My Reclaimed Life: Finding Peace While Defeating Alcohol, Cigarettes, Gluttony, and Sloth

After twenty-four years of daily drinking, Ed Wyrick hit his bottom and tossed out his last bottle of vodka in August 2002. As a high school counselor in a rural county in the middle of the Bible belt, he feared for his job if he revealed his addiction, so he tried detoxing on his own. When he gave up and surrendered to a treatment center two weeks later, doctors said he was lucky to have survived. Three months after that, he quit smoking cigarettes. After eighteen months, he'd lost seventy pounds and was running five miles a day. Many years later, he remains free of alcohol, cigarettes, fat, and sloth. In , Ed tells the story of how he changed his life, including the tools he uses to react to life's challenges without using alcohol, drugs, nicotine, or rocky road ice-cream. Early on, Ed read everything he could about defeating addictions and getting healthy. Even though he has an academic background, holding masters and doctoral degrees in counseling and psychology, books by scholars describing why he drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and ate too many chocolate chip cookies provided little help. Instead, he needed to know how to get better and found help by reading about real people's success stories. Now, he's paying it forward.