What Are the Biggest Causes of Any Alcohol Addiction?

Have you ever wondered why it is that some people can drink a lot without it having any effect on their long term wellness and wellbeing, whilst others quickly become dependent on alcohol? Do you wonder why some people turn to alcohol in times of emotional turmoil whist others don’t, and why drinking one glass of wine often leads to drinking a few more.

 

When you are dependent on alcohol, it is known as ‘alcohol addiction’ and you are considered an alcoholic, regardless of how much you actually drink. When you are an alcoholic, it is helpful to start learning a bit more about alcoholism and try to understand why it is that you drink, in order to find out what you can do to get past it.

 

Some studies suggest that alcoholism can be linked to genetics – in other words if your father or mother is an alcoholic, there, is a good chance that you may also have these same genes, and that casual drinks can turn into an addiction. Studies are still ongoing on this.

 

Some people are also psychologically more predisposition to become alcoholics, due to their personality types. Others fin that peer pressure is the reason that they start drinking. In social circles, there is often a lot of pressure to drink, or to drink a certain amount. Friends get together and drink as teenagers, and often the need to ‘look cool’ is greater than any factors that may put you off drinking alcohol.

 

Advertising may also be to blame. Advertising makes drinking alcohol looks cool, and makes people aware of what alcohol there is on the market when they would otherwise be unaware. Alcohol also appears on television in non-advertorial format, so in television shows where people are drinking alcohol, and this leads to the normalisation of a drinking culture, which can lead to people blurring the lines between what are acceptable drinking habits and what counts as a problem.

Categories: addiction, Alcohol, alcohol addiction, drink, Drinking, drinking alcohol, nbsp, people

The Absolute Worst Weekend Weight Loss Mistakes

Many of us want to lose weight. Dieting is big business and it seems that so many people are willing to do virtually anything if it mean that we drop a few pounds. So, many of us turn to dieting systems in the hope that they will see us shedding weight. And these systems may work for a little while but ultimately it may be the case that they fail at the weekend. This is because we tend to find ourselves slipping into more relaxed habits at the weekend and that can make us put the weight back on that we worked so hard all week to lose. So we’ve compiled a list of some of the worst weekend weight loss mistakes that can see you piling back on that weight that you have lost.

 

Drinking alcohol

Many of us love to drink alcohol on the weekend. For many it is part of a weekly ritual, for others it is simply a way of relaxing and letting off steam at the end of a long working week. You might think that there is nothing wrong with that, but the trouble is that drinking alcohol comes with a number of problems attached to it. Of course we all know that alcohol is just empty calories and that many alcoholic drinks are surprisingly high in calories.

 

So if you go out and have a heavy night drinking you’re loading up on wasted calories that serve no purpose aside from their ability to spoil your diet. But there is another problem too, because it’s not just the calories that you accumulate from the alcohol but also that alcohol often makes you more like to want to pick up some late night snacks, whether that is in the form of crisps or nuts in the pub, or perhaps even a kebab or burger afterwards.

 

Eating at the cinema

If you’re like many people then you may like to watch a film at the weekend – everyone enjoys going to the cinema every once in a while. But there are issues going to the cinema too. Especially the fact that many people love to chow down when they are watching a film, and cinema lobbies are not exactly notorious for their range of healthy goods on offer. This means that you will likely be eating something along the lines of popcorn and a sugary drink. Clearly these are very bad for you and if you want to keep up your diet through the weekend, you can’t be buying these kind of snacks to go into the movie with.

 

Shopping on an empty stomach

The weekend is a popular time to go shopping, mainly because we’ve got enough free time to go around the shops and buy the things that we need for the coming week. But the scourge of shopping is the empty stomach. It’s well known that if we go shopping when we are hungry we are more likely to make purchasing decisions that include unhealthy foods and things that we feel like we want to eat right then – this usually includes crisps, chocolate and other foods that are bad for us. The knock on effect is that we then have these foods in our homes that we wouldn’t usually buy. That puts you in the place of being very tempted all the time by the junk food sitting in your cupboard. Do yourself a favour and don’t shop on an empty stomach – all it will do is fill your shelves with unhealthy foods that you wouldn’t normally eat.

Categories: Alcohol, drinking alcohol, foods, loss mistakes, unhealthy foods, weekend, weekend weight, weight, Weight Loss, worst mistakes

Could a Cheese and Wine Evening Save You from Diabetes?

The Mediterranean diet now has another feather in its wellness cap, thanks to a new large observational study. European research, published in the journal Diabetologia, has shown that if you follow a Mediterranean diet (which means chomping on fish, fruit and vegetables and healthy fats from olive oil), you’re potentially protecting your wellbeing against type 2 diabetes, especially compared to people who don’t go Mediterranean.

 

The study also discovered that a diet which a low-glycaemic load – meaning that it regulates your intake of carbs based on how they impact your blood sugar levels – can also lower your diabetes risk, while combining the best of both worlds and having a low-glycaemic Mediterranean diet means you’ll have the greatest benefit. These results are based on data from 22,295 people who were followed for more than 11 years. The researchers recorded dietary and diabetes information during this time, throughout which 2,330 people developed the type 2 variety of the disease.

 

In their study, the researchers wrote, ‘The influence of the Mediterranean diet against diabetes risk was independent of GL [glycaemic load] levels, and individuals with a high MDS [Mediterranean diet score] and a low GL tended to have the lowest diabetes risk. It is not difficult to envisage a low-GL Mediterranean diet, since olive oil and vegetables dominate this diet and do not contribute, or contribute only marginally, to the GL.’

