The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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I posted last week about trying to drink less. I went 5 days sober, which is at least past the alcohol withdrawal hump. I'm on vacation currently, and a bit of peer pressure and boredom led to me breaking my very short sober streak. I'll continue sobriety experiment when I get back from vacation. Which sounds like famous last words, but I will follow through. The first five days of no drinking was easy enough, and the results felt good.
Not sure if anything I said last week was at all helpful but some more stuff to add: alcohol is really bad for you. I think we all are aware of this, but we mostly kinda ignore it (minus the whole "a glass of wine is fine" thing that more recent research has called into question).
It makes it harder to lose weight, it fucks with your sleep, it causes multiple kinds of cancer, your liver is robust but liver problems are one of the worst ways to die, one of the few things that can very easily kill you withdrawal, etc.
It can certainly be worth it, but health reasons to stop can be pretty motivating, and it's relatively common, even with more mild to moderate use, to find that cutting it out makes you feel a decent amount "better."
On a pointless academic note: alcohol withdrawal can last for multiple weeks but that's rare and would be vanishingly unlikely to apply in this case (5 days is a reasonable rule of thumb however).
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212 days sober here.
What's your goal in regards to 'drinking less'? If it's literally just getting the number of drinks over a week / month down, then all you should worry about is tracking your drinks (plenty of apps for that) and looking for a gradual trend down. Eventually you'll find a sustainable level.
But is there something else? Are you worried your drinking is getting you fat and out of shape (it is) or that it's just sort of generally reducing your cognitive sharpness even if you aren't hungover every day(it is) or maybe that it's having a mild negative effect on mood stability? (it is)
If you want to quit. Quit. Hard sober for the rest of your life? Not necessarily. I think a good goal is to do 365 days sober and keep a log of how you're feeling about every 10 days or so. You'll learn a lot. You'll learn how to deal with out of nowhere cravings. You'll understand more about emotional and stress triggers. "Sober Octobers" aren't long enough and I feel like "stay sober for as long as you can including up to forever" creates an all-or-nothing kind of thinking that can lead to hard relapses (fun fact: a lot of programs have definitions of sober that allow for some level of drinking. I think this is absurd, but that's a personal opinion).
In my experience so far, the physical and mental health benefits are obvious and unambiguous. Social situations aren't difficult to navigate after you've said "no thanks" about 10 times. (As another aside, just use "No, thanks" or "I'm not drinking tonight" as your responses. Don't get into any more detail than that - that's when people get weird. Be ready to repeat yourself. A lot. )
The tradeoff is that my life is fundamentally more boring. Alcohol, like other drugs, is a quick hack to emotional regulation. How it manifests will be person dependent. For me, I no longer have any reflex to drink if I am sad, stressed, overwhelmed etc. That's a great thing. I miss drinking now when I am feeling very good. A Big Business Thing happened at work a few weeks ago and, when it did, I really wanted to tie one on on a friday night knowing that not only did I have nothing to do on Saturday, but that I could probably take a few days off the next week because of the big win.
I cleaned out some old home depot boxes in my garage instead. Anti-climactic.
I'll tie it off here. Start at the beginning; what do you want your drinking life to look like?
Talked about it in last weeks thread. But id like to be a social drinker, having a few drinks one night a week if I'm out with friends or something.
Right now I'm closer to averaging about 4 drinks a night every night. That's too much and the health effects seem noticeable.
I slowly and unintentionally shifted into heavier drinking. I think partly as a treat for myself as I struggled to eliminate sugar from my diet.
I find stopping the drinking to generally be easier than stopping sugar.
I'm in better shape and health than I was pre-pandemic when I actually was a social drinker. Not saying the alcohol helped at all. But I started exercising weekly, cut out sugar from my diet (and cut carbs a bunch, but not entirely), and started intermittent fasting.
I don't want to entirely quit drinking for the one negative you've stated: life is more boring. My life is already very boring as it is, and it honestly frustrates me. Especially during extended periods where I have no social activity outside my immediate family. Drinking allows me to have fun at social events. I'm too much of an introvert when I'm sober.
