I Love Being Sober

She was thirteen. She decided the world would be better without her, and she picked anorexia as the way she was going to leave it. She told her parents she would be dead by sixteen. She went into a treatment center three hours from home with four adolescent beds and a building full of adults detoxing. The program treated her by the number on a scale. Reach this number, you can call your parents. Reach this number, you can go outside. Nobody asked her why she was doing it, and she already knew. Paige Kelly, BSN, RN spent eight years in that illness. She got out at twenty-one on what she calls decision day, on a bathroom floor, with her body failing. She went on to become an emergency room nurse, because chaos was the environment her nervous system already knew how to live in. Then she got on a bike, then she got off it in a crash that showed her what eight years had done to her bones, and a doctor told her to start running to rebuild them. That is how she ended up finishing an Ironman in 10:07. This conversation is not about any of that. It is about what nobody taught her: how to notice the thoughts running her life, how to tell the difference between her own voice and everyone else’s, and how to come back into a body she had spent a decade at war with. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. What we get into: why an eating disorder is a decision about the world and not about food the difference between an eating disorder and disordered eating why so many people eat before bed and what the nervous system is actually asking for the “I should” inventory she did with a piece of paper and a pen what to do when someone asks what you love about yourself and you come up empty the day she said hello to her own body and her body told her where to go why she keeps her promises to herself microscopically small, and the one thing she thinks treatment centers should be doing more of.

He was a Versace model living at the Clevelander on Ocean Drive, drinking fifty drinks a day for free because his friends tended bar, and getting handed cocaine because the dealers knew he knew everybody. He worked five times a year. The rest of the time was idle. Then the hangovers started lasting five days. Troy Casey — The Certified Health Nut — grew up a ward of the state, started drinking and smoking weed at thirteen, and spent four and a half years cycling in and out of sobriety before it finally held in 1999. What made it hold was not a program. It was an hour on a cushion the morning after a fight, and then, two weeks later, ten days of silence at a Vipassana retreat. Thirty-five years into holistic health, his position in the wellness industry is not what you would expect from someone who looks like he does: the things that actually move the needle are mostly free. Sleep. Sunlight. Walking. Water. Breathing through your nose. He is blunt about the rest of it — peptides, Ozempic, TRT, the twenty-supplement stack — and blunt about why a person in recovery in particular should be careful with all of it. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. The room does a breathing exercise together at 42:30 that is worth doing along with them. What we get into: the fashion industry’s open bar and what it did to a young man with no supervision why he calls the friends who told him he was wasting his potential “love incarnate” the four and a half years of relapse before it stuck what ten days of silence actually does the nine pillars, and how to shrink them to three when you are thirty days sober why he thinks biohacking can become the same disease in a lab coat the seven factors of stress how to breathe like your nervous system depends on it, because it does.

Everybody in treatment eventually gets the insight. They can tell you why they drank. They can name the childhood, the trauma, the trigger. And then they wake up the next morning and do the same thing they did yesterday. Natalie Hunter has spent more than twenty years studying why that happens. Her position is blunt: insight alone does not change anybody. What she teaches instead is behavior over belief — that change comes from doing something different, not from finally thinking differently. In this episode, she walks through her Six Stages of Conscious Change, including the one almost everybody misses: the distance between wanting to change and being willing to change. She lays out what she calls the Four Core Human Wounds. And she is direct about where coaching stops and a doctor starts — including for people whose medication is the reason they are alive. Tim also ends up in the chair. What starts as a question about guilt and shame turns into an unplanned, on-air look at a pattern he had never traced before: stealing candy as a kid, the adrenaline, and what he was actually reaching for. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. What we get into: Why you can say all the right words in a coaching session and still not change The difference between desire and willingness The “horrification moment” and why it is fuel rather than shame The four wounds underneath every limiting pattern Why the feeling you are having about your behavior is often the wrong feeling What an energy shift actually looks like from the outside Where coaching ends and psychiatric care begins

