Episode Transcript
Dr. Brooke Scheller and Alcohol Tipping Point-20230410_113517-Meeting Recording
Deb: Welcome back to Alcohol Tipping Point. I have a special guest today. Her name is Dr. Brooke Sheller. She is a doctor of clinical nutrition and she's a nationally recognized health expert and the founder of Functional Sobriety, a nutrition-based approach to an alcohol-free lifestyle.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Brooke.
Dr. Brooke: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me, and I'm excited for our conversation. Yeah,
Deb: I'm sure people can guess what we're gonna talk about since you're a doctor of clinical nutrition. So we're gonna yes, get into it a about nutrition, but even with that will come different aspects of your health and, and just how you can apply these different tools and resources to help you when you're quitting drinking and in long-term recovery.
Dr. Brooke: Exactly, exactly. Well, can you get a little bit of
Deb: an intro about who you are and how you help people and, and maybe even how you got into this in the first place.
Dr. Brooke: Yeah, I would love to. And I'll also just quick preface by saying that I'm in New York City and sometimes out my window are trucks making noises and sirens.
So just disregard if anything comes through. My apologies on that. But yeah, so I am a doctor of clinical nutrition by trade. I have about. Gosh, I don't know, 13, 14 years of experience in working in nutrition. And I started with a bachelor's in nutrition and got a master's and then really just was so passionate, became so passionate about understanding how the body works and you know, how important nutrition is in so many different elements of our, our.
And continued my studies to get a doctorate. And for many years I worked in clinical practice as a private practice nutritionist working in functional medicine, so doing a lot of testing and looking to do and understand the root cause of someone's health concerns or symptoms that they're experiencing.
And then several years after being in clinical practice, I left and started working in the startup world with different supplement companies, food companies, and helping to get behind innovation and development in the nutrition and wellness space. And it was through my own experience in getting sober in June of 2021.
So we're getting close to that two year mark, which is exciting. And actually, very interestingly, prior to me getting sober, I had the opportunity to author a chapter and a textbook on integrative therapies for substance use disorders. And I wrote a chapter on nutrition and supplementation for substance use disorders.
And I ironically it was not planned, but the same month. Textbook published happened to be the same month that I got sober. And so while I was starting my sobriety journey, which had, you know, multiple different facets to it, I started using some of the tools that I had been researching for that project in order to support my own experience, to reduce cravings to, you know, start to.
Focusing on my health a little bit more. And a few months after I got sober and, you know, the fog cleared, I recognized that no one was really talking about nutrition and the impact that it can have on our health, on our sobriety, on our, you know, our cravings, how our body is healing after alcohol use.
And a light bulb went off in my head and I thought I should write a book on this. And and I ended up getting a book. And so it you know, over time just became something that I transitioned all of my work toward because I really recognized that people could relate to so many different facets of this and.
I'll just end this story by saying that, and we'll talk about this throughout the podcast, that, you know, it's not just about, I think people think nutrition has a lot to do with weight loss or weight management. You know, maybe managing cholesterol or, or heart disease or diabetes. But nutrition has to do with everything from our gut health to our brain, neurotransmitters, to our hormone.
To our stress levels and how we manage all of that. So what I do and, and why I created functional sobriety was to really take this more holistic approach in looking at the biochemistry of our, our history of drinking. Not only so that we can use food supplements and other natural methods to heal but also to support healing our bodies from the damage that we've done over the long.
So it's been such an interesting way for me to leverage my expertise and the things that I'm passionate about and, and I love talking about it, so I love being on podcasts and talking about it. Oh, that's great. Well,
Deb: congratulations on two years coming up.
Dr. Brooke: Thank you. Do you
Deb: think that some of what you were learning about alcohol and the effects of alcohol in your health contributed to you deciding to give up drinking?
I mean, I'm sure there was a lot going on there, but was that part of it?