 

The results of the study revealed that participants who were the most gung-ho for the Mediterranean diet were 12% less likely to develop diabetes than those who abided by it the least faithfully. At the other end of the scale, people who ate more carbs were 21% more likely to develop diabetes than the participants who consumed the fewest carbs. The researchers added, ‘the combined protection imparted by a diet with a high MDS and a low GI was about 20%.’

 

 

Still, this isn’t the only study to show how different diets can impact your diabetes risk:

 

1. Cheese. According to a recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, cheese (despite it’s less-than-healthy reputation) can lower your risk of diabetes by 12%, and the more you eat, the more you protect yourself against the disease.

 

2. Tree nuts. Researchers from the Louisiana State University Agricultural Centre, who published their results in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, found that regularly eating tree nuts reduces your risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and metabolic syndrome. Nuts such as pistachios, walnuts, almonds and cashews lower your levels of an inflammation marker called C-reactive protein, which is associated with heart disease and other chronic conditions. Plus, they raise your levels of the “good” HDL cholesterol, and lower your BMI.

 

3. British fruits. Another American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study found that people who eat apples, pears and blueberries are at a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes than those who don’t eat these British beauties. The researchers looked at the diets of 200,000 people, and determined that it was the anthocyanins in the fruits that reduced diabetes risk; flavanoids, however, did not.

 

4. Alcohol. Yes, in moderation, drinking alcohol is linked with a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes for women with refined carb-heavy diets, according to an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study. Study researcher Frank Hu commented, ‘If you eat a high carb diet without drinking alcohol, your risk of developing diabetes is increased by 30%. However, if you eat a high carb diet, but (drink) a moderate amount of alcohol, the increased risk is reduced.’

 

I say it’s time for a cheese and wine evening, with a few fruity and nutty nibbles, don’t you?

Categories: american journal, cheese, clinical nutrition, develop diabetes, Diabetes, Diabetes risk, drinking alcohol, heart disease, high mds, Mediterranean diet, wine evening

How Much Alcohol is Too Much? 5 Steps to Recovery

Many people have no problems enjoying an occasional drink with dinner or when they are celebrating special occasions like anniversaries or birthdays. However, you, like many others, might have a problem keeping your social drinking under control. When one or two drinks give way to total inebriation, you may put yourself at risk of incurring some of the worst consequences of excessive drinking, including driving while intoxicated and being charged with a DWI.

 

If you are charged with a DWI, your life could be gravely impacted. You could face paying huge fines to the court, as well as serving jail time, losing your job, and jeopardizing your personal relationships with your loved ones and friends. Retaining an experienced DWI attorney with many year’s experience is vital. One NJ DWI attorneys group stated “People mistakenly think that nothing can be done to defend against a DWI charge. That’s incorrect.”

 

 

And if or when you can recognize that you have a drinking problem and want to get help for it, you can heed these pieces of advice in your path to recovery.

 

1. Accept and Acknowledge the Problem

It is one thing for you to think that you have a drinking problem. If you are serious about getting help and recovering, you must accept and acknowledge it to friends, family members, and your employer. You may have previously thought that verbalizing your alcoholism would make you weak and put you at risk of losing everything. However, hearing yourself say it out loud to those who are closest to you can give the clarity to begin to seek the help you desperately need.

 

 

2. Surrender Control and Accept Help

Your recovery may include going to rehab and joining a support group. When you first go through these programs, you may struggle to maintain some sort of control over your life. However, it is essential that you relinquish control to the professionals who are there to help you. When you realize that you are powerless against your addiction to alcohol, you can then take the steps needed to regain control over your behaviors that lead to your drinking.

 

 

3. Stay Away from Temptation

Your drinking buddies might be the most fun and most exciting people you know. However, during your recovery, they are also the most toxic influences you could encounter. If you are serious about recovering, you must stay away from people and situations that lead you to drink. This avoidance could include staying away from ball games, restaurants, clubs, and even after-work get-togethers that make you want to drink and join your friends in consuming alcohol.

 

 

4. Look to the Future and Plan

As you take your recovery one day at a time and start to regain your former sense of self, you may reach the point where you can look to the future. Your future plans may be less grandiose that what you might have imagined when you were drinking. Even so, they may also be more realistic. You can plan on getting a good job, going back to school, patching up neglected relationships, going to church, and enjoying normal, yet important activities in life.

 

 

5. Acknowledge that Recovery is Forever

You can stay sober if you accept that your recovery is not ever going to be a one-time thing. You will always be recovering, and you will always be a former alcoholic. You cannot change those things about you. However, you can add to your personal resume, so to speak, and include exciting and respectable events and titles to your life. You can be a friend, spouse, parent, teacher, and inspiration to others who will look to you to mentor them out of the grips of alcoholism.

 

 

Excessive drinking and alcoholism can invite disaster to your life. When faced with a DWI charge, retaining an attorney is imperative to obtain the legal help of the charge you are faced with. When faced with the reality of an addiction, you can be successful by taking several pieces of advice into consideration.

 

 

Lisa Coleman shares ways that a person who is facing a drinking problem caused by too much alcohol consumption can obtain help; physically, emotionally and legally. Retaining an experienced DWI attorney, such as Levow & Associates, a NJ DWI attorneys group, is important when faced with a DWI charge. They can represent and help fight the charge legally, while their client can focus on their own physical recovery and well-being.

 

 

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindseygee/6952756877/

 

Categories: alcohol addiction, alcohol recovery, attorneys group, consequences of alcohol, drinking alcohol, drinking problem, DWI, DWI attorney, dwi attorneys, dwi charge, excessive drinking