Katy: Hey, I’m Katy Harvey, a non-diet dietitian. If you’ve spent years battling food and your body, I’m here to show you the path to healing. Here on the Rebuilding Trust with Your Body podcast, I teach you how to find your own freedom with food through tools, strategies, mindset shifts, and heartfelt discussions around what it means to make peace with food and your body while still existing in diet culture. I believe that all bodies deserve respect and that health is so much more than a number on the scale. It’s about connecting with our true selves and learning that our relationship with food is more important than the food itself. So, if you’re ready to discover the freedom of rebuilding trust with your body, grab a seat and maybe a snack, and let’s do this.

Hey there, Katy here, and welcome back to another incredible episode of Rebuilding Trust with Your Body. Today, we’re going there, and we’re gonna talk about something that so many of you have asked me about. I also know that a lot of you are wondering about this topic but haven’t felt comfortable talking about it yet, and it’s alcohol. Where does alcohol fit into your relationship with food? How does alcohol fit in with intuitive eating? Is not drinking alcohol a form of restriction or diet mentality? Should you always honor your cravings for alcohol? These are the types of things that we are going to dig into today with an extra special guest that I cannot wait for you to meet.

Casey Maguire Davidson is a life and sobriety coach and the host of the Top 100 Mental Health podcast, The Hello Sunday Podcast for Sober Curious Women. As an ex-red wine girl who spent 20 years climbing the corporate ladder while holding on tightly to her love of wine, Casey’s passionate about helping busy women stop drinking and create lives they love without alcohol. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, PR, HuffPost, and The New York Times. I’ve followed Casey for a while, and I am so blown away by her ability to teach on this topic in a way that is so practical, wise, and non-judgmental. You’re gonna get so much out of this episode no matter where you’re at in your relationship with alcohol, whether you drink on a regular basis, or if you’ve worried that maybe you have a problem with alcohol, or even if you hardly ever drink or you choose not to drink for one reason or another.

One thing I want to challenge and get out ahead of time before you listen is I want you to be curious about whether you start to think about cutting alcohol out as a sneaky way to lose weight. If that’s what you’re making it about, you’re treating it like a diet. Casey shares what she sees as reasons that someone might consider sobriety or decreasing their alcohol, but it’s not about weight loss. She talks about it in terms of how your body feels, how your life feels, and how alcohol is different from food in the sense that it’s an addictive substance, whereas food is not an addictive substance. We don’t develop chemical dependence or withdrawals from food like we do alcohol. So, we do have to think of alcohol a bit differently than we do food, and that’s an important distinction as you consider your relationship with both things.

I also just want to say from the get-go that I do drink alcohol, and I am not advocating for sobriety or telling you that you need to try sobriety. That is a personal decision for each one of us, and who knows, maybe someday I’ll try taking a break from alcohol to see how it feels. I think Casey’s perspective is really interesting, and I am practicing being curious about how I feel after I drink. My intent with this episode is just to bring that topic to this space. Even if you don’t have any concerns about alcohol, it’s still worth giving it a listen because it’s an interesting discussion about the intersection of alcohol, sobriety, and diet culture. There is so much richness in this conversation. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Casey, thank you so much for being here. I can’t wait to dig into all things alcohol, but first, I gave a little intro, but I want you to tell us your version of who you are, tell us about the work that you do, kind of where you’re coming from with it, and then we’ll go from there.

Casey: Absolutely. Thank you, Katy. I’m really excited to be here. Yeah, so what about me? Let’s see. I live right outside Seattle. I’ve been married for 22 years. I have two kids who are now 16 and 10. I spent 20 years in digital corporate marketing at startups and Fortune 500 companies, and I was a red wine girl for most of my adult life. So I spent kind of 20 years climbing the corporate ladder, getting married, having kids, building a life, and holding on really tightly to my love of wine.