Dr. Brooke: Yeah, as it as it ends up for a lot of people in the end. Right. It's so complicated because there's so many different elements that are, you know, coming into coming to a head at that time. And I have to only imagine that there was some type of spiritual awakening happening to me in the sense that all of this was kind of when I look back now, It's like ironic, if you will, the way that everything kind of fell into place in that sense.
And I I won't say that, that body of work. Encouraged me to say that, oh, I recognize that, you know, I knew what alcohol was doing to my health. And a lot of times when I tell my story, I share pretty openly with people. Like, I felt like I was living a double life. You know, I was trying to convince myself that I could drink alcohol and be healthy, that I could just take enough liver supplements and detox often enough and you know, exercise enough and eat enough vegetables that it would.
You know, erase the damage that I was doing to my body. But the reality is that as for so many of us, the more and more my alcohol intake spiraled. Like it wasn't, I wasn't just having a glass of wine and eating a kale salad and saying, you know, here we are. It was, I'm gonna have a bottle and a half of wine, and that kale salad at that point doesn't matter.
Right? So, As so many of us have that experience, you know, I think that health is definitely something that helped to encourage me towards sobriety, but it wasn't necessarily. The turning point in my life that brought me there, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
Deb: Well thank you for sharing. . So let's talk about some of the ways that alcohol does affect your health.
And I kind of wanted to get from you some of the more surprising ways, cuz we kind of know mm-hmm. We're learning more and more about the heart and the liver. Mm-hmm. But can you share some of the more surprising ways alcohol affects our.
Dr. Brooke: Yeah, I, you know, I love this question because again, as I mentioned, I think people kind of limit their thoughts around nutrition, toward being around fitness, toward being around weight loss, and.
And a handful of other conditions. And in my training, in my background, which is in functional medicine as I mentioned, which is really a root cause way of looking at whatever's going on in the body. So it's starting to identify, you know, if we have headaches, for example Not just, okay, we take Advil because we have a headache.
Well, why is that headache happening? Is it a nutrient imbalance? Is it something that's going on in our gut? Is it something that's going on in our hormonal systems? So I won't say that anything for me was really surprising when it came to looking at the impacts of alcohol. But what I often find in the conversations that I have, I think we innately kind of know alcohol is having these impacts, but we don't necessarily put the pieces together, right?
So one big thing that people love hearing about is hormones and how alcohol affects hormones, right? Because the two things seem pretty unrelated, like, oh, well my periods, and if you're a woman or my testosterone, if I'm a man, you know, that doesn't have anything to do with my, with my alcohol intake.
And the liver, which is the main organ that is affected by alcohol use because it has to work so hard to metabolize that is the same organ in the body that helps to metabolize our hormones, right? And so those two things are actually very closely linked together, which is why something like breast cancer is increased it.
Our risk increases when we consume alcohol because it has to do. Hormones and our body not being able to adequately eliminate hormones. So the hormonal system is a big. And then also talking about the gut. Another big area that I discuss is gut health and how alcohol can change the microbiome can affect intestinal permeability and lead to things like leaky gut, which can actually lead to autoimmune diseases, right?
So oftentimes we have these symptoms that are seemingly unrelated to our alcohol intake. We don't necessarily put two and two together to say, how much is this really affecting how I feel on a long-term basis? Not necessarily just this short-term, I have a hangover kind of feeling, but what's going on in our health long-term?
If we have a history of moderate, heavy, you know, regular if you will, drinking for a period. 10 years or 20 years, there is absolutely health effects that are linked to that. And that can be anything we experience. It could be anything from digestive discomfort. To hormone imbalances, to PMs, to difficult menopause, to again, those autoimmune conditions, skin abnormalities, we could go on and on.
Adine item, right? Because. It's really goes back to all these deeper systems that those root cause sy symptoms in our body that can outwardly kind of change and manifest in different ways. So I find unique things all the time that, that excite me about it. And just one, one quick little thing that I'll share that I always found to be interesting as it relates to the gut and gut health is that certain microbes in the gut can actually feed off of.
And so when we continue to give that to the body, it essentially helps these organisms thrive in the gut. So it's part of the way in which our body potentially has cravings because we have these signals being sent from the gut microbiome saying, Feed me more alcohol because that's what I need to thrive.
