a week doing with postmates and the grocery shopping ourselves. Wow. And the only reason I can say that is because we have the data from it. And so all he cooks is unprocessed foods. So now all of a sudden, all those inflammation things you talked about, that's gone. Like this is all non-processed foods. That not only am I eating, my wife's eating, but now our kids are eating. So my son, listen, I didn't have a Brussels sprout until I was like 48 years old. Like this kid eats Brussels sprouts and cauliflower now, like it's it's just a daily thing.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

And what about Mediterranean diet? Are you all doing that? What is that? So the Mediterranean diet is. Is that when you go to Greece and you mean if you're if you're lucky, if you're lucky, it's it's uh it's uh No, I haven't heard about this.

Ryan Leaf:

Tell me.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Tell us. Okay, so uh instead of doing your your vegetable oils, your lards, you're cooking primarily with olive oils, you're gonna be doing a lot of grains with that. Again, a lot of green. He cooks with that.

Ryan Leaf:

That's how most of our stuff is done. He made these peanut butter cookies for us the other day, made with no sugar. It was all almond flour and it was so good. And we put it in the freezer so it doesn't get it has to stay frozen. But when you eat it, it tastes just like my mom's sugar-filled peanut butter cookies growing up.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

So basically, it's about finding alternatives so that you're not feeling deprived, because nobody really wants to feel deprived in their lives globally, especially if you're making changes around health, but also finding things that are like healthy alternatives so that you're not so then all of these that you move into in the recovery are healthy alternatives.

Ryan Leaf:

Like the exercise part of it, you know, I used to have to do that to perform for my profession. And so it becomes resentful because I don't want to do this today. You have to do it, you know, you have to put food on the table for your family and everything like that.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

But but the good thing about exercise is particularly in recovery, is when they've done the studies, what they found is that you really only need to do somewhere between 20 to 60 minutes three times a week for about eight weeks. I mean, generally speaking, when they when they study these in clinical trials, these trials last for about eight to maybe as many as 12 weeks. 20 minutes a day, three times a week, I think that that's something that we can all maybe.

Ryan Leaf:

We can all strive to, but it's incredibly hard to motivate yourself even to get to that 20-minute mark. It's true. It's something that you have to become accustomed to, build a routine around. And so that's where it does. So the medical side of it, understanding what your body needs and what it can do, the food that you put inside it that will fuel it to do the things that you need it to, and then recovery. And when I talk about recovery, I don't mean what we talk about or what we are in these facilities doing, and sometimes I'm talking about body recovery.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Yeah.

Ryan Leaf:

And that's a huge part of it because the older you get, the more recovery time you need for your body. And you have to exercise differently. And as a former professional athlete, sometimes we just go right back into what we used to do, and all of a sudden I'm, you know, deadlifting 285 pounds, and that's just that's not smart. But I want to do it because that's what I used to be able to do. Just like when I get on a basketball court, I think I can just explode and go up and make a layup or something like that. And I do it, and my hamstring falls apart, you know.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Okay, so for the rest of us, I'm gonna be walking for about 20 minutes. It's stretching before and after.

Ryan Leaf:

So, all the things, some things I did, the stretching aspect of things. We we got a really neat massage chair and it does a lot of stretching with it. So it lifts your lower back and stretches you, yeah, does a ton of stuff like that that helps a lot. We invested in a cold plunge.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Nice.

Ryan Leaf:

Which is huge in terms of the inflammation part of things, right? And it really helps with your breathing and meditation because it's cold. Yeah. And when you get up first thing in the morning, and listen, you don't have to do it forever. I do it for three to four minutes, three or four times a week. But first thing in the morning, when you've been cozy in that bed all night, and then you step into a 48-degree cold plunge, it takes your breath away.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

I'll bet it does. It sounds like punishment.

