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

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.

John Newport, Ph.D., is a wellness counselor and writer based in Santa Ana, California. He holds combined doctorates in psychology and public health.