So we've known that for a long time about sugar and carbohydrates and their impact on the gut. But it's really interesting to me the, the different biochemical or deeper reasons why we might have cravings that are beyond just saying we don't have the willpower. Oh,
Deb: that's really interesting. Yeah, I remember reading this.
Study, well, it, it wasn't even officially a study. There are some researchers studying whether they can do some fecal microbiome. Transplants in the gut to help with alcohol addiction.
Dr. Brooke: Mm-hmm. Have you read about that? Not particularly for alcohol addiction, but I've actually read a lot about that for autoimmune disease.
So they do that for things like psoriasis and lupus and other types of autoimmune disorders. And why that is, is because of. The gut, it has to do with the balance of the microbiome being so disrupted that it contributes to these symptoms and this inflammation throughout the body. So it makes sense when we think about it because alcohol does have this very disruptive.
Effect on the balance of that good and bad bacteria in our gut. So that good bacteria we often call are probiotics. So we take probiotics, we think that that's helping our gut. I have many people that take probiotics and drink alcohol and think, well, you know, I'm, I'm working on healing my gut. But the reality is if we're still having alcohol, it's not really gonna get us to the next level of gut health that we may desire.
It's very challenging as, as a healthcare practitioner to work with people who are struggling, you know, to get to that next level of their health, but are not willing to eliminate alcohol because it's something that, you know, oftentimes we have people that will take all the supplements, they will try all these different things, but you try to take away the alcohol and it's like a hell no.
Excuse my language, but you know, but it's one of the biggest things that can have an. . I mean, I was that way. I was very
Deb: healthy, very health conscious. People who know me now and know how much sugar I eat will be like, really? But no, I was like very conscious about what I was putting in my body. I wouldn't drink juice.
Because I was like, that's just pure sugar. Like I'm not gonna drink orange juice. Right. But I will drink this bottle of wine, you know? Right, right. Just things like that. So I can relate to that. Well, how could we use this information and use nutrition to help someone who's quitting drinking? So if you're at this stage where you're going through the cravings, maybe you're not far away from it yet, so you're in it.
Like, how can we help them with nutri?
Dr. Brooke: So that's a great question. There's a lot of tools that I share on in my programs, but also on Instagram. So make sure to definitely follow me on Instagram cause I post a lot of good tips on this. And I had someone just this past weekend respond to one of my stories and tell me that one of these very simple tools helped her cut out alcohol.
For good. And now she's gone several months and she's lost 35 pounds. And a lot of this roots back to these kind of simple changes. So one of the big things that I talk about is adding more protein into your diet. And I know we hear that very often. It's kind of this like old news recommendation, however, There is a very close link between alcohol and our blood sugar levels.
So when we are experiencing a craving for alcohol, but also for sugar, for carbohydrates that can be due to low blood sugar. And over time, when we are drinking on a regular basis, it can have a long-term impact on how our blood sugar works on a regular basis. So not only does alcohol contain some level of carbs and sugar, which so many of us, you know, maybe we're looking to.
Drink less. We'd drink a vodka soda instead of a glass of wine, for example. But it's not just about the sugar that we take in, it actually has to do with the ethanol, the actual alcohol component of what we drink because it shuts down our liver's ability to release things like glucagon and insulin, which manage our blood sugar on a regular basis.
So essentially, If if we are looking to quit and we are having these kind of high highs in blood sugar and low lows in blood sugar, which can come from a high carb, high sugar diet, that can make it more difficult for us to hold on to that willpower, if you will. And I, I do that again with quotes.
And I know this is a podcast, so I'll just iterate to anyone who's listening. I'm doing air quotes here because. Willpower is not just about your ability to. Say yes or say no. A lot of it's coming from our internal biochemical makeup that is saying, Hey, I'm hungry. I'm in. When you're in a low blood sugar state, you're hungry.