Back in the day, I would have a glass or two, but over the years, as I had kids, work stress, and life got really busy, and responsibilities got really overwhelming, it sort of pretty easily slipped into me drinking a bottle of wine a night, kind of seven nights a week. And if that sounds crazy, I promise you that I am not alone. There are way more women than you think drinking like that. What was strange was it almost wasn’t even something anyone commented on, including my husband. Like, everyone knew I loved to drink. I would have wine every night when I came home. I would just have a glass when I walked in the door, then I was cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up, reading stories to the kids, and I would come back downstairs and sort of finish my bottle of wine, either jumping back on the computer or just sitting around, kind of hanging out, watching shows on TV on my couch.

I knew it was an issue because I tried really hard to control it. I tried every trick in the book—from “I’m only gonna have two drinks a night” to “I’m only gonna drink on the weekends” to “I’m gonna drink beer because I like wine better,” to… I mean, you name it, I tried it, and it never lasted for very long. I would white-knuckle it. I would be irritated if I wasn’t drinking. I would rationalize it. I’d be like, “Oh my God, it’s my one reward. It’s the one way I have to relax,” you know, the martyr. “I have so much on my shoulders,” and I would drink. Then, I would wake up at 3 a.m. with crushing anxiety. I would roll over in the morning and be like, “What the hell is wrong with you? Get your life together.” I would hate putting on my eyeliner. My eyes were all watery and bloodshot. I felt shaky, and nobody knew.

I mean, I was a director at a Fortune 500 company. Nobody knew how worried I was about my own drinking, and that was because I worked really, really hard to make sure nobody knew. Nothing bad happened; there was no giant thing that made me decide I needed to stop. It was sort of the death of a thousand cuts, you know? One too many hangovers, one too many nights my husband couldn’t wake me up off the couch, one too many conversations I didn’t remember. My anxiety got worse. I just wasn’t very proud of myself. I felt terrible about myself and kept trying to take breaks. I tried to do dry January, tried to do all the things, and slowly over the years, I got more plugged into the universe of high-achieving women who struggle with alcohol, who were writing books. It’s called Quitlit—it’s like Chicklit, but it’s about women quitting drinking. It’s kind of funny. There were online groups about women quitting drinking, podcasts—I have a podcast about women quitting drinking.

Really cool, smart, amazing women just like me who were like, “Dude, I got sucked into this trap, and it’s really hard to get out of.” Finally, I just woke up one day, random day, mid-February, and was like, “I can’t do this to myself anymore.” Someone had recommended a sober coach—she happened to live in Paris. She had a podcast. She was awesome. I wrote her that morning, you know, from my big office, terrified someone would see, and I signed up for her 100-day alcohol-free challenge. And that was 9 years ago. Wow.

Katy: What is striking me so much is how similar this is to when people decide to quit dieting. It’s such a familiar story—just, you know, kind of a different topic—where there’s that normalization of it. You know, people might not think you really have a problem with it or know how much you’re struggling, hitting rock bottom with it and deciding to make a change.

Casey: It’s so similar, and it’s so mixed up together in terms of women. I know that most women, including myself, also struggled with their self-image, their body image, as well as their drinking. I am not the only woman who does with drinking what a lot of women do with dieting—like, “I’ve already blown it. What’s the point? I’ll start again on Monday. I’ll start in January. I’ll ‘be good’.”

Katy: Take a break from drinking, walk away from drinking. The first one is saying that they’re never gonna drink again or debating whether they have a problem with alcohol, or saying that, “I don’t think I’m that bad, I’m not an alcoholic, all my friends drink like I do.” Take all of that off the table. You do not need to have a problem with alcohol to decide you’re not drinking again. You do not need to decide you will never drink again to take a break from alcohol. Just take a break and see how you feel. It’s sort of like dating, I mean deciding before you ever stop or a month in that you are never ever gonna drink, it’s like going on a third date with a guy and being like, “Alright, am I marrying him or dumping him? Like that’s it, I need to know now.” No, like if you like him enough, go away for the weekend, go on vacation, I don’t know. There are a million things you can do, just keep going. So one thing that people do is they say, “I’m never gonna drink again,” and it just doesn’t work. You will go to a bar, walk by something, and see someone with a glass of wine and be like, “Oh my God, I’m never gonna have that again.” And you know, if you take a longer period of time without alcohol and you don’t like it, it’s going to be there. Nobody is taking away the alcohol, but you need to get distance from it to see how much it is impacting your mood, your priorities, your time, your habits, your happiness, all of that stuff.

