North Texans recovering from addiction find sobriety through sweat

By JD Miles

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NORTH TEXAS, Texas (KTVT) – North Texans recovering from addiction said they are getting help staying sober in an unexpected place.

A Plano gym owner said there’s science linking sobriety and sweat and it’s catching on with those in recovery.

The disco lighting, vibrant music and social atmosphere appeal to the life that Tiffani Jones used to live.

“There are times when I want to go on a Friday night when I’ve had a rough week, where I want to go have a glass of wine or two, or have a margarita at a restaurant, and I can’t.” said Jones. “But with this, I can let go and enjoy myself.”

Jones is celebrating his ninth year of sobriety this week by doing something that, over the past few months, he credits with helping him stay that way.

“I feel like I’ve been in a good rhythm right now and I don’t want to stop,” Jones said.

Within Body Machine Fitness in Plano, there is a growing number of members who are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse. They even publicly promote their sobriety.

“He wasn’t an alcoholic, he was a drug addict,” Carlos Rosales said. “I know what certain triggers were the triggers for this person to come back.”

Rosales is among those in recovery who have found sobriety through sweat.

“It’s like some people go to bars,” Rosales said. “Okay, my bar is the gym.”

Jeremy Soder is the co-owner of Body Machine Fitness and first recognized the solution that comes from fitness while trying to help his brother with a heroin addiction.

“I started taking him to the gym daily,” Soder said. “And over the course of probably 30 days, he was the best I’d seen him in literally, I don’t know, a decade, the happiest, the fittest.”

This workout is designed to increase chemicals in the brain that advocates say can help recovering addicts stay sober.

“You change the brain wave states and you start to release more dopamine, more endorphins,” Soder said. “And essentially, we’re going to energize the brain’s reward and pleasure circuits.”

A National Institutes of Health study found that “exercise can help restore dopamine levels to pre-abuse levels. Dopamine is a chemical produced by the brain to create feelings of happiness, and abuse of drugs and alcohol can alter the brain’s dopamine balance.”

“Places like this have changed the way I think about life,” Rosales said.

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