You are you need fuel for your body, right? So you don't have as much willpower at that point. So what we do, and we try to balance that, is we add more protein to the diet protein and then good sources of fiber. So things like vegetables, fruits making sure that our carbs are coming from that place is where they have some fiber and some protein along with it.
Right. So just that in and of its. Self can have a really big impact on cravings. I do have some supplements that I also suggest and supplements that are available on my site. Things like L-glutamine, which can be really useful for managing cravings and stabilizing blood sugar. So some of those tools can be really easy to implement.
And I'll just preface by saying, I know sometimes people think you. Don't do everything at once. Don't quit alcohol and go on a diet and try to, you know, start exercising and all of these big changes. But it doesn't have to be big changes, right? You don't have to completely overhaul your diet. You don't have to cut out all sugar simply by starting to think about adding more protein into your diet.
That can really, really have an impact on those craving. Awesome. Thank
Deb: you. Yeah. I always tell people like, eat number one, tip eat. Yeah. I am not opposed to eating sugar. And you do obviously start to crave more sugar. Can you talk a little bit more about the body craving sugar so much? Mm-hmm.
Especially when you're first quitting, and then some ways to manage those sugar
Dr. Brooke: craving. Yes. So exactly the same as we mentioned with the alcohol craving. So it has to do with, okay, there's, there is this part of it that goes into dopamine and getting this kind of hit of dopamine, which is what a lot of people talk about when it comes to this.
But it also has to do with blood sugar, right? So the things that cause those big fluctuations and blood sugar are going to be alcohol, sugar, and carbs, right? So when we take away the alcohol, well, what's left? The sugar and carbs and. There's several different schools of thought on this in that some people believe you.
Eliminate all sugar at the same time, and you don't wanna give into the sugar cravings. And I'm more of an advocate of allowing yourself to have some sugar. It's not the worst thing. If you're not drinking, that's good enough in my book especially in the beginning, to lean into those sugar cravings.
But you can help manage them by incorporating things like the protein. So instead of, you know, maybe having, I don't know, giant ice cream cone for dessert. Maybe you have a little bit of ice cream closer to dinner where you would have some protein and have some other good sources of fiber again maybe some healthy fats and that is going to have less of an impact.
Then if you were to just have a giant ice cream cone for dinner, right? The reality is that if we had the ice cream cone for dinner the next day, we're probably gonna wake up in this cycle of imbalanced blood sugar again. Whereas if we're having that protein, more of a high protein diet, it can. Shift actually how we're feeling the next day too.
So, you know, I always share in my story, I probably hadn't had ice cream on a cone in like 10 years, and when I quit drinking, it had to be on a cone. Like it, it was definitely something with the holding something in my hand kind of mentality. And you know, it's, there's so many reasons that I think.
Good to be able to have sugar when you're quitting because it is still a way to get out of the house, do something, celebrate it. It feels like a moment that you can cherish a little bit more than just sitting home and sitting on your hands. Right? So I think there's this part of it that is still leans, celebratory or fun, or, you know, gives you this kind of pick me up in a way that we didn't necessarily.
Or that we might be necessarily missing when we take alcohol out of the picture. But pairing it with the protein is always my recommendation. Love it. Yeah. So I, I, I think of
Deb: it as a treat too, like, because you mm-hmm. You, you know, when you're giving up drinking, you will fill that deprivation.
Mm-hmm. And so you want, oh, you want other treats to look for. Mm-hmm. And that might be in the form of ice cream on a cone. I, I would like to, Through Carl, I still do this every once in a while, drive through Carl's Jr. Because they have a dollar vanilla ice cream cone and you get it in your, I I didn't think about the hand thing, but that makes sense.
But you get their soft syrup just swirly up. Yep. Six inches high. Now I'm gonna want one. Okay, well anyway,
Dr. Brooke: We all have our thing and like, yes, sugar is terrible like you. I get comments sometimes right of on, on my things on Instagram, for example, and you know, people are like, well, sugar is worse than alcohol and all these things.