Casey: The other thing that I see women do is what I did, which is try to moderate their drinking or try to only drink on the weekends or only drink two glasses a night, or, “I’m not gonna drink for two weeks or 30 days, and then I’ll be quote unquote reset.” And the problem with that is that it is so much easier to not drink at all than to try to moderate your intake of an addictive substance. And alcohol really does function a lot like cigarettes, meaning that when you smoke or drink and then don’t, you are in withdrawal, regardless of how much you’re smoking or drinking. So alcohol does a few things. One, it spikes your cortisol, which is your stress hormone, that lasts like two to three weeks. Two, it spikes your dopamine really high, like if you think like heroin spikes your dopamine off the chart, yes, alcohol spikes your dopamine as well, not quite as high, but it does. And your body wants to get yourself into a normalized state, so what your body does, even if you only drink on the weekends, it suppresses your natural level of dopamine, which is your happy hormone. It also suppresses your natural serotonin, which is your mood stabilizer, and it takes about 30 days to stabilize those. So if you are going and only drinking on the weekends, or even drinking every night, or drinking every two weeks, it is not your imagination that you are more irritated, less happy, more blah, more stressed out when you are not drinking. But that is because of what alcohol is doing to your body. Right, you are navigating life less happy and less emotionally stable than you would be if you didn’t drink at all.

Katy: So when people are like, “I’m only gonna drink on the weekend,” or “only every two weeks” or “only X number of drinks,” you basically are going through the craving and withdrawal cycle constantly. You are doing the worst, absolute part of withdrawal every single week. And if you got past those first two weeks, you would suddenly notice that you feel more peaceful, that you feel weird bursts of joy that you haven’t had in years. Like literally, “Oh my God, tears are coming to my eyes, I feel like the world is in technicolor.” It is strange, but people call it the pink cloud, but it’s real. You will also notice a lot of physical things. So I always encourage women, if you’re taking a break from drinking, like take pictures of yourself. Take a selfie on the day you stop, take a selfie every week. You will notice you cannot lose a single pound, your face will be less bloated, your stomach will be less bloated, your skin will be brighter, your eyes will look better. I mean, it is significantly noticeable how much healthier you are, and that is just from removing alcohol. You will sleep better, and again, it takes about two weeks, right? If I was drinking nightly, I probably hadn’t had a good night of sleep in two years since I quit when my daughter was two. It really messes with your sleep. Like even a single glass of wine, and if you are waking up at 3 a.m. with anxiety and your mind racing, it’s the alcohol.

Casey: So the other big mistake I see women make, we’ve talked about this, is attempting to combine a period of time without alcohol with any kind of weight loss or food restriction or diet. And there are so many reasons for this, but I did it forever. I mentioned Weight Watchers, and like, “I’m gonna cut out all the food and drink,” or, “I’m gonna cut out alcohol and a ton of food.” And hunger is the number one trigger to drink. So when women are quitting drinking, I highly recommend, number one, don’t diet at all. Just don’t. I swear to you, you will look and feel better regardless. You can eat all the brownies. You will still look and feel better if you don’t drink. But also, you need to set your alarm for 3:30 or 4 p.m. and have a protein snack so you are not starving going into the witching hour, going home to cook dinner, leaving the office, picking up the kids, or you’ve been home with the kids all day. You need to eat something before the time when you would normally drink. Hunger is a huge trigger. Also, you need comfort food, right? Like alcohol is a lot of sugar. Also spikes your dopamine in the same way that sugar does. So you can’t take all of that away at once, and it will help you. I’m always like, “Eat the damn brownies.” Like, you’re getting away from a highly addictive substance that causes seven kinds of cancer, is everywhere around you, and you’ve been relying on as your one coping tool for connection, stress, relaxation, and everything else, like to get your second wind. So like, eat a damn brownie. It’s okay. The world will move on, and you need to separate: are you super irritated and annoyed because you’re not drinking? Or are you super irritated and annoyed because you’re starving and you haven’t had anything but a salad for two days? You need to separate those two.

