How to Stop Drinking and Start Recovery

Overcoming an addiction to alcohol can be a long and bumpy road. At times, it may even feel impossible. But it’s not. If you’re ready to stop drinking and willing to get the support you need, you can recover from alcoholism and alcohol abuse—no matter how bad the addiction or how powerless you feel. You don’t have to wait until you hit rock bottom; you can make a change at any time. Read to get started on the road to recovery today.

Alcohol treatment and recovery 1: Commit to stop drinking

Most people with alcohol problems do not decide to make a big change out of the blue or transform their drinking habits overnight. Recovery is usually a more gradual process. In the early stages of change, denial is a huge obstacle. Even after admitting you have a drinking problem, you may make excuses and drag your feet. It’s important to acknowledge your ambivalence about stopping drinking. If you’re not sure if you’re ready to change or you’re struggling with the decision, it can help to think about the costs and benefits of each choice.

Evaluating the costs and benefits of drinking

Make a table like the one below, weighing the costs and benefits of drinking to the costs and benefits of quitting.

Is Drinking Worth The Cost?
Benefits of drinking:	Benefits of not drinking:
It helps me forget about my problems. I have fun when I drink. It’s my way of relaxing and unwinding after a stressful day.	My relationships would probably improve. I’d feel better mentally and physically. I’d have more time and energy for the people and activities I care about.
Costs of drinking:	Costs of not drinking:
It has caused problems in my relationships. I feel depressed, anxious, and ashamed of myself. It gets in the way of my job performance and family responsibilities.	I’d have to find another way to deal with problems. I’d lose my drinking buddies. I would have to face the responsibilities I’ve been ignoring.

Withdrawing from alcohol

When you drink heavily and frequently, your body becomes physically dependent on alcohol and goes through withdrawal if you suddenly stop drinking. The symptoms of alcohol withdrawal range from mild to severe, and include:

• Headache
• Shaking
• Sweating
• Nausea or vomiting
• Anxiety and restlessness
• Stomach cramps and diarrhea
• Trouble sleeping or concentrating
• Elevated heart rate and blood pressure

Expect setbacks

• Alcohol recovery is a process—one that often involves setbacks. Don’t give up if you relapse or slip. A drinking relapse doesn’t mean you’re a failure or that you’ll never be able to reach your goal. Each drinking relapse is an opportunity to learn and recommit to sobriety, so you’ll be less likely to relapse in the future.

What to do if you slip:

• • Get rid of the alcohol and get away from the setting where you lapsed
  • Remind yourself that one drink or a brief lapse doesn’t have to turn into a full-blown relapse
  • Don’t let feelings of guilt, blame, or shame keep you from getting back on track
  • Call your sponsor, counselor, or a supportive friend right away for help

Call 911 or go to the emergency room if you experience any of the following withdrawal symptoms:

• • • severe vomiting
    • confusion and disorientation
    • fever
    • hallucinations
    • extreme agitation
    • seizures or convulsions

Best Dietary Changes After Joining A Gym:-

Signing the gym membership paperwork is the first step toward getting and staying in shape, but the steps that follow are often more difficult. Consider your diet before setting foot on the treadmill. Your nutrition needs will be a bit different once you’re exercising regularly and, what’s more, eating the proper foods can give you the energy and stamina you need to achieve your goals in the gym.

Breakfast

Don’t write off breakfast when you’re trying to get in shape. Regardless of when you’re planning to visit the gym, eating a balanced and healthful breakfast sets the stage for a beneficial workout. Your blood sugar is low in the morning, which lowers your energy level. Breakfast gives you an energy boost and, according to MayoClinic.com, skipping this meal actually puts you at risk for obesity. Eat protein, which keeps you full for hours and helps you build strong tissue. Try scrambled eggs, a breakfast sandwich made with lean ham and a slice of cheese or a smoothie made with yogurt and protein powder.

Eating Before the Gym

You shouldn’t eat right before you exercise, since this can make you feel nauseous and weighed-down, but it’s smart to eat a snack around an hour before working out to keep your blood sugar up. Eat carbohydrates, which give you energy but are quick to digest. Fruit, whole wheat toast, a small bowl of pasta or a low-sugar granola bar all will work. If you do plan to hit the gym within an hour or two of breakfast, skip the protein and eat a small meal high in carbohydrates instead.

