Review: How to Eat to Change How You Drink

I can’t be the only person in their mid-late thirties whose body all of a sudden decided to not function the way it’s supposed to. For me, my digestive system seems to be having a few issues and I started to wonder (after many medical appointments and consultations with actual trained folks, not Dr. Google) if alcohol was sometimes a culprit. So, when I saw Brooke Scheller’s book How to Eat to Change How You Drink: Heal Your Gut, Mend Your Mind, and Improve Nutrition to Change Your Relationship with Alcohol was available to review, I thought, hm let’s give this a try.

Here’s the book’s description:

Let nutrition guide you to sobriety (or to just drinking a little less) with this guide and meal plan to reduce alcohol cravings and repair your health through food.
Trapped in alcohol's addictive grip, Dr. Brooke Scheller wanted a way out. For her, total sobriety was the answer to her problem, which she achieved by applying her skills as a doctor of nutrition, pairing her knowledge of nutrition with other integrative therapies to eliminate alcohol for good. Seeing the success in herself, she shifted her practice to help inspire others to explore a lifestyle with little to no alcohol.
How to Eat to Change How You Drink is a revolutionary guide to leverage food and nutrition to reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption, develop mindfulness, and promote a healthier relationship with alcohol. Working through the book, readers will identify their drinking archetype and then learn the types of nutritional changes they can make to reduce alcohol cravings alongside behavior modification; they'll learn how alcohol affects their nutritional status and can contribute to health symptoms ranging from fatigue, to hormonal imbalances, digestive irregularities, weight gain, thyroid disorders, autoimmune diseases and more; and they'll restore their nutritional status and repair key body systems after moderate to heavy alcohol consumption.
This book will change the way we think about and address alcohol intake in our society-- through the lens of nutrition.

I requested this book right before leaving for an almost 3 week vacation and it was waiting for me when I got home. I say this because I may not have looked quite as closely at the book’s details or Scheller’s background as I may normally have done. And I say that because I wasn’t expecting the book to come from a place of sobriety more than dietary. I didn’t really want/need to be reading about the addictive qualities of alcohol nor did I need to find out what kind of drinker I am. I know that, duh, that’s all part of how alcohol affects your body but the tone of the book definitely came across as, “this is why you should become sober” not so much “this is why cutting back can be beneficial to all of us.” Is that fair of me? To be frustrated that true sobriety was a larger focus than I wanted? I recognize that no, it may not be fair.

I’ve been reading a few books on digestive health lately and some are far more accessible than others. Scheller’s fell somewhere in the middle. That said, I still didn’t quite get anything useful out of the gut health section. Again, this could very much be a personal thing. I’ve been trying for months to figure out my issues and I was really hoping for a nugget of information that could help and I just didn’t get one.

The book’s divided into four parts to help break down this somewhat unwieldy topic and make it understandable for us laypeople. Part 1 talked about relationships with alcohol, leaning (in my opinion) too heavily on Scheller’s personal history. Part 2 focused on a “functional approach to sobriety” and discussed how alcohol can affect different parts of the body, like the gut and brain. Learning how to eat to change drinking habits was the focus of Part 3 and Part 4 gave the reader some recipes to try to support an “alcohol reduction plan”. 

I think Brooke Scheller’s book, How to Eat to Change How You Drink, would be a good one to pick up if you’re committed to completely cutting out alcohol and living a sober life or if you’re sober-curious and don’t have any other medical issues to worry about. It was an interesting enough read for me, confirming what I knew about some of the sneaky downsides of alcohol, but it wasn’t as applicable to my life as I would have liked.

*A copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*