Yes, sugar is bad and I'm not advocating for everyone to, you know, go out and binge on a bunch of sugar, however it is. Part of the natural process of eliminating alcohol. There's a, again, there's this reason that it's happening. If we can control and manage that by because again, it's if we're trying to take out alcohol and sugar and, you know, all these other things It can be harder on some people, and I'm in the camp of, you know, we don't wanna develop a sugar addiction either, but in the beginning it can be a good tool to, you know, allow yourself to have some but have it in the right way.
Yeah.
Deb: I mean, and no one has gone to the ER
Dr. Brooke: to
Deb: like, detox from too many cupcakes or gotten in a, a, an accident driving, you know, with after too many ice
Dr. Brooke: cream cones. Right. It's definitely, I'm sure we could find something on the internet about that, but,
Deb: okay. Well, do you think sugar is as bad or worse than alcohol?
Would you even compare them? Like,
Dr. Brooke: I wouldn't compare them, and this is why alcohol is not a necessary food slash nutrient for our body. Sugar, which is all forms of sugar and carbohydrates, break down to glucose in our body. Well, glucose is a source of fuel. We cannot completely eliminate sugar or carbs from our diet because we need them in order to live.
We need them to produce energy. We need them in order for our brain, for func to function. We need them for, you know, our heart. Right. So we can't necessarily eliminate all sugar from our diet. We need it to live. So alcohol on the other sense. So alcohol is technically a macronutrient but it's the only non-essential macronutrient, which means we don't need it in order to live.
So I think of them in a different way in that, you know, alcohol is essentially a poison that we put into our body. Some might argue that sugar is poisonous as well. But it's not poisonous in the sense that it is a foreign material, if you will, that we shouldn't be having in our diet. Yeah, that makes sense.
Deb: How about once we give up drinking? Are there, you know, our body is just so amazing and it heals itself.
Is there anything that might be
Dr. Brooke: irreversible? Yes. You know, One thing that we most often think about when it comes to drinking alcohol is the liver, and I think that's what most, most people immediately associate with the health effects of alcohol use. The liver's very resilient. As some white might know in the sense of they've drank for a long, long, long time and they're still here, they're still, you know, they don't have any major health effects, but the liver can become damaged over long-term alcohol use in the form of cirrhosis, which is a scarring of the liver.
So the liver is quite regenerative until it gets to that point of scarring with which there's oftentimes not a lot that can be done in order to reverse that. But as it relates to, you know, other parts of the body, again, the body is very resilient. So you know, we can have these impacts that affect our GI system, for example, but that's also very malleable too, if we're using the right tools in order to rebalance the gut via probiotics and making sure again, that we have the right nutrients to support a healthy gut lining that can be repaired.
You know, there's a lot of things that can change as the result of long-term alcohol use, but the beauty of how resilient the body is, is that this is where nutrition and some of these natural methods can come in, is that we can do a lot. To change the body's biochemistry based on how we eat based on what we're putting in our system, what we're not putting into our system.
And there's very few things that I would say are irreversible when it comes to the damage. It's more about understanding and identifying well what's missing, so that we can support that in order to have that recovery that we're looking. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So
Deb: you mentioned like when you're first giving up, drinking to really add a lot of protein.
Mm-hmm. And so when you're further down the line mm-hmm. What is some way we can help heal our bodies? You know, here I am three years out, I'm sure I still need to heal my body, undo my sugar, sugar habit. What are some of the other ways we can heal through nutrition?
Dr. Brooke: One of the other big things that happens when we consume alcohol on a regular basis is it D robs us of a lot of our nutrients.
So we become deficient in things like B vitamins, vitamin D, many of our minerals, things like magnesium and zinc, and. Even if we're taking, let's say, a multivitamin while we're drinking, which is a response I get a lot of the time, it doesn't necessarily recover what is being lost. The other thing to consider is that many of us are nutrient deficient.
Even before we start drinking, right? We don't necessarily have a diet that is rich in all of these different things. The American diet is not rich in a lot of vitamins and minerals and nutrients and omega-3, for example, which is a healthy type of fat that is found in things like wild caught fish and a couple of different nuts and seeds that is depleted when we drink alcohol.