You got sober. You did the work. And you still wake up exhausted, foggy, flat, and unmotivated — and everyone around you says give it more time. Sometimes that’s the right answer. Sometimes something underneath is actually broken. Dr. Amie Hornaman spent her twenties competing in bodybuilding and figure competitions. Then the scale started going up while she was training twice a day and tracking every macro. Six different doctors inside a major medical system looked at her labs and told her she was normal — eat less, exercise more. The seventh doctor was the first one to physically touch her throat. She found nodules, and a diagnosis. Today Dr. Amie is “The Thyroid Fixer,” founder and CEO of the Advanced Thyroid and Hormone Clinic, host of The Thyroid Fixer podcast, and author of The Thyroid Fix. In this conversation she makes a case our clients hadn’t heard before: getting sober is a physiological stressor, and stressors are exactly what flip thyroid and hormone problems from dormant to active. Pregnancy does it. Perimenopause does it. Divorce and grief do it. So does removing a substance your body has spent years adapting to. Which is why she argues thyroid and hormone testing belongs in early recovery — not eighteen months later when you’re wondering why you don’t feel the way everyone promised you would. What we get into Why six doctors missed it, and what the seventh did differently Why TSH alone is not a thyroid test — and the full panel to ask for What long-term alcohol and substance use does to cortisol, blood sugar, liver detoxification, and sex hormones Why thyroid dysfunction looks almost identical to burnout, depression, anxiety, and post-acute withdrawal What alcohol does to estrogen in men, and why testosterone often can’t be fixed without addressing it SHBG, and why your hormones can test “normal” and still not be reaching your cells Why she says you can’t put hormone therapy on a dumpster fire The 30/60/90-day timeline for feeling different And why chasing every biohack can raise the same cortisol you’re trying to lower Tim also shares his own experience — two to three years sober before anyone checked his thyroid, and what changed 90 days after they did. FREQUENTLY ASKED Can getting sober cause thyroid problems? Dr. Hornaman’s position is that sobriety doesn’t cause thyroid disease, but it acts as a major physiological stressor — and stressors are what activate a dormant autoimmune thyroid condition. She places getting sober in the same category as pregnancy, perimenopause, andropause, grief, and divorce. Why do I still feel tired after getting sober? Persistent fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, low mood, and low motivation in sustained sobriety overlap almost completely with the symptoms of hypothyroidism and low sex hormones. Her recommendation is to test rather than wait it out. What thyroid tests should I ask for? Dr. Hornaman names six: TSH, free T4, free T3, reverse T3, and the two antibodies — TPO (thyroid peroxidase) and TGA (thyroglobulin). She argues TSH alone is a pituitary measurement, not a thyroid measurement. Does alcohol lower testosterone in men? In her clinical experience, yes — and it simultaneously raises estrogen, both directly and by burdening liver detoxification. She describes a case with an estradiol of 343 in a man in his fifties. How long until I feel better? Her typical timeline: mental clarity and energy around 30 days, changes on the scale and early hair regrowth around 60 days, and the full effect around 90 days.

Dr. Sharon Stills started drinking at twelve. By nineteen she was sitting in a parking lot in the Hamptons, too high to walk into the party — and that was the night it broke. She got sober at twenty, without AA, without rehab, and thirteen years later became a naturopathic medical doctor. In this episode she explains addiction the way she sees it after twenty-five years of practice: not as a moral failure and not purely as a brain disease, but as a nervous system trying to regulate itself. Which is why, as she puts it, we don’t quit addiction — we graduate from one to the next. She’s blunt about her own: coffee, work, the phone, hot yoga. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix, with about twenty-five minutes of unscripted audience Q&A at the end. WHAT WE GET INTO: Why the physical body has to be fed before trauma work can land The nutrient deficiencies she finds over and over in newly sober patients What’s actually happening when someone says they’re crawling out of their skin How progesterone, testosterone and estrogen drive cravings through GABA, dopamine and serotonin Perimenopause as an unrecognized relapse risk The “backpack” model of toxic load Why she’d rather you eat a Big Mac in joy than organic food in stress. ABOUT DR. SHARON STILLS, NMD — Naturopathic medical doctor, 25 years in practice. Graduate of Sonoran University (2001). Trained in European biological medicine under Dr. Thomas Rau at the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland and served as a co-lead North American lecturer for the Paracelsus Academy. Board member, Bio-Regulatory Medicine Institute; former board member, the Archive of Healing at UCLA. Former host of The Science of Self-Healing podcast. She practices at Lasting Wellness Center in Scottsdale, Arizona alongside her son, Dr. Ben Stills. FIND DR. STILLS — Website and newsletter: drstills.com · Instagram: @drsharonstills · Her free five-day online summit opens for signup September 1 and runs live starting September 12, with 40+ expert interviews. Join her newsletter at drstills.com to get the invitation. ABOUT THIS PODCAST — Tim Westbrook is the founder and CEO of Camelback Recovery and holds an MS in Addiction Counseling. The I Love Being Sober Podcast records live every Wednesday at 10 AM in front of the clients and staff at our Phoenix outpatient center. If any of this sounds like your situation, a conversation could be a reasonable next step: camelbackrecovery.com This episode is educational content and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it is not a substitute for clinical assessment by your own physician. Products and brands mentioned are named at the guest’s discretion; Camelback Recovery has no sponsorship, affiliate, or financial relationship with any of them. Views expressed by guests are their own.