Katy: So trying to diet is another huge mistake. And just get a period of time without alcohol, get to a baseline of what your body and mind and emotions feel like, and then you can evaluate what else you want to change in your life. I think that’s such an important message there, and I love hearing you say, “Eat the damn brownie, like it’s okay,” you know? And be kind to yourself as you’re going through this thing that’s really hard. And I can totally see where people are tempted to be like, “I’m getting healthier, and I’m not gonna drink,” and therefore, “I’m gonna do all the other things as well,” and it’s like, cue the diet mentality, you know?

Casey: Oh my God, and in early sobriety, like you are going to be very tired. Like, you just are. Your body is healing. You probably haven’t slept well in a really long time. So you need like two weeks. So I like to tell women, like, pretend like you have the flu. This should be a time of extreme self-care. Lower the bar, take naps, go on long, slow walks. Like binging on a good show is a legitimate way to get through early sobriety. Like, read the romance novels, do all the things, go to bed at 8 p.m. Like, you almost have to slow down before you can spring forward, and it’s really good. And I love that the message there is really to take care of yourself instead of just being hard on yourself, of like, “Well, shame on me for having this problem, and this is what I deserve for, you know?”

Katy: And if you are struggling, if you are worried about your drinking, you are absolutely not alone. If you are struggling with drinking, you are absolutely not alone. And if you are trying to change your relationship with alcohol, you should be incredibly proud of yourself. This is a really healthy, good move for your life and your health and your family. It is hard to do, and even by listening to this podcast, you should be proud of yourself.

Casey: I’m curious, you know, when you look at your life on sort of a global level, what do you think have been some of the biggest benefits for you personally, and what are some of the things that you hear over and over again from clients? Like once they’re on like the other side of it, and they’re like, “Okay, I’m not drinking anymore,” what has changed in their life?

Katy: So what’s interesting is like everything and nothing, right? So one of the things before I stopped drinking was I had a really great life. Like, there wasn’t this huge issue. I had, you know, at the time I’d been married for 14 years, I had two little kids, I had a great job, I had tons of friends, we went on vacations, like life was good. And yet, I was anxious, I was insecure, I sort of weirdly felt doomed, like a ton of anxiety about like future life decisions. I was resentful of my schedule. I thought my husband wasn’t helping me enough. I was sort of very defensive, all the things. And when I stopped drinking, I was giving up in my mind like my favorite thing in the whole world. Like I very, very consciously for years was like, “I need to get a handle on my drinking so that dot dot dot I never have to stop completely.” Because I thought that would be the worst-case scenario in my life. And like diet culture, it just showed how skewed my thinking was, how just completely messed up and hijacked my priorities were. Because to some extent, it is just a beverage in a bottle. Like it is just a liquid. It’s like choosing a Coke versus a Pepsi. I mean, I love non-alcoholic beer now, athletic non-alcoholic beer is my absolute favorite. It’s just choosing an NA beer versus a regular beer, a non-alcoholic mojito versus a mojito with alcohol, right? It is just a beverage swap. But for me, there was so much tied into it, to my identity and who I was and what that meant about myself, and my fear that I wouldn’t have fun again, or it was just ridiculous.

