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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Seriously, great work. Not just in quitting alcohol, but in writing this up so that you can remind yourself of all the benefits of quitting and all the reasons you quit in the first place.
5-8 drinks every 24 hours is alcoholic level. Most men I know who like alcohol seem to drink at least 2 or 3 every night, probably more on weekends. Even that amount seems excessive to me. An expensive habit, isn't it? I don't drink much, but the price is one reason why I want to cut down even more on beer drinking in 2025.
And to co-opt your thread: what does The Motte think about moderate drinking? One glass of red wine a night for heart health and cholesterol and whatnot. I must say, I am skeptical and have been skeptical for a while now. Those were longitudinal studies, and it could have been that the type of person to moderate their drinking to just one drink a night is also doing other healthy stuff.
Thanks, I appreciate it. And yeah, it gets really expensive. Never start drinking scotch or cognac, boys...
Re your question, I mentioned it in another post, but listening to the Huberman Lab episode on alcohol helped me quit. He actually talks about the glass of red wine a day idea here. tl;dl the effect of the good compounds in red wine is so small that you'd have to drink a ton of wine to get any benefits, and the physical effects of alcohol are so negative that there's really no "healthy" amount. But he does acknowledge that you should weigh the social and QoL benefits of an occasional glass or two against the effects and use your judgement (e.g. a glass or two of wine at wedding is probably okay of you're not an alcoholic).
More options
Context Copy link
As with almost every single thing, I think it's likely to be a marginal effect. Seed oils, a bit of booze, grassfed beef, some vitamin or other, high fructose corn syrup, caffeine... whatever. I think properly measured these things all pretty much blend into the background and have no meaningful impact on general health, wellness, physical ability, or longevity barring an actual significant deficiency or severe overuse. Stay reasonably lean, move around a bunch, pick up heavy things from time to time, and that'll get almost every bit of predictable benefit that you can get from health choices.
Every time I dig into studies that say otherwise, they appear to be complete garbage.
(For the record, I think drink at least somewhat too much and expect that it comes with at least some adverse risk down the road - I'm not trying to come up with some cope for why I'm actually totally fine.)
More options
Context Copy link
My vaguely remembered understanding is that, not only are their observation studies in people, there are also experiments with animals and a proposed mechanism. I think that makes the recommendation stronger than the typical associations drawn in nutrition science.
That said, I'm not going to drink less, or indeed more, because I think it'll reduce my risk of heart disease. Alcohol has enough negative effects for me that I can't see myself ever drinking more than I do now, which isn't much.
More options
Context Copy link
See for me, I like drinking occasionally well enough, but when I read the recent headlines about alcohol and cancer, the studies were about women who had two drinks every night. Which is a level I literally can't imagine, not so much because I don't drink that much, as because I can't manage to do anything that consistently. I can't remember to wear a wedding ring every day, or take vitamins, let alone have two drinks every single night.
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola , if you could quit with no problems I wouldn't worry about alcoholism, but I would put 5 drinks a night at a problematic level if you weren't able to quit it.
My final push to quit for a while was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast about alcohol. It's not just "not good" for you, it's not just "bad" for you, it's really, really damaging to your body (gut, liver, and brain) in ways that AIUI scientists didn't even fully appreciate until relatively recently, even at what are commonly considered "safe" levels like a 1-2 drinks a night.
I realized that while I used to be able to accommodate a bit of light drinking in my life because my life had more "slack," I was now older and had significant responsibilities at work and home, so I really didn't have excess time and energy to spend on alcohol anymore.
ETA: I read that Huberman is known for playing fast and loose with the facts, so it might be wise to take the podcast with a teaspoon of salt.
More options
Context Copy link
That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
I was just thinking during my recent holiday illness how much it would suck to have a nicotine addiction and need to figure out how to manage that on top of being unable to eat or sleep.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link