Dry January, Women's Health & How to Make Lasting Change

You know that sense of possibility you feel at the start of a new week? It turns out that feeling is backed by science. Dr Katie Milkman, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Penilsvania, discovered the fresh start effect, we're more likely to create lasting habits when we begin them at meaningful moments like a Monday morning. And that's exactly why I created fresh start. My weekly email for women in perimenopause and beyond who want to feel more energised, clear-headed and in sync with their bodies. If you want to start your week feeling more in control with one simple science back step, you can actually take that week. Fresh start is for you. It's practical, powerful and written with heart. Think better energy, steady moods, deeper sleep and that I've got this feeling. So, if you're ready to support your hormones, your nervous system and your mitochondria without the overwhelm, head over to Angela Foster.me/fresh start to sign up. That's Angela Foster.me/fresh start. It's totally free and it might just become your favourite Monday ritual. Now let's get back to the episode. Hi friends, happy new year and welcome back to the High Performance Health Podcast. If you're starting January with a commitment to change whether that's around alcohol, your health or your longevity, this conversation is for you. Today I'm sharing a clip from an expert master class in my live young membership. When Sarah Rosbash best-selling author of Beyond Boos and a grey area drinking coach, who's worked with over 10,000 women, came to speak to our members. In this segment, Sarah reveals the hidden health risks of alcohol that most women don't know about. What sets this conversation apart is that it's not about shame or judgment. It's about knowledge, understanding what alcohol is actually doing to your brain, your hormones and risk of cancer. Knowing that if you've been drinking for years, your body can still recover. I came to this realization myself when I learned about APOE 4 and the connection between alcohol and dementia risk. Sarah takes even further, sharing what Dr. Helena Popovich taught her about brain health. Why women metabolise alcohol so differently than men and the breast cancer risk that four out of five women don't know exists? We dive into the real transformation work here. The three pillars of behaviour change that actually work because this isn't just about alcohol. These principles apply to any habit you want to change, any goal that you want to achieve this year. So whether you're making a new resolution around alcohol, your energy, your hormones or your overall health, this episode will give you the science and the framework you need to actually make it stick. This is the kind of expert insight and practical guidance that you get inside my live younger membership every single month. So let's dive it. Do you know on this one, Sarah, it really changed my view when I heard Wonder Patrick talking about the fact that there is no safe limit at all with the brain in terms of drinking and that if you carry APOE 4, which I do and my mother has Alzheimer's, there is no safe. Not one glass is contributing in her view towards the potential environment and that was, I think that's been probably the biggest reason that I haven't so far. I'm not saying I'm a non-drinker, I wouldn't say that, but I certainly haven't drank in the last few years and it's quite hard for me to after learning that. Yeah, absolutely and I think I interviewed Dr. Helena Poppavitch and she came into my group and again, I talked about dementia and the brain and alcohol use and yeah, the more we understand it, the more you kind of go, why, why would we? If there's an easy win that we can get through our health and our longevity and it's simply not drinking, I feel like it becomes a bit of a non-brainer. It's linked to depression and anxiety. Women can't metabolize alcohol the same as men. There's an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase, ALDH, that is responsible for helping the body process and eliminate alcohol because it's a poison. Women produce less of this enzyme and the amount that we produce reduces significantly once we get into Peri and postmenopause. So what this means is for women, a woman and a man drinking the same amount of alcohol, more alcohol content goes into a woman's body so she is more at risk of alcohol. I interviewed Ann Dalsett Johnson and she said a man and a woman are both at risk of alcohol-related stroke and it will happen to a woman seven times faster. Again, where's this being shared in a more open, honest environment? And then there's the breast cancer risk, which of course no one wants to talk about, but it's important. We know that one in five breast cancer deaths are caused by alcohol but four in five women are unaware that there is a link. It's one of the biggest risk factors for breast cancer. And you know that we, a new study has come out recently that shows that alcohol because it causes such an increase in circulating estrogen that it causes an increased risk of developing breast cancer of 35%. And again, you