Ryan Leaf:

It sounds it the walk, the walk to the cold plunge in the morning and the negotiation that is going on in my mind. Like, like, I know I have to do three to four minutes. Well, you if you just do one, that'll be that's more than you would have done if you didn't do it. I understand this bargaining. So I get under and the breathing just it just takes over. So it's almost meditative. And it for a while it took me to you know getting that breath back, and then all of a sudden you can kind of be a meditative state, and three minutes, four minutes pass is pretty quickly and you're and you're out. And it just accelerates any sort of inflammation that existed in your body. So these are just things that I've done to capitalize on that. I'm gonna be an old dad, right? My daughter will be, I'll be 65 when she graduates high school. So I want to be around as long as I can be. I love these kids, they're so fun. Being, you know, almost 50 and chasing around a 21-month-old is not light work. It's not light work. I love it, but like picking her up now, yeah. She's a little beast, that one. And so I want to be around as long as I can.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Okay, you mentioned one other thing that I want to make sure we talk about, and that's meditation, because we were talking about the meditative space. And if we're thinking about how to reduce stress hormones, reduce cortisol, meditation can be one really important way of doing that.

Ryan Leaf:

There's many different avenues to that. Many people have dived into applications you can just do. And for me, it was just being like not vibrating. Like I felt like my body, I just vibrated. And to actually be still for any sort of amount of time was so foreign to me. And this is a good example of ramping up to something where you may just be doing it for 30 seconds.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

30 seconds to start, just like sitting intentionally and monitoring your breathing.

Ryan Leaf:

Monitoring your breath because my mind will go somewhere else. It just it will. Like I'll even be listening to the app talking about thinking about something else, and I'll think about something else will pop into my brain, and my brain will have been there for the 30 seconds where I was supposed to be focusing on maybe nothing, and maybe just my breathing. So that's taking a long time. I think you find in recovery anywhere you look, meditation and prayer are a huge part of it. Some people may be religious, may be agnostic, it doesn't matter. It's just I think there's always the understanding that there's a purpose greater than you. Yeah. And I really think the purpose greater than me in all this is being able to do something like this with you. I mean, where else would we be able to give back like this in a public forum having just been in prison 11 years ago? You know, it's fascinating to me. So that for me is a purposeful thing and it's meditative and it's where it belongs. And it usually belongs in the morning for me. Sometimes I need it at night just because the day may have been a bit overwhelming or too much, or you know, the seven-year-old just would not go to bed and life was completely unfair to him, and, you know, he just doesn't deserve any of it, you know. Of course not. I need I need that two or three minutes of maybe some breathing and no, you know, bluey on the TV and no wife telling me, you know, we got to have this ready for the sports thing tomorrow and everything like that. It's it's a reprieve. So, you know, a lot of times to get rid of them, you just go towards the cold plunge because they don't want to be anywhere near that. And that's a good meditative breathing exercise for me for three to four minutes.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

Yeah. And the great thing about meditation is that you can incorporate that at any part of your day. So if you if you need a second during the middle of the day, between Zoom calls, being pulled in a million different directions, taking one to two minutes just to stop and breathe can be a complete game changer.

Ryan Leaf:

Looking out onto this campus here at the Menninger Clinic, they have many places like that all over campus where you could sit down simply during your day too. I'm sure you've probably taken advantage of it.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

I take advantage of it all the time.

Ryan Leaf:

And it it's huge. I think a big part of your recovery, if you've wanted to continue to build on that, is find an environmentally soothing you know, situation to do things. And, you know, we made a move to Connecticut three years ago, and I found that. You know, I think my wife has too, and I hope my kids understand like the difference of what that looks like when they grow up. But those things all piece together. Like this isn't there's no blueprint for recovery. You can adapt to so many different things and it takes what it takes, yeah. Whatever that is. We're not here to school you or we're here to give you solutions and guidance in any way we can. That's what's worked for me. I've taken a radical acceptance of that my thinking and my way of things didn't work, and so I needed guidance on that. And so I've taken it, and it may be or it may feel to some like it's you know an overwhelming one when it comes to lifestyle changes, but it's kind of it's given me the life of my dreams, so I'm gonna continue you know doubling down on that side of things and keep hoping for the best.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

And the best thing about recovery is that it's not one size fits all, it's your approach. You can totally individualize it for yourself, and so our hope is that you just incorporate thoughts about your diet and exercise and moving in that direction as part of your overall recovery.

Ryan Leaf:

Yeah, and then and like when we talk about this stuff, it doesn't mean you have the same have the same approach as you or me in terms of like aggressiveness either. Like it is, to your point, one size does not fit all. Like you could take bits and pieces of what I do and add that to your recovery, and it will change it drastically. It doesn't have to be is this, that, or the other. I think what you need to look at is maybe just the bullet points of these, not necessarily the application or how much or how many. And the best of luck.

Dr. Daryl Shorter:

And we'll see you next time.