Dry August/January - a month of not drinking!

Back home now. Total damage 3 whisky and 8 glasses of varying types of wine amounting to GBP 71.20 of alcohol consumption, excluding tips. I feel this was quite enough for a time to come.

By the way, we spent GBP 38.25 on food. I find this shocking.

Awesome post Crumpy.

Thursday 28th January


Another long day at work saw us missing another boxing class. This isn't much good for my training schedule. I opened a Becks Blue when I got home, having decided to save the Brewdog Nanny State for 'special occasions' (e.g. normal drinking times like Friday night). While Nanny State is marketed as alcohol-free, it has 0.5% alcohol content so technically it sort-of counts. Long-term, I think it could be a good substitute for the regular beers we'd otherwise be drinking. My husband suggested we should drink proper beers tonight but I refused.

Thanks for the supportive words and the article link, hardly. I don't know why, but I can't help feeling that articles like that come across as judgemental and condescending (even when it is not the way they are intended). I think the problem is that I'm still a drinker, and even though I know it isn't in my own best interests, I will probably go back to drinking after this is over, even if I change the frequency and volume. There really can be no debate that drinking isn't a good life choice, but the same could be said for many other things in life. This particular guy (like the guy in an earlier article) did more than just stop drinking - he 'rebranded' himself. I'm not quite after that kind of transformation. But I would like to understand why I feel so defensive when I read these perfectly rational justifications for a teetotal lifestyle.

Soon you'll be drinking nothing but water.

Saturday 30th January

I managed to get up early and do some cardio on the crosstrainer this morning, in my efforts to compensative for failing to go to the gym all week. I've said it several times now, but exercise in the morning is something I would never do after waking up hung over.

Changing the car battery was a performance. Like most DIY projects we take on (however small) it involved multiple trips to Screwfix as we realised we didn't have the right tools. Obviously we were without the car for this, so my husband cycled in the icy wind to pick up a set of spanners, and later in the afternoon was my turn to get on my bike and pick up a box wrench set. In the end, all costs totted up, it would probably have been cheaper to take it to a garage. But there is a certain satisfaction to be had from doing it yourself, I suppose. Once the new battery was installed and demonstrably working, my husband suggested we celebrated with some proper beer. It would kind of suck to get to 30th January and have a slip, so it was easy to say no.

We went out for dinner and a movie tonight. It's getting easier to say no to a bottle of wine with dinner, especially at the unexceptional chain restaurants we eat at before going to the cinema. It also cuts the bill down massively, as Lord Ba'al mentioned a few posts ago. Tonight's movie was The Big Short, by the way. I highly recommend it.

Tomorrow is the last official day of Dry January (I'm extending my dry spell to include the first two weeks of Februay to compensate for my cheat days, but will no longer record the progress here or else this is going to turn in a Livejournal or something). As part of my close-down I will include some data from my Fitbit pedometer, comparing January 2016 to December 2015. I have not yet looked at this data so I'm hoping it going to be dramatic and awesome.

Early congratulations since it's the 1st here already.

Sunday 31st January

A typical Sunday of games with friends. We had some people round at our house, then in the evening our other friend couldn't get away from home because of his kids so we went over to his. I drank quite a lot of non-alcoholic beer, which I think despite being alcohol-free must a little dehydrating because I had a cracking headache by the time I went to bed.

Other people's business:

• The last couple of weekends, we've opened a bottle of wine on Sundays in order to serve it to one of our friends, which resulted in my husband also drinking. On this occasion our friend stuck to orange juice because she'd had a big night on Friday with her colleagues and was still suffering from the hangover.
  
• When we went to my other friend's house, he was drinking what looked like fruit juice from a pint glass. This was unusual for him as I never see him drinking soft drinks in the evening. Turned out it was a pint of wine.

Monday 1st February

Thus concludes Dry(ish) January! And in case anyone wondered, we didn't sit up until midnight just so we could break open a bottle in celebration (not least because we have to do another two weeks in February). Here's the final result:

Pre-planned cheat days: Two
Slips: Zero
Total damage (across cheat days): 3 pints of premium lager, 1.5 pints of real ale.