know, we're not talking about this enough. I have a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer and she knew from the work I do a little bit about it and she said to her chemo nurse, "Oh, should I stop drinking while I'm going through the chemo?" And the nurse laughed and said, "Oh, God, no, you'll need it." That's just a stole issue. We know that alcohol has to be processed by the liver first, then the estrogen once it's been detoxified, then gets stuck and it can't be reprocessed. And so it gets repackaged, which is a more dangerous form of estrogen than your natural estrogen that goes back into the system, which is quite scary. Yeah, exactly, exactly. What is the lasting damage if you've been a gray area drinker for a number of years? Can you reverse some of the negative impact? Absolutely. And that is the most positive thing about this D is that I've got ladies, even in 30 days, they will get their bloods done at the start and then they get their bloods and blood pressure and things done at the end and liver function. In 30 days, the beautiful thing about the liver is it can get to the point where only 10% of it is working and it can fully regenerate. So your liver, your brain, so many things. Courtney says, "I love your point on alcohol and estrogen. I think it's so important for practitioners and coaches to explain to women why certain recommendations are made and exactly how in the body these things work." Absolutely. And this is the whole thing. It's not about making women wrong or bad, but it's explaining why this information is so important. For us to make informed choice, I'm not here to preach and I'm not here to lecture, but I am about women being able to make informed choices. And I don't feel like we're living in a world that offers that at the moment when it comes to understanding the impact of all of this on women's health. Alcohol use disorder in women has increased over 80% in the last 30 years, which is somewhat astonishing. This is me with the wine time. I feel like alcohol consumption is going down. Is it still going up in that in certain populations? Midlife women is the only demographic that are staying. So we know that massively going down in teens and young people under kind of 35. It's generally the boomers that are still drinking the most and it's that midlife age from kind of 45 to 70 is particularly women is where we're seeing significant alcohol use. Why is it going up? The marketing and promotion of alcohol to women, we know that 30 years ago the alcohol industry sat down and for the first time segmented their marketing. So previously they just had one type of advertising campaign that had just gone out to everyone to try and get them to buy alcohol. And they went, "Oh, let's change this so that we've got women and female specific advertising and we've got female specific alcoholic drinks." And this is when we started to see the rise of pink drinks and the rise of alcohol pops. This is the kind of stuff that makes my blood boil. I just imagine all these men sat around a table going, "Oh yeah, let's just make all the drinks pink and then we'll get all the women to buy it." And I fell for that hook line of sinker. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, give me my pink rosé." I felt so like sophisticated drinking pink rosé. And actually you think about it now. It makes my blood boil because no one was talking about the health risks to women when they were talking about how do we get women to drink more. And they've succeeded massively. Alcohol use in women has gone up more than anything. We've reached a point of normalising alcohol as a form of self-care. You know, you say to anyone, "I've had a hard day, I've had a stressful day." And the response is, "Generally, I'll go and have a drink, go and have a glass of wine." I feel like we're just doing alcohol's job for them in terms of that promotion. And then we've seen that rise in female-focused drinks. And this is a brilliant book. I loved this book and she goes really, she's a medical journalist and goes into a lot of the details about women and alcohol, as well as her own journey. So just a touch on a couple of the points about how alcohol impacts menopause. It raises our cortisol, so we feel even more anxious. We get an increase in hot sweats. Our GABA and Progesterone are declining anyway. GABA is the neurotransmitter that helps us feel calm and relaxed. Alcohol use reduces GABA production even more, so we feel even more anxious and are more likely to turn to alcohol for a response. It impacts our sleep, as we've learned it increases brain fog. And you know, the key insight, if alcohol were invented today, it would probably be illegal to advertise in the way we currently do and would likely be considered a hand fit for human consumption based on health risks. And you know, that's just food for thought there. And again, there's a lot of confusion. Every country has different recommendations. There's a couple of countries that do differentiate between men and women, which is great because they are saying women can't tolerate alcohol as much as men. The UK doesn't do that. It's the same number of