I Gave Up Sundays For 7 Years Before I Figured This Out
A 38-year-old mom's accidental experiment with one of the strangest supplements I've ever tried.
A reader essay submitted to the Cloud9 community blog
I had my first daughter at 31. My second at 34. By 36 I had quietly accepted that Sundays were just gone.
Not in a tragic way. In a totally normal "this is what being a mother in your late 30s looks like" way. My husband and I would have two glasses of red on a Saturday night, watch something on the couch, go to bed at 11. And then at 7:15 the next morning my four-year-old would walk into the bedroom holding a yogurt pouch, and I would feel like I had been hit by a small bus.
For seven years I just thought this was the deal.
What I Had Already Tried
I am not new to this conversation. Before I figured out what actually worked, I had tried:
- Pedialyte (helps a little, costs like $7 a bottle, kids ask why mommy is drinking from their juice)
- IV drip clinics (works, but $200 a session, and dragging yourself to a clinic on a Sunday morning is its own punishment)
- Those bright pink "hangover prevention" packets you mix into water (mixed results, taste appalling)
- One brutal year of just not drinking at all (worked, also made me a stranger at my own friends' dinner parties)
What none of those addressed was the actual problem. Which I did not even understand until last fall.
The Thing Nobody Told Me
The problem with how I had been thinking about all of this is that I was treating the morning AFTER as the issue. As if the goal was to recover faster from a thing that had already happened.
What I learned from a holistic nutritionist friend last fall is that the morning after is not really the problem. The problem is that by the time you have had two drinks, your body has already used up the nutrients it needed for the recovery. Specifically B-vitamins, glutathione, and a few other things I had never heard of. NAC. DHM. Stuff in that family.
Those nutrients do not get rebuilt by Pedialyte. They get rebuilt over days, while you sleep, while you eat, while you live. And if you are 38 and tired and eating a lot of cheese, you are already running low before the wine even shows up.
The fix, she told me, was not a thing you take after. It was a thing you take every day. Like a multivitamin, but specifically for the nutrients that alcohol blows through.
I was skeptical. But I was also losing every Sunday, and I had run out of pride.
What I Actually Did
She recommended a product called Daily Restore. It is a 2-capsule daily supplement from a brand in San Diego called Cloud9.
Inside the capsules: Milk Thistle, NAC, DHM, Kudzu root, B-complex, and Ashwagandha. Clinical doses of all six. The same ingredients I had seen scattered across the random "hangover" packets I had tried, but combined in one bottle and taken every day instead of after the damage was done.
I started taking it on a Tuesday morning in October with my coffee. I almost forgot I was doing it after a week. That is how easy it was. There was no powder to mix, no timing it around dinner, no remembering to take something at midnight.
What Happened
The first Saturday I tested it, my husband and I had a long dinner with friends. Two glasses of cab. Maybe two and a half if I am honest.
I woke up at 6:50 the next morning. Made coffee. Cleaned the kitchen. Read a book on the couch for an hour before my kids were up. I remember thinking, this is weird, I should feel worse than this.
That was eight months ago. I have not had a real recovery morning since.
I am not saying it is magic. I am saying I had been treating the wrong problem for seven years, and the right problem turned out to have a very boring solution. A daily capsule. With breakfast. At about $1.50 a day, less than the IV drips I used to drag myself to.
The Recommendation I Now Give My Friends
If you are reading this, and you are in your late 30s or 40s, and you have started to feel like two glasses of wine costs you a whole day, try this for 30 days. Take it every morning with breakfast. Do not think about it on Friday or Saturday nights. Just take it like a multivitamin.
Cloud9 offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you do not feel different in a month, you get your money back. I did not take them up on that, but I appreciated that it was an option.
I am not getting paid to write this. I am writing this because I wasted seven years thinking my Sundays were just gone.
They were not gone. They were just buried under a problem I was solving wrong.
This essay was submitted by a verified Cloud9 customer. Daily Restore is a dietary supplement and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult your doctor before starting any supplement, especially if you have existing health conditions or are taking medications.