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Wellness Wednesday for July 31, 2024

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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.