units for men and women. And 14 units is quite a significant amount. In Australia, they updated their guidelines more recently. But this is the World Health Organization. They came out in 2023 for the first time, and they said no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. And you know, just to touch on obviously why we're all in this group, how does it impact longevity? It accelerates aging. It increases those, we radicals. It leads to chronic low grade inflammation. We have less energy production and the outcome being ourselves behave older than our chronological age. It reduces brain longevity. It shrinks grey matter. The more you drink, the more it shrinks. It lowers neurogenesis. It impairs cognitive function and memory. It raises our risk of dementia and even moderate drinking is associated with these, you know, significant risks. It harms metabolic and cardiovascular longevity increases visceral fat, blood pressure, triglycerides, insulin resistance. The glass of red wine is good for the heart. Is that myth we've always heard? But the science says the benefits come from the polyphenols, not alcohol. You'll get a hundred times more from berries, olive oil or green tea without needing to have the alcohol. So it always grabs some blueberries instead of a red wine. It disrupts our sleep as we've talked about and sleep, you know, is so important for health span and it drives five core longevity killers. So cancer, liver disease, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease and type two diabetes. With cancer, it is dose dependent. The more you drink, especially for women when it comes to breast cancer, the higher the risk that we put ourselves under. It weakens stress resilience and we know the impact that stress has on all aspects of our health as we age. And it accelerates inflammation. So it drives that leaky gut as we talked about, it alters our microbiome, it raises inflammatory cytokines. Women are already facing so many risk factors for inflammation once we go into our forties and adding alcohol makes it so much worse. But our times changing, go the Irish. In January 26th, Ireland will be the first country to have health warnings on alcoholic drinks. Be interesting to see Australia and the UK follow because up until now, all alcoholic drinks have just said drinking when pregnant can harm your baby. And from January next year, the Irish will have a health warning that it can be related to cancer, like what happened with cigarettes. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens. So some of the benefits that we do get when we change our drinking, there's a brilliant study that was done at the University of Sussex that looked at what were the benefits that people got from taking a month off alcohol. And this just summarises it, a sense of achievement, they saved money, they think more deeply about their relationship with alcohol, they felt more in control of their drinking, they learned more about when and why they drink, they realise they don't need a drink to enjoy themselves, which is key. They had improved health, they slept better, they had more energy, they lost weight, they had better concentration and 54% had better skin. If I could turn these benefits into a pill, I'd be a millionaire, but you don't need to, you can take a, if anyone who is in that gray area can take a break. So coming on to what are these core pillars of behaviour change? And this is what I've identified as being what really helps me when I was making these changes. When we make any behaviour change, it's so easy to focus on what we're losing. So Daniel Kanemann has done a lot on loss of version and how humans are more likely to focus on what they lose than what they gain. So it's really important to focus on the positives of what we're gaining when we make any kind of change. Instead of just sitting there crossing off the days, this is terrible, I'm doing dry January, it's awful, I'm never going to have fun again. What about gaining? I've got more energy, I've got better sleep, I'm saving money, my skin looks good, I've lost some bloating around my tummy, so really focusing on what we gain. Pillar number two is we have to add in when we take something out. So if we're drinking for a reason, we start with identifying why do I drink? What is it giving me? What in what circumstances do I drink? Is it habitual? Is it five o'clock? Is it my mark of the end of the day before the evening start? So what are the reasons that we are drinking? And when we identify that, we can think about some swaps. I've got a free guide of a hundred things to do instead of drink, which has got everything from doing a jigsaw to playing your favorite song, going for a run, doing some coloring, going out into the garden, doing some box breathing. There's so many different things in that moment, we have to have something else that we add in because otherwise it's only going to be a matter of time before we're thinking about alcohol again. And pill of three, if we don't try, we don't know. So I know you've interviewed, I think it's the lady that wrote the book, Tiny Experiments. Angela, yeah, and you know, this is