I'm in pretty much the same boat as you. I'm not an alcoholic, but I do drink pretty much every night. Mostly out of boredom. Every night is like:
choice A: stay home alone. Watch TV, play some pointless game, do a pointless hobby. boring. only fun with drinking. choice B: go out to socialize. All of the "sober crowd" activies are incredibly boring, people are just much more fun to socialize with when everyone is drinking at least a little. And it's more fun with more drinks, with a pretty damn high upper limit.
It doesn't help that one of my activities lately has been listening to comedy podcasts or standup. Those are both significantly better with drinking.
I do disagree on the "upper limit" part. I like it best just being a little tipsy. I'm a little louder, a little more willing to talk instead of just listening, and laughs come a little easier. Getting too drunk I get too loud, I talk too much without listening, and I laugh at dumb things that aren't fun to remember the next day. Also I throw up easily, so too drunk is just a bad time for me.
I also enjoy standup and yeah. there's a reason so many of them require you to purchase at least 1 drink. I hate the people who go there stone-cold sober and just sit there refusing to laugh or show any emotion like "this is very serious business and I will not laught for anything less than the very highest levels of comedy."
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You've got a handle on the situation. I think you'll put together a good plan.
The only thing I'll admonish you for - and it's only because you mentioned in three times in the post - is the "I gave up sugar" line.
Booze is concentrated sugar. That's the whole point of it. One immediate effect of going sober; you'll likely drop 5 - 10 lbs with zero other changes to diet and exercise habits.
It's a common myth, and I'm not sure where it started. But no, booze doesn't metabolize into sugar. It gets broken down into something more like a fatty acid if I remember correctly.
Perhaps the myth is because blood sugar levels can spike while drinking. The liver will prioritize metabolizing alcohol over maintaining blood sugar levels.
I absolutely do not remember enough biochemistry from medical school to know off hand, but a brief lit review gave me these:
"Alcohol has a high energy content, and this energy is utilized by the body as efficiently as the energy in normal food. Ethanol has such good properties as a substrate for energy production that we are faced with the problem of explaining, not why it is consumed, but why it is not consumed in still larger quantities by nonalcoholic humans or by animals. When alcohol is consumed by animals, the intake of food decreases in relation to the caloric content of the alcohol; if a choice of macronutrients is possible, alcohol decreases the consumption of carbohydrates most."
"Step 3 Much of the acetate produced by the oxidation of acetaldehyde leaves the liver and circulates to peripheral tissues where it is activated to a key Acetyl CoA. Acetyl CoA is also the key metabolite produced form all major nutrients- carbohydrate, fat and excess protein. Thus, carbon atoms from alcohol wind up as the same products produced from the oxidation of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, including CO2, fatty acids, ketone bodies, and cholesterol; which products are formed depends on the energy state and the nutritional and hormonal conditions."
My main recollection is that it's shockingly energy dense but I don't remember which form of metabolism it most mimics. The above implies probably none of them, with the "it becomes sugar" perhaps being related to the carb's bit in the first quote, or the way it can absolutely fuck you up with hyperglycemia (which does not necessarily require pure sugar intake).
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Interesting. I didn't know that and had just absorbed the myth.
This makes me wonder about weight less after alcohol cessation. I wonder if it has more to do with poor eating habits that often come with drinking and, perhaps, some sort of digestive disruption.
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My guess is that the myth started the way that @cjet79 mentioned below - the majority of alcoholic drinks that have been consumed do have quite a bit of sugar (or simple carbs that are readily converted to sugar in the case of beers). If you're drinking cran-vodka or wine or beer in any appreciable quantity, you're getting quite a bit of sugar with it. The calories from the ethanol itself are obviously not going to help either.
