The Wellness-Recovery Connection: Charting Your Pathway to Optimal Health While Recovering from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction

by John Newport PhD

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Author: John Newport PhD

Publisher: Hci

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0757302130
ISBN 13: 978-0757302138

A leading wellness advocate offers a step-by-step holistic plan for the 50 million people in recovery – a personalized blueprint for adding years to their life and life to their years. Includes a foreword by leading relapse prevention expert Terence T. Gorski.

Based on over thirty years in the trenches as a wellness professional and counselor, John Newport, Ph.D. shares the missing dimension in recovery and the reason why the majority of people battling alcoholism and drug addiction fail to reap the full benefits of recovery and optimal health: They don’t adopt a wellness-oriented lifestyle.

Newport breaks down the nebulous concept of wellness into 7 steps, and gives people in recovery – and their families – specific tools to design their own blueprint for optimal health, including:

Nutrition: nutritional hazards associated with alcoholism and drug addiction, and how to lay a sound nutritional foundation for recovery.

Exercise: role of exercise in preventing relapse and enjoying optimal health, with tips on how to get started.

Stress Management: practical tips on stress management and meditation, specifically geared to people in recovery.

Spiritual Needs: tips on how to manifest your unique sense of central purpose, and how this will help you stay clean and sober and move toward optimal health.

Social Supports: how to develop a strong social support system, sexuality in recovery, and more.

Conquering Substitute Addictions: including nicotine addiction, caffeine addiction and junk food binging.

Health Care: why our health care system is "wired backwards", and how recovering people can effectively work with doctors and other health care resources.

A must read for people in recovery, and treatment professionals.

From Publishers Weekly

For those with drug or alcohol addictions, arresting that dependency is, obviously, crucial for survival. But overcoming addiction's insidious effects on the body by taking charge of one's health is critical as well. Newport, a wellness professional and counselor with 25 years of experience, focuses on the "neglected stepchild" of recovery: basic wellness concepts that, he says, are often disregarded. Newport emphasizes that "taking it one step at a time" works for integrating a wellness-oriented lifestyle into recovery. Years of drinking and doing drugs produce an undernourished body that needs a decent nutritional foundation, which Newport covers in detail. Additionally, many former alcohol and drug addicts develop new addictions (to caffeine, nicotine or junk foods), and Newport discusses ways to prevent this from happening, including engaging in "moderate intensity physical activity," stress management and meditation. He outlines meaningful applications to accompany the spiritual dimension of wellness and recovery, and challenges readers to set long-term goals. Numerous resources, from literature to Web sites, will be of further assistance. This excellent book would be a fine supplement to any recovery program. (Jan.)
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Review

Trying to recover from alcohol and drug addiction without utilizing the tools of wellness is like fighting with one hand tied behind one's back. Yet it is astonishing how the many dimensions of wellness are often underutilized in the continuing care components of recovery programs across the country. Dr. John Newport corrects this oversight, and in doing so brings recovery within the reach of many more people."

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