Hold My Beer

If you saw my phone, you might think that I had a problem:

The story is a simple one – back in late January of this year, I woke up one morning and felt sick from the previous night of drinking. I was never really a big booze drinker – in fact, it was typically always modest in portion and highly infrequent. And in almost all cases, when I went beyond one drink, it was because I was in a social setting.

But on this particular day, I had lost track of how much wine I had consumed the night before, fueled by good conversations – but the consequence of that really pissed me off – I felt sick all day all because of this mistake? It wasn’t worth it and would never be worth it. And so that was the end of that, I vowed to drop alcohol altogether. After all, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction recommends drinking ideally only 2 standard drinks or less per week:

Key points from the guidance include:

There is a continuum of risk associated with weekly alcohol use where the risk of harm is:

0 drinks per week — Not drinking has benefits, such as better health, and better sleep.

2 standard drinks or less per week — You are likely to avoid alcohol-related consequences for yourself or others at this level.

I easily fit into this definition the vast majority of the time, but on this particular day in January, I made a mistake that pushed me to make a change – I went up one entry in the list quoted above. 0 drinks per week – I’ll take better health and better sleep, please and thank you – no more hangover stupidity.

Now, you could very well ask… why didn’t you just reduce drinking? Because I’m me, that’s why. I was a vegetarian for 8 years and stuck with it (up until I tasted shrimp again, those delicious little bastards). Conversely, in the case of alcohol, I couldn’t quite say that alcohol tasted good, it was more the relaxing effect that was kind of interesting. Taste-wise, everything could be achieved with mocktails or just non-alcoholic beers.

So anyway, that’s one more change that I’ve put into place and am continuing to enforce. I will never make the claim that I will always be off the booze or anything like that; there’s always the possibility of me reversing this or changing my approach, but I just don’t see the purpose at this point. I’m getting older, and one thing that I can damn well do to improve my health is to just NOT do this one additional thing. So I won’t.