everything in our life. Experiment, get curious, how might I feel if I take a break from, if I stop the behavior that I think is holding me back, whether that's too much screen time, not going to bed early enough, eating too much ultra-process food, drinking alcohol, whatever it is, give yourself a period of not doing that and be aware and audit your life accordingly so that you can go, okay, what's different? What's my sleep like? What's my energy like? What's my mood like? What are my relationships like? Get that data. Do you know, it's interesting, Sarah, what you say that because actually I found that doing an experiment and that's what I chatted to her about and her book is all about is how doing a tiny experiment takes the pressure off you. So I had been similar to you and I'd done like 30 days of no alcohol. I met James Swanwick in London. He was the first person to kind of inspire my alcohol, no alcohol journey when I did the podcast, when I started it back in 2019. And so I had done 30 days and I was just going straight back to it. And so I decided to do this tiny experiment where I was like, I wonder what, because my drinking's a bit different than here, which I'm happy to share if anyone wants, but it was a different experience for me. And I wanted to see when I wouldn't get a reminder. So when would I notice that I'd truly changed the habit and my brain wouldn't remind me that it was a good idea. So I started that as an experiment. And I was like, well, University of Oxford Research says 66 days, so I will see how long it takes. And I think it took around between the 53 and 54 days. And then it kind of got easier. I made a lot of mistakes like I forgot about the fact that if you're removing something you need to create a new habit, so it brought out different kind of addiction things anyway. And so it started out as this experiment. And there was no pressure at any point I could stop it, but I'd committed them to the 90 days. And then it was like, oh, I wonder what it would be like to go from 90 to 100. And then do you know what I mean? It kind of went from there. And it was like, oh, I'll go from 100 to Christmas. And I think it's just such a good tip because it doesn't mean you're not like the holding to it. Do you know what I mean? At any point now, so I say I'm not saying I'm going to drink her. If I want to go back to it, I can. I've just at the moment, choosing not to. But it's quite a fun way. I've done it with other things. I don't know if you do it like regularly. It's like, well, I wonder if I run this experiment. Like what happens? And I've learned so much about myself doing that. I love it. Like I just get so curious all the time. And there's a great guy called Mark Brackett. And he calls it being an emotional friantist. So it's like just running these experiments on yourself and noticing the impact it has on your emotions, your mood, your energy, you know, all the things that matter, right? Because at the end of the day, we want to go through our life with what's happening up here, being positive. And what does that look like? It means we've got energy. It means the inner voice inside our mind is positive and not negative. It means that we challenge ourselves. We're interested in new things. And for me, alcohol was all the opposite of that. You know, like the first thought I would have most mornings would be, oh, we're a loser. Oh, we just said you weren't going to drink last night. And then there you go again. You've had a bottle of wine. And now you feel like shit. And when you start your day, self talk, it's just disgusting. So who goes and has a great day if those are the first thoughts that you have? Whereas if you start your day going, oh, yeah, I'm kicking ass today. I was asleep. I've been to the gym. I'm feeling positive. Like it's just, you go and just achieve so much more in your life. And isn't that what life is about? Like, you know, when you step back and just look at it all, don't you just want to give yourself the best chance for your time, just tiny, small bit of time on earth to be the best that it can be. And that all starts with what's happening up here. And I'm curious. If I can ask you a question. So having, like, you've had 10,000 people go through your alcohol free challenge. What would you say people are chasing when they're drinking? Oblivion. So I asked this question all the time. They drink to escape their life. But the problem is, and that's sad, right? You know, the biggest main reasons are boredom stress and loneliness. But if I was to summarize that, it's escape. And because they're constantly drinking, they don't have the confidence, the energy or the motivation to change what they want to escape. So they stay stuck in that vicious cycle, whereas when they actually stop drinking, the alcohol's not the problem. The alcohol is the solution to the problem. It's just that we've been drinking for so long that we've now decided alcohol's the problem. And if we get the alcohol out, everything will be fine. But in actual fact, getting the alcohol out is the first step. And then we look at, well, what are the changes I want to make in my life so that I don't