Eating After the Gym

The food you eat after working out is just as important as what you eat before. Try to eat something within the two hours after you leave the gym to help your tissue recover and to replace nutrients and fluids you sweated out. Carbohydrates are again useful, since they help replenish glycogen, which is sugar that the body stores until it needs it for energy. Rice or potato dishes are examples of post-workout carbohydrate dishes, though, again, you can reach for fruit or whole wheat toast. You’ll need some protein as well. Eat a handful of nuts, a sandwich made with skinless chicken breasts or a piece of grilled fish.

Hydration

If you didn’t keep a water bottle handy before, you’ll need to start once you join a gym. Exercising and sweating can bring on dehydration, but drinking during your workout isn’t enough. Aim to drink around a cup of water per hour during the two to three hours before you visit the gym and sip from a water bottle every few minutes during your workout. If you’re exercising for more than an hour, MayoClinic.com recommends switching to a sports drink to keep your electrolyte levels where they need to be. You’ll need fluids after you’re finished, so keep drinking water or switch to fruit juice or tea during the two hours after exercising.

7 Ways to Boost Your Endurance and Stamina

1. Combine strength days with cardio days.
It’s a simple equation: the more muscle you can get working, the more it will challenge your heart and your cardiovascular system. Instead of building cardio-only workouts (the pitfall that’ll prevent you from building endurance) make sure to weave strength days into your training. “Most people reserve one day for strength and another day for cardio. Try combining the two instead,” says Torres. “Use a bench press, immediately followed by pull-ups, then run a mile as fast as you can… and repeat.” Another good example: Jump rope for a minute, followed by squats, an overhead press, and finally sit ups. Repeat. - 
2. Reduce your amount of rest.
Men typically give themselves between 30 and 90 seconds of recovery time in between sets, but if your goal is greater endurance, be prepared to sacrifice break time. “By the end of your sets, your muscles should be burning—you should be breathing heavily and sweating,” says Torres. “Only take a break if you physically can not continue.” Torres suggests selecting a series of movements like 10 pull-ups, 10 squats, 10 push-ups, 10 sit-ups. Do three rounds of the series back to back, taking as minimal a break as possible. - 
3. Do fast-paced, high-intensity lifting.
“When you use weights at an extremely rapid pace, it will not only improve your strength, but also carry over to improve your endurance activity,” says Torres. “It’s one of the best ways to ignite your metabolism. When people do an excessive amount of endurance-only training, they actually slow down their metabolism because it starts to eat away at your muscle tissue.” - 
4. Choose compound movements over isolation.
Compound moves that require using more than one joint—like squats, step-ups, push-ups and pull-ups—will improve your endurance more so than exercises in isolation. “Isolated exercises like bicep curls and leg lifts aren’t going to stimulate you enough to increase your stamina,” he says. - 
5. Remember: Routine is the enemy.
Switching up your workout is essential to building endurance and stamina. According to Torres, the human body gets used to a workout after two weeks. So if you’re always running, start doing Muay Thai instead. Or if you’re an avid cyclist, change it up by running stairs. “You need to move the muscles in a different way so that you don’t develop overuse. Plus, it becomes more motivating,” he says. “It’s important to keep the mind guessing.” - 
6. Go for hybrid exercises.
A squat with an added overhead press (a “thruster”), jumping pull-ups, and lunges with bicep curls are all great hybrids: exercises that take two separate movements and combine them. “The more muscles you can get working in a movement, the more it will stimulate your heart muscles, which in turn improves your stamina.” -
7. Add explosive movements to your workout.
Explosive movements that take a lot of energy challenge your strength, endurance and stamina simultaneously. Once you become more explosive, you’ll notice that you’ll actually start moving faster. Torres says: try adding things like burpees, box jumps, jumping knee tucks and power push-ups to your workout routine. - 

5 ways to shape your body :-

1) Focus on Building an X-Shaped Physique :- The best way to do this is to do pull ups 2 times in a day .

2) Push Less, Pull More-In keeping with the ideas from above, the goal of training for sexiness should also include balance and symmetry. This is not only so you train the right way, but also because you need to make a concentrated effort to avoid training the wrong way.

As men, we’re highly visual creatures. As trainees, this translates into becoming highly focused on ‘mirror muscles’ – that is, those you can readily see in any mirror.

Guys in general tend to do a lot more work on muscles like chest than back. I cannot begin to describe the drawbacks of this mentality. Instead, I’ll focus on the main ideas of this post.

With specific regard to appearance, lopsided training which focuses on anterior (front) muscles over posterior (rear) muscles leads to pretty ugly imbalances. In addition to this being a great way to get yourself injured, it can lead to a round, forward shouldered look that is not the goal of any training program I’ve ever heard of.

