Watch the podcast, above, or listen below.

If you recently saw the revised drinking guidelines in Canada and gasped, you’re not alone. Most Canadians are drinking more than two drinks a week, the new low-risk maximum.

Ann Dowsett Johnston is an award-winning journalist and the bestselling author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, a book named one of the top 10 of the year by the Washington Post. Ann is also now a psychotherapist, and my friend, mentor and writing coach.  

Ann joins me for a discussion about the alcohol consumption guidelines in Canada released by the Centre on Substance Use and Addiction in January, which replace the 2011 Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines. The new guidelines present a continuum of health risks associated with different levels of alcohol consumption, including the risks of breast and colon cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Ann and I discuss what now constitutes low-risk, moderate, and...

Watch the podcast, above, or listen below.

Ann Dowsett Johnston is an award-winning journalist and the bestselling author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, a book named one of the top 10 of the year by the Washington Post. Ann is also now a psychotherapist, and my mentor and writing coach. 

Ann joins me for a discussion about the new face of women’s recovery, and the powerful role that writing can play for women recovering from addictions and over-drinking, eating disorders, illness, and trauma. We also discuss the new ending Ann has planned for the 10th-anniversary edition of Drink and what Ann is exploring in her second book, which she’s hard at work on now.

We discuss why, almost 10 years later, as Ann so aptly stated in Drink, alcohol is still “the modern woman’s steroid”, and how the overwhelm and stress of the pandemic has spiked drinking levels and continued to normalize women’s drinking as a...