Casey: So you stop drinking, I have the same life, same husband, same kids, same job, and number one, my anxiety is down by 60%. I mean everything that stressed me out was so much less acute than it was before. Probably because my nervous system wasn’t, you know, shot to hell. Probably because I was finally sleeping better. Definitely because I wasn’t trying to struggle through the day with a hangover without having anyone notice. I mean that is exhausting and ridiculous, right? But also, like I was being so much kinder to myself, so much kinder. I had to put better boundaries with my husband. I had to prioritize myself. I had to ask more of him. I had to stop doing things that made me resentful because they were triggers to drink. I needed more self-care, so I started working out. I started going on walks in the middle of the day. I started blocking off my calendar at work. I started eating well so I didn’t like diet all day, starve myself through the witching hour, drink a bottle of wine, eat all the food, sleep terribly, start all over again. I was proud of myself, which was weird. I started feeling those moments of joy that were incredible. My mind was less busy. I wasn’t no longer trying to calculate if I had quote unquote enough wine at home for the evening. I wasn’t trying to decide if I had time to stop for a bottle before I had had to pick up my kids at daycare. I was better able to just say no at work because I didn’t feel guilty that I was like hungover and therefore that’s why I wasn’t doing well. And I was better at my job with less stress. So everything and nothing. Now you map that out over years. I left my corporate job, which was insane. I was like the golden handcuffs girl. “I can never do it,” my job was less stressful, and I decided it wasn’t fulfilling enough for me to stay. I could barely handle life when I was drinking and a director at a 45 hundred company. Somehow, stopped drinking, same job, same family, somehow had time to like go back to coaching school for nine months on nights and weekends, start my own business, start coaching women in addition to my job. I mean, I feel like high achieving women who are drinking like I did or less, you’re like running a marathon with this ball and chain tied to your ankle, and you don’t realize until you let go of it how much harder you are making every moment of your life. Like you’re just like, you can, I coach like really incredible busy, high-achieving women, the things that they are able to do once they stop drinking are amazing. Because they’re doing all the things anyway, like with one arm tied behind their back, and it is exciting and cool and inspiring to see what they can do when they finally let that go.

Katy: Yeah, that’s incredible. And like you said, like it’s everything and nothing changes.

Casey: Yeah, I think that’s such a beautiful way to put it.

Katy: Yeah, yeah.

Casey: Okay, so here’s a question I get asked all the time and I really want your input on this. So because I teach intuitive eating, people will often ask me if they should treat alcohol the same as food in terms of, you know, listen to your body and intuitively like honor your cravings and let yourself have a satisfying amount and let yourself have it when you want it. How would you speak to alcohol in that regard? Do you think of it the same as food? Do you think of it as different than food?

Katy: I think of it as being very different from food, and I’ll tell you why. Alcohol is a very interesting combination. It is both a depressant and a stimulant. It hits your bloodstream really, really fast and it sort of hijacks your mind, right? Your dopamine spikes really hard, really quickly. It impacts your nervous system, it impacts the way that you interact with the world around you. So it is very hard to intuitively drink, right? Because of what it does to your body and your mind, unless you are truly a take-it-or-leave-it drinker. But those people drink like maybe two drinks a year or once every 3 months. Like there are very, very few people who literally, truly do not care about alcohol. If you did not care about alcohol, if you could take it or leave it, you would leave it, right? Or it would be very, very rare. Most of us have a very complicated relationship with alcohol. If the idea is, “If you crave it, have it,” you are going to crave it. Of course you’re gonna crave it. First of all, it’s all around you. It’s tied into your coping mechanisms. It’s tied into the way you self-soothe. Also, if you drink it all often, you’re going to be in withdrawal and therefore, you are going to crave it. So what I say to that is, take 100 days off. If you can’t do that, take 30 days off. Give yourself an opportunity to see that when you don’t consume it at all, you won’t crave it. You know, we sort of crave what we consume in some way. And like I said, it’s almost impossible to intuitively drink alcohol, right? You would never be like, “I’m gonna intuitively take heroin, like just when I feel it, and like that’s cool,” you know? But like if I don’t feel it, I won’t do heroin. Like it just… The minute you take it, it takes over. And not everyone drinks like I did at all. I mean, like I said, my husband still drinks. He has beer every night.