Very important for the immune system. It's very critical for the brain and brain health. And if we take out alcohol, it doesn't necessarily mean that we ha we're consuming more of these foods, right? So, I always suggest and this is why I do testing with a lot of my clients, is we're looking to identify, well, what is still maybe off in the system?
Are we maybe still nutrient deficient? Are there certain things that are maybe still lying around as the result of, of alcohol related dysfunction? So a good example is high cholesterol that a lot of people think is familial. It's you know, their mother had it. Father had it. And you know, I'm, I've always had high cholesterol.
While cholesterol is elevated, when there's inflammation in the body, it also is metabolized in the liver, right? So many people will have that kind of residual buildup that once may have occurred there when alcohol was present to. Like calm down some of the inflammation and the damage that was happening.
But through rebalancing diet, through adding in more fiber, more important nutrients. So again, things like our Omega three s and our B vitamins we can start to have this rebalancing in our system. So it's always important to me to think. What someone is experiencing. So whether that is, again, a hormone imbalance, headaches, is it a thyroid condition?
Is it joint pain? Is it skin issues? Is it acne? Is it eczema? And then starting to look and say, well, is there a possible link there from my alcohol? And then we start to look at, well, where could that possibly be coming from? How do we support that kind of root cause of what's going on?
Deb: So you're saying sometimes people still don't feel better even though they gave up alcohol. And then you can do different tests and figure out like, okay, what are you missing? Could there be a key I don't, what's the word I wanna use?
Nutrient or hormone or something? Yeah. What is, what is missing? What is low? And then here are some ways that you can heal that either through right nutrition or supplements or.
Dr. Brooke: Other methods, correct? Correct. Okay. Yes. It's very interesting because it's not that alcohol is the cause of everyone's high cholesterol or the cause of everybody's hormone imbalances, but what I like to share is that if you have a history of regular drinking, at least a few times a week for several years, It is likely that those things you're experiencing are in somewhat related to alcohol intake.
And by making changes to your nutrition by making changes to your habits, that can have a really big impact. You know, one of the questions that I get often is, You know, I quit drinking and I expected to feel more energy. I expected to feel X, y, Z happen, and I still feel like crap. And it can take time for the body to heal it.
I usually tell people anywhere between two to six months. And that's naturally, that's not with adding in, you know. Potential supplements of nutrients that you might be missing or making changes to the diet so that you are helping to support the body in recovering from some of that damage. So it's interesting because again, everybody's body is unique, right?
We all have this kind of unique biochemistry. We have unique genes. We have unique environments, so the things that we're exposed to and. It can, it can make it complex. But again, it's really the same tools underneath of increasing more protein, increasing your veggies so that you're getting more of those nutrient dense foods.
Adding in things like wild caught fish for their Omega three s and really starting to. Think of your diet as something that is your medicine, right? It's something that's healing you and healing your body, and not just a tool that you might use to support fitness or weight loss, et cetera. Well, how would someone,
Deb: you know, here I am, I'm in Boise, Idaho.
Dr. Brooke: I love
Deb: Boise. How, how would you know here you people are from around the country and the world, right? And they might be listening in. Mm-hmm. So how would they go about like finding out, well, how am I, how do I know if I'm low in any of these? And, and what do I get? How can I get help? What, what's
Dr. Brooke: some advice?
Yeah, so well I created my online programs just to answer that question explicitly because it is challenging to know. Most of the time, and this is the other thing I hear often is, you know, we go to the doctor and they did our blood work and everything looks quote unquote normal. And in my training what we do is we look at more narrow ranges on blood work.
We look at more. Testing to see, well, what is really wrong? Because what is tested by most physicians, when you go in for a normal checkup or a normal physical is a baseline screening that says like, everything's still intact. Like everything's still there, your kidneys are working, your liver is working, like nothing.
