This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. I am so glad that you're here. Thanks for being here.

Today I'm here with Meredith Atwood and Meredith has just amazing sort of story because hi Meredith, welcome.

She has so much success and she has a great podcast that I was on called the same 24 hours and so we're going to get into what that's all about because it's such a cool concept and she also has an online community swim bike mom for triathletes and it's just such a movement that Meredith has created.

But before we get into all of your success and what you do today, I would love if you just like take us back to kind of the beginning and tell us your story sort of a drinking.

Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for having me. I'm glad we're doing this and face to face is so much fun.

Okay, so I had my first drink when I was 17. I went to South Africa for weightlifting competition because that's what I did in my teenage years.

And I remember it like it was yesterday, like this drink was just it was a margarita. And it, and it, it transported me like I was somebody else, I felt like someone else.

And it was the beginning of the end. I mean, immediately, it was something I had to have. And I, you know, at 17, you're not the easiest thing to get.

And I was like, you know, you have parents with a liquor cabinet, which I did not, I'm very churchy parents and non drinking parents. So this was, I was never around alcohol growing up. So it was all very new.

Fast forward a little bit to college and college was nothing but a giant bench. I mean, there was access. It was, I mean, I don't want to date myself.

It was quite a while ago. And it was really easy to just like go to a bar, right? You know, in the late 90s and just drink till 5 a.m. Whatever.

And so I did and I had no off button, like none whatsoever. And I ended up going graduating from school, went to law school, still no off button.

But my off button was really completely not off in law school. Like it was so, it was so bad. And I know people say, oh, well, how bad was it? And, you know, for those of us who have struggled with drinking, we can kind of nod and say, yeah, I can understand that.

You know, a big old thing of vodka or a bottle and a half a line, two bottles of wine, like that was standard.

You know, I mean, that's just what I did every night.

So in 2004, I was held as I 24, I quit drinking for a year. It's just like my year of sobriety.

And I went to AA and I lost like 50 pounds and I stopped drinking in April. And I returned to law school in August. And people did not recognize me.

Now I had died my hair red. But literally I was talking to my friends in the hallway. And one of them was like, there was this light bulb that went off. And he was like, oh, my God, there it is.

So like the drastic change from April to August. And you know, my appearance and my attitude. It was enough for someone not to recognize me. So for me, that should have been like a giant clue that maybe I didn't need that in my life.

But it wasn't. So I had, I had my year of sobriety and then had an incident that, you know, I was very stressed out. I went and had one margarita again. Are you detecting a pattern.

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