KATY: That is his choice. We are all adults, and it is pretty insidious the way it can pull you into drinking more and more.

CASEY: Yeah, and I think that you explain that so well, and it makes perfect sense. We just can’t intuitively drink the way that we can intuitively eat. In some ways, it’s almost an opposite approach. Because what we know with food is that telling ourselves we can’t have it or being like, “I can’t eat this for 100 days,” that’s actually gonna make it worse with food. But with alcohol, it sounds like that’s actually the more productive approach. And part of it is because of the biochemistry of how it’s working in the body.

KATY: Yeah, also, it’s an opportunity to change your habits and develop more healthy coping skills, right? So, I used to go to work, and I would be like, I was driving in fifth gear down a highway—I don’t know if anyone knows how to drive a stick car anymore, I learned on a stick. So, you’re like all the way at fifth gear, and then you get home and you have two hours to chill, right? And then you have to go do it all again. So, I wanna downshift into first really, really fast. The easiest way to do that is to drink alcohol, right? It will immediately depress your nervous system and stimulate you to get through this second shift. It’s really incredible how it impacts your body. By the way, it also takes you down really low, will make you more tired, more anxious, I mean, all that stuff, right? But what you need to do is—I feel like we get really lazy.

CASEY: So the thing I ask women when they’re taking a break from drinking is, you are going to crave alcohol in the first two weeks. There is no question. Any woman who is like, “Oh, I didn’t even wanna drink,” I’m like, yeah, you’re lying to me. That’s not true. It just isn’t. If you have any kind of a complicated relationship with alcohol. But what you get to do then is to identify why you want to drink. So in the beginning, it’s withdrawals—great. That’s what it is for most people. After that, it’s emotional and habitual. It’s a self-soothing mechanism. It’s boredom, you know. We drink because we’re hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, overwhelmed, stressed—all those things. So what I would say to women is like, okay, number one, eat if you wanna drink. Eat something, preferably something with protein, and then ask yourself why you want to drink. What is the reason you wanna drink? Actually name that emotion. And it can be, “My husband’s being a jerk,” “My boss was a nightmare,” “My kids are crying,” “I can’t take it,” “I haven’t had 10 minutes to myself today,” “I’m bored out of my mind,” “I wish I was 23 years old,” like whatever it is, “I wanna heighten this celebration,” “I deserve it.” You can solve for all of those, right? You can be like, “I’m tired,” okay, I need to rest. “I’m overwhelmed,” I need to take something off my list. “I need to ask for help,” “I need to opt out.” You know, “I’m lonely,” I need to call my best friend. Whatever it is. But we get so lazy that alcohol is the easy button.

KATY: Yeah, I think what you’re describing makes so much sense. You go three months without alcohol. You know what the three months would be like if you’re drinking? We have all these rituals, right? Maybe you’ll take up a new hobby. Maybe you’ll find a new way to connect with your partner. Maybe you will do something you always said you wanted to do, like, “I’m gonna hike every weekend,” or “I’m gonna play guitar,” “I’m gonna do X with my kids,” that you never did because you just were in this cycle of instant reward and then recovery. You deserve to see how much your life could change not drinking, and at the end of it, like, you will have learned something. You’ll probably look back and be like, “Wow, I wasn’t really living my life to the fullest.” And if you want to go back to drinking, you will have that information. So the next time you wake up with a hangover or you feel anxiety coming, or you do XYZ, you’ll be like, “Oh, I didn’t feel this way when I wasn’t drinking,” and that’s good information too.