Keeping in mind the idea of building a sexy body, it’s worth noting that such a look is also decidedly unattractive.

Instead, we should focus more on the muscles of the upper back: latissimus dorsi, teres major, trapezius, et al. These muscles, developed correctly, will help pull your shouldersback, helping to create the broad shouldered look that men find powerful and women find attractive.

To prevent imbalances and help to create such a look, try to maintain a 3:2 ratio of pulling exercises to pushing exercises.

As an example, 3 sets of rows, 2 sets of bench presses.

Following this pattern, you are far less likely to develop 

3) Lift Heavy at Least 4 Days per Month-The benefits of heavy training are widely documented, so once again I’ll just focus on the relevancy to building a bang-worthy body.

Training heavy doesn’t just make you strong—it makes youlook strong. Training in low rep-ranges (3-5 reps) necessitates the use of near-maximal weight. In generally, you would be working within 75%-85% of your 1RM.

This elicits some profound physiological changes.

Training with heavy loads leads to an increase in both neurogenic and myogenic muscle tone, both of which are important for building an attractive physique.

First, it is necessary to recognize that for the purposes of this writing, the word “tone” means the level of tension in a muscle. With that understood, let’s talk about each type.

Neurogenic tone refers to the level of tension in a muscle during a working or flexed state. That is, how “hard” a muscle is when you are either training it, or just flexing it for some chick at the gym/beach/World of Warcraft party.

Myogenic tone can be defined as residual tension in a resting muscle. What this really means is how hard, full, and dense your muscles are when you’re just hanging out. Rather than some artificial pump, an increase in myogenic tone is a permanent increase in the appearance of your muscles.

Increasing neurogenic and mygenic tone also has the benefit of making muscles more visible at slightly higher levels of bodyfat – and there is a lot to be said for having your triceps pop out a bit more at 10%–just imagine how they’ll look at 8%!

To achieve the increases, my clients all have at least 1 day per week dedicated to lifting near maximal loads. In addition to the aforementioned benefits, heavy training also leads to strength increases, which has obvious implications for training in the future.

4) Mix Up Your Training-In order to create a body suited for a variety of physical…er, tasks, (yup, that was a sexual innuendo) you need to change up your workout pretty frequently.

Training variety keeps you motivated and invariably leads to better results. In terms of helping you increase your rating on the Scale of Sexy, the main benefit of it is from a fat loss perspective.

While it is arguable that “training ADD” can inhibit muscle gains (which is only true if you are changing haphazardly with no thought to programming), for the purposes of getting lean, exposing yourself to consistently changing stimulus is an excellent way to ramp up metabolism and consistently increases the processes by which fat loss is made possible.

Certainly, I do not advocate switching programs from day to day. Instead, I recommend choosing or designing programs that have multiple training methods built into a training week. (For example, my Final Phase Fat Loss Program).

An easy way to work variety into your training is to change exercises for the same movement. Switching form bench presses to push-ups, counter intuitive though it might seem, can actually help you increase muscle mass, as well as lose fat.

Even a switch as simple as trading in barbells for dumbbells for a single workout can make significant changes, and keep you lean year round, aiding your quest for a sexy body.

For more structured change, consider trying out timed workouts: that is, instead of counting reps, each set will be for a given length of time—the goal of course is to get as many reps in that time period as possible.

Not only will increasing training variety make you sexier, but it also keeps training fresh and fun.

5) Tame Your Hormones-Bro, I hope it isn’t news to you that men and women have vastly different fat storage patterns than men. Moreover, fat storage patterns vary pretty heavily from man to man.

I covered this in a full article on hormonal optimization to lose stubborn fat, but let’s address it briefly here.In general, men tend to store fat around the abdominal and love handle areas. Once again, we have our ancestors to thank/blame for this one. So after 10,000 years of evolution, we’ve adapted to storing fat where it wouldn’t get in the way of hunting, killing, skinning, and devouring dinosaurs, wildebeests, umber hulks, and squirrels.

Women, on the other hand, store fat in the hip and thigh area.

Evolutionary favoritism notwithstanding, these differences are due in large part to differences in hormonal environments between men and women.

To make it basic: men generally have higher levels of cortisol, which will lend itself to storage of midsection fact, whereas high estrogen leads to lower body fat storage.

Of course, we can’t talk about dude hormones without mentioning testosterone.

Follow these steps and get easy results :)