want to escape my life? But you can't do that when you're drinking all the time because you're negative, you're anxious, you're tired, you're unmotivated, you're foggy in the head. So nothing changes. And I just have watched women. They've been trapped in this cycle for years and years and years. And the oldest lady that I've worked with was 81. And I just absolutely loved it. 81, she was going, "Right, that's it. It's time to ditch the booze." And I was like, "God, yeah, let's do this." That's amazing. Let's live another great 10 years together. And so it's, you know, like, why how, and I talk so much about this in my book, about this concept of alcohol so often is the solution to the problem. And so we have to look at what is alcohol the solution for. And if we change that, then our need for alcohol goes away anyway. Yeah, that's very true. And what about, you know, when you have that drink, it's been a while for me. But I remember it so well that there's just that very kind of, well, it's intoxicating, right? And it just feels so good as it kind of rushes in through your body. And you get that kind of, I don't know, this is a really nice feeling. That's probably the one reason that would stop me going back to it is it is addictive in nature. What can people do that can bring that sense of relaxation? Like, if they're feeling like they've had a really stressful day. And their immediate turning point previously would have been, "I'm going to reach, I'm going to have a glass of wine, I'm going to chat to my husband over there, so I'm going to, or friend, you know, go around with the girls. What can they do to get that relaxation, have you found?" I hope you enjoyed that clip. This is exactly the kind of conversation that happens aside my membership, live younger every single month. Transformation doesn't happen through information alone. It happens in community. It happens when you have a guide who understands both the deep longevity science and how to apply it to your life. It happens when you bring in expert guests like Sarah who specialize in specific areas. And it happens when you're surrounded by other women on the same journey. That's what live younger is all about. Every month we bring in specialized experts to complement the comprehensive longevity framework that I teach. But the foundation, the integration, the personalized guidance comes from me. I am there to help you understand the full picture of your hormones, your aging, your energy, and how everything connects. As a member of live younger, you also get access to my 21-day hormone and longevity reset, a comprehensive program designed specifically for midlife women who want to reclaim the energy and build the foundation for true longevity. And in addition to monthly master classes and Q&A calls with me, you also get monthly expert sessions like this one with Sarah, where specialized guests dive deep into topics that support your longevity journey. And you get access to our lovely community, a group of like-minded women committed to living their best lives. This is the difference between listening to isolated expert advice on a podcast and having a comprehensive integrated approach to longevity. It's the difference between just listening to podcasts and having the support around you to make change possible. If this resonated with you and you're ready to understand the real science of longevity and make changes that stick in 2026, then come over and join us at angelafoster.me/liveyounger. And as a special January offer, if you use code Jam 26, at checkout, you'll get 30% off. Head over to angelafoster.me/liveyounger to join us in the live younger community today and use code Jam 26 at checkout to get 30% off. I'll also put a link in the description below. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey to vibrant health and high performance. Make sure you check out the show notes for a summary of all the important links that everything we talked about. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the follow button and share it with a friend on social media or leave a review over on Apple podcasts. Remember, achieving high performance health is about getting 1% better each day. So think about one thing you learned from today's episode and start implementing it today. Share with me what you've learned on social media over at angelafoster. I love hearing from you and connecting with you. Have a beautiful day and always remember you are worthy of your dreams. Now for the legal stuff. This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, nutritional or other professional advice. Always consult with a qualified health care provider before making any changes to your health routine. Some of the links I share may be sponsored or affiliate links, meaning I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase at no extra cost to you. That said, I only have a link to products that have undergone rigorous testing and that I personally use and love. And because I want to bring you the best value, I always work to secure exclusive discounts for my listeners wherever possible. 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