CASEY: Yeah, it’s data for you.

KATY: Absolutely. And I’ve heard you talk before on your podcast about how very few people full-on quit the first time they try.

CASEY: Yeah, you know, it’s highly a thing of like, don’t declare that you’re never gonna drink again, because then no failure, yeah. I mean, I couldn’t go more than four days—like maybe seven. I mean, I had told my husband I was gonna take a break from drinking like a million times when I stopped. And then the time I actually stopped, I didn’t tell him anything more than I was doing a 100-day no alcohol health challenge. I had hired a super coach. I had joined an online program. I knew all this stuff. I knew it was serious. But I was afraid to fail. I was afraid to tell him that it was anything more than a health challenge because one, I really didn’t want to stop drinking completely. So, like, “Oh no, if I tell him that, maybe he won’t let me go back to drinking or will judge me.” But also, it’s really complicated. Like, that’s why it’s so great to meet other women. We’re on the same path, in the same way as intuitive eating and getting out of diet culture and all that. You need people where you can be like, “This happened and I really wanna drink,” or “I’m scared that I won’t ever be able to go out with my friends anymore,” or “I’m worried that I may not have anything to talk to with my partner because we’re drinking buddies,” and what are we gonna do on dates? Or “My kids are driving me crazy” and it’s all tied to the reasons you drink. You need those people to say, “Do this instead, here’s a suggestion, just hold on. It gets better, oh my God, I just went on my first sober vacation, and it was amazing. These parts sucked, but this part was so much better than my last vacation.”

KATY: Oh my gosh, totally.

CASEY: Yeah, and for people also to get kind of real, like I have to tell you, it is hard to think that drinking is that glamorous if you were like attempting to throw up quietly so your spouse won’t hear you. Like, it’s not quite as cute at age 40 as it was at 23.

KATY: Yeah, even some of the things we might do, like in order to have, make time to stop to get the wine on the way to daycare, school pick-up, you know, all of that, it’s like, when you step back, it’s just like, “Wow.” It takes up space in our life. What you’re really describing is all these other things that may come into our lives when we open up that space.

CASEY: Yeah, and just like getting some clarity around what you want your life to look like. I feel like so many of us go through life, we do everything we’re supposed to do, we’re doing the home and the family and the work or, you know, you’re building a life or you’re doing anything, and you just kind of put your head down and grit your teeth and move forward. We’re kind of taught that’s what we’re supposed to do, but we use alcohol as like, I think, and Dowsett Johnson, who wrote the book Drink, called it the Modern Woman Steroid. The thing that allows us to do all the other things. Right? So, we use it to get through the second shift, or to— I think about it if your mom is a pacifier. So, I used to like literally spread pacifiers everywhere for my kid. You know, the kid’s hungry, the kid’s upset, the kid’s bored, they’re sitting at the table too long, you like give them a pacifier, right? And I think society does, gives women wine or alcohol of any kind, a pacifier. Like, “Here, have a drink. Stuff this in your mouth, swallow down your resentment, your irritation, your overwhelm, your loneliness.” Like, have a drink.

KATY: Oh my gosh, totally. Yeah, don’t look at what it is that you really are feeling or needing. “Yeah, I need a drink.” No, you need help. You deserve it. You need a day off. You need a friend. You need whatever. But like drinking is like you’re tranquilizing yourself. And you can move through life pretty tranquilized.

CASEY: Yeah.

KATY: That’s a pretty eye-opening way to look at it for sure.

KATY: Okay, so let’s wrap up with this. If someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, “Okay, I am kind of curious about this whole sobriety thing,” and they’re just sort of toying now with the idea, what would you encourage them to do next, or where would you encourage them to go from here?