If someone doesn't want to change their total EtOH intake but does want to cut the sugars and even maintain a keto diet, they can switch over to sipping neat whiskeys instead of pounding beers. I would also say that for anyone that isn't into alcoholism territory, this will tend to downregulate the amount of alcohol consumed pretty naturally. It's so, so easy to just sit there and drink 4 IPAs over the course of 4 hours watching TV shows and doing nothing. Pouring up four whiskeys feels weird in a completely different way. The high alcohol content makes the whole thing seem much more clear and intentional rather than it blending into the background and feeling the same as just drinking some tasty soda that happens to have alcohol. So, yeah, this one weird trick will tend to cut a lot of drink calories out of people's diet - just drink hard booze neat.
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Weight loss from stopping drinking shouldn't be too surprising, what you mentioned, plus: Plenty of alcoholic mixed drinks and cocktails are filled with sugar. And most beers are heavy on the carbs. Some wines are sugary (usually cheaper wines that add sugar, and dessert/port wines). Basically some people are probably drinking the equivalent of half a soda can per alcoholic drink. College kids gaining weight makes a lot of sense to me.
I heavily changed my alcohol consumption habits as part of the diet changes. On most days I'm doing a 12 hour fasting window, and some days an 18 hour fast so that helps with giving my body time for digestion (I keep any drinking within the eating window). I switched away from heavy beers and sugary cocktails to low carb beers and straight liquor.
The sugar and snacks and late night eating also impact hangovers. I went from bad half day long hangovers to basically not getting them. Which is part of why I think I started drinking more, there wasn't as much of an immediate next day cost as there used to be. Very frustrating to make progress in one area of my health, only for the slack I created to be used to degrade my health habits in other areas.
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Ethanol itself is 7cal/g in theory, but it's not fully metabolized in practice. So a pint of Guinness (4.2% abv) contains 210 calories according to the label. If you have three, it's 610 extra calories, enough to ensure a caloric surplus for that day. But you probably drink it with snacks, and it's easy to double or triple the calories with crisps, cheese sticks and wings.
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A question--as I'm approaching my personal goal of 30 days sober--why not have a drink (I mean you)? You seem to be set against it, or, put more positively, you seem set on staying sober. I will be at my in-laws soon on August holiday, and I quite enjoy that first cold beer with my father-in-law. Your post here has a foreboding about it, a definite anti-booze vibe, if not a direct or preachy one.
Perceptive as always, Doctor Hale. (I mean that sincerely and with admiration)
There was a time when I needed to be what I call "hard sober." I mentioned this on a previous Sunday thread I think, but in 2023 I was drinking heavily all the time. Never had a rock bottom moment or crisis incident, but from about Halloween through Christmas I came face to face with the fact that I was definitely full throttle on that Highway To Hell.
I think I passed that time somewhere between 100 and 120 days. Like I wrote previously, that's about the time when I no longer thought about drinking to relieve negative emotional states. It was almost a tangible shift and I am happy about it.
Why not have a beer now? I think being sober revealed that there was more work "under the covers" to do. I complain that my life feels more boring - because it is. Well, perhaps I should consider developing some interesting hobbies or otherwise inject dynamism into life. There's another perspective that says, "hey you got to the point in 2023 where you were getting after it pretty hard consistently ... what's to prevent that same thing occurring again?" So, proactive prevention is part of it too.
I'm not anti-drinking. Aggressive teetotalers are much the same as aggressive atheists; their rabid anti-religion is a fervent faith all its own. I am, more than I used to be, leaning more in the direction of "know thyself; and know thy limits" for some people, drinking just is to high risk even if they aren't problem drinkers or full blown alcoholics. In a very discrete case, I had a college friend who had severe loss of motor function and balance even when mildly intoxicated. It was a bizarre and scary sight to see; coherent speech (no slurring) full awareness of surroundings, but all of the kinesthetic ability of a new born deer. For others, it might be that they don't turn into Barry Blackout on the weekends, but they're slow motioning ruining their lives. I've also seen monster drinkers who seem to be immune from hangovers and have objectively high performance lives.
To maybe close with a little pithiness; arbitrary life long decisions are almost always bad. "I'm doing XYZ just because!" isn't a reason to do anything. My reason for not drinking so far is pretty simple; I keep waking up and thinking "Eh, don't feel like drinking today."
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