If we don't see red flags screaming it, you know, doesn't indicate that there's anything wrong. But what I do a lot of times is I find. Well, we haven't really tested everything that should be tested, right? So let's say for example, it's a woman who you know, she's chronically fatigued. She maybe has gained weight, she hasn't you know, her mood is a little bit off.
You go to the doctor, you get kind of the normal checkup, and the doctor says everything looks fine, right? Her thyroid wasn't tested, her hormones weren't tested, her nutrient levels weren't tested. You know, all of these other things can paint the picture as to what's going on and what might be wrong.
And so, you know, I'm a big fan of doing testing and trying to identify, you know, what is the root cause of what could potentially be going on. But for a lot of people just starting to make some of those changes again to the diet can. Show a lot of improvement for majority of people. It's difficult to access more of that kind of in-depth testing you know, when you're in parts of the country that maybe it is less easy to access.
Thankfully the pandemic brought most of us online, so we can do things, you know, around the country, around the world. And you know what I always say? You are someone who's listening and you've been struggling with your health. You know that alcohol wasn't helping, but you've cut out alcohol and you still don't feel your best and your doctor's telling you that everything's fine.
It doesn't necessarily mean that everything is fine, right? It doesn't necessarily mean that there's nothing that can be done in order to help you get to the place that you wanna get to. You know, the traditional medical system can be challenging sometimes in that sense of, unless it's an emergency, it's not urgent.
And a lot of people leave their doctor's offices feeling frustrated without answers and It just takes a little bit of looking deeper in order to sometimes find those things, those answers.
Deb: Yeah. Well, I mean, now would be a good time to mention your website and your resources and, and how you help people.
Dr. Brooke: , so I work both. In group settings, I have an online program. It's called the Functional Sobriety Program, which is an online network. It's an online course which walks you through my methods in terms of creating a customized nutrition plan for your sober or sober curious journey. So that helps you to identify some of these different areas.
You know, is there an imbalance in your gut, for example are there. Potential nutrients that you're low in. We incorporate different foods, functional foods, if you will, that support the brain and support blood sugar and support all of these kind of elements that make up this complex picture. And then from there we also have an online network where we have meetings like five meetings a week, and we've got a great group in there.
And so that's a great program for people who are just looking for, just looking to get started looking for some more resources, are interested in, you know, that nutrition kind of approach. But then I also see clients one-on-one, and that is oftentimes with people who have. More significant health concerns that they want to look a little bit deeper into.
So we will do some testing. We will start to identify, you know, well, what really is going on on a deeper level so that we can then customize that food plan, that supplement plan even further in order to get them the results that they're looking for. So it's been such an interesting blend of my background, my expertise in nutrition and functional medicine and that passion with sobriety because, You know, there's not a lot of people out there that are taking those two things into consideration.
And it's such an opportunity for people to really start to heal their body and to start to get to again, what that root causes so that we can really start feeling better and, and heal the damage that we've done over the long term. Yeah,
Deb: that's wonderful. Well, how can
Dr. Brooke: someone find you? You can head over to my website.
It's functional sobriety.com. You can find me on Instagram at Dr. Brook Sheller. Dr. Brook Sheller. I'm sure that'll be linked in the show notes. If I had to guess, Deb. Yes, it will be. And it's, this is a tricky spelling. Yeah. So my online programs are all there, and as I mentioned, I post a lot of content on on Instagram and in my emails, for example, which you can get onto on my website.
More content and more resources for everybody. Again, foods, supplements, other types of wellness techniques, so fitness and all the other good things. Meditation that play an important role as. Well, that's fantastic. . I, I so
Deb: appreciate you coming on today and just thank you sharing about your journey and then how you're helping other people and, and just giving, like you said, like this is really filling a gap out there, like mm-hmm.
How can we use nutrition to heal our bodies, and especially if, if our bodies have been a little wrecked from drinking too much. Right, right. So using it to help quit drinking, and then when you're on the other side too, so,
Dr. Brooke: That's fabulous. Thank you. Thank you.
Deb: All right. Well, I hope that you have a wonderful day.
Thank you all for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.