CASEY: Say if you are sober curious, try it. Try a period of time without alcohol. So, 30 days is a great break. A month alcohol-free, lots of people do it, you are not alone. Think of it as a health challenge, as a positive mood that you are doing for yourself. So if you are up for doing even a month alcohol-free, I encourage you to do a few things. Number one, tell people. Tell everyone you need that accountability. And all I told anyone was, “I am taking a break from alcohol because I wanna sleep better and I think it’ll help me be less anxious and I’m hoping to have more energy.” That’s it. But you don’t need to tell anyone other than that. Then prepare. Get yourself some non-alcoholic beverages. There is a universe of incredible non-alcoholic options. And that’s not just tea, sparkling water, and hot chocolate, although those are amazing. Like, Guinness has a non-alcoholic version, Corona has a non-alcoholic version. There are incredible non-alcoholic sparkling rosé and brut—like anything. There are non-colored cocktails on every menu, right? You do not have to— you can keep all your rituals, change the ingredients. If you can get the alcohol out of your house, if you can at the very least get your beverage of alcohol out of your house, your favorite—I told my husband, you know, I love wine. I want to take this break from drinking, but it’s gonna be really hard for me. So, I need to have no wine in the house for like 60 days. I just need that. And I also like changed our date nights for a while, and I would just be like, “Oh, babe, I’m still on that no non-alcohol challenge, so instead of going to the wine bar, can we go to the open mic night at the Coffee House?” Can we go to a movie? Let’s go on a long walk and have brunch. And then get support. So there is an incredible universe of sober curious people out there and they are really, really cool. So you could start, I have a podcast, it’s called the Hello Sunday Podcast for sober curious women. I have episodes on everything from how to get started to sober treats to dealing with anxiety and marriage and perfectionism and, you know, anything that that women drink over. If you go to my website, which is hello someday coaching, I have a completely free tips for your first 30 days. So, a guide to help you make your first 30 days alcohol-free easier. And I have an online program called the Friday Starter Kit that’s like only for busy women. It is designed for all of your challenges and triggers, which are very, very different than men, and what other people deal with. It just is. And so it’s really practical. So those are a couple ways to start.

KATY: Does that help?

CASEY: That helps so, so much. Yeah. I mean, along with the way to approach it, the practical tips, resources, places to go is like everything you need was just laid out there for you.

KATY: And we’ll link to all that in the show notes so people can find it easily.

CASEY: Great!

KATY: So, what would be the best place for someone to connect with you? Where do you hang out online?

CASEY: I’m on Instagram under Casey M Davidson, and so that’s one place to find me. The other place is my website. So if you get my free 30-day guide, I send you a lot of emails with audio coaching and resources that you can tap into. And it is completely without judgment. I mean, if you’re even thinking about this, you should be really proud of yourself. It is cool. I know that’s hard to believe, but it truly is. And, you know, just go to Instagram and put in hashtag sober curious. There is a universe of people on cool things.

KATY: Very cool. Thank you so much, Casey. This was great. I love just hearing your wisdom. It’s something that we don’t talk about a ton within the intuitive eating community, so it’s fun to be able to pull this in and realize, “Oh my gosh, there’s this other universe of people hanging out over here in this sober curious land.” And you know, I think it would be cool to see there being a little bit of intersection and overlap there.

CASEY: Absolutely. And I think a lot of people who struggle with alcohol or have a complicated relationship with alcohol also have a complicated relationship with food. And I think women are really encouraged to use the quickest possible fix for anything, where what we really need to do is to slow down, to figure out what we need. You know, our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and to actually take care of ourselves. And we’re honestly doing a really crappy job of it.

KATY: Well said. Well said. Alright, Casey, thank you so much for being here today.

CASEY: Thank you! I love talking with you.

KATY: I hope you enjoyed this conversation about alcohol. I haven’t talked about it a ton here on the podcast, so I would love to hear your thoughts and your experience with alcohol on your intuitive eating journey and what’s coming up for you now that you’ve listened to this. So shoot me an email or a DM and let me know. And in case nobody has told you lately, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.