Fitness

At the beginning of this challenge, I mentioned I was wearing a Fitbit pedometer and hoped to see improvements in my levels of exercise. I certainly feel like I've been more active in January, but the results are actually underwhelming.

Total steps in December: 245672
Total steps in January: 282513

There was one day in January where I forgot to wear my Fitbit, so I'll conservatively add 4000 to my January total to make up for this, resulting in a January total of 286513.

So, average steps per day:

December: 7925
January: 9242

I've also attached a graph, but it's difficult to see any obvious trend. If I'm honest I had hoped the increase in January would be more signficant. I think maybe a month is too short to see trends here, because the data is so obviously skewed by a couple of anomalous days.

Other lessons learned

There was a lot going on this month. Work was in a unique place, due to year-end procedures. I tried to go to the gym more often. Crucially, I cut chips out of my diet (though admittedly I had a few more chip cheat days than I had alcohol cheat days). I LOVE chips with dinner. Whenever we had a dinner we'd normally serve with chips, I took an extra portion of vegetables. This was a real test of willpower. A few articles posted about other people's Dry January efforts seem to include stuff like this: not just cutting out alcohol, but taking other positive steps to try to improve wellbeing. I think it's part of the January New Years Resolution malarkey, but speaking for myself, I badly wanted to see some benefits from this month. I think making a few additional changes (chips, exercise) was in order to guarantee it.

Here are things I've appreciated from Dry January:

• I can do all the stuff I would normally do in a month, without alcohol (with the exceptions of a birthday party and going to the pub with my parents)
  
• My friends do not react at all negatlively to my not drinking, or try to encourage me to drink when I don't want to
  
• I should have more respect for other people's decision not to drink (in the past I, and especially my husband, have been guilty of trying to pressure people into drinking when they chose not to)
  
• I like not waking up hungover. I've spent a lot more of life hungover than I realised.
  
• I've saved money
  
• I've felt more motivated in day-to-day activities, such as my job, looking after the house and going to the gym. This possibly is linked to having more energy and being in a more positive mood.
  
  

Yesterday, my husband said that he hopes when Dry January ends we don't go straight back to our old habits. This will be difficult, because for all the obvious advantages of not drinking, we fucking love drinking. It's fun. I had fun without alcohol, but in many cases, I genuinely will often have more fun if I'm drinking. We love beer. We love wine. Having wine with dinner makes dinner feel more special. Having beer in the evening is like a reward for a hard day's work. Having drinks with friends makes us happy. Make no mistake, we had fun without alcohol. But I'm not going to pretend alcohol didn't bring something to the occasion.

Sustaining a reduced-alcohol lifestyle will be hard but I'm committed to giving it a go. A month and a half isn't long enough to truly recognise the benefits. We need several months of sustained low-alcohol in order to truly realise benefits. I'm going to stock up on soft drinks and non-alcoholic beers and see how it goes. Dry January became easier after a couple of weeks in, when we'd broken the ritual habit of opening a drink after work every day, and every weekend afternoon. We need to avoid getting back into that habit for this to work.

Some people might be frustrated reading this. Why not stop drinking entirely, forever? Well, why not cut out all junk food? Eat 5-a-day of fruit and vegetables. Turn vegatarian. Do however much exercise each week is currently recommended by the Surgeon General. Etc. We all know what's objectively good for us, but we allow ourselves freedom of choice over how we live and how we treat our own bodies.

Here are my own plans, going forward:

• Reduce the number of days a week I drink, and the volume I drink on the days where I choose to.
  
• Be more aware of the impact that drinking has on my body and my lifestyle. Like how many times I don't do something due to being hungover. How many times I do or say something regrettable due to being drunk.
  
• Be more aware of the impact that drinking has on the people around me. How I treat them when I'm drunk/hungover. How my drinking might be disruptive on social occasions. How the people who love me feel about my drinking.
  

Dry January has definitely given me some food for thought in these areas.

One of the motivations behind Dry January, as I mentioned at the beginning of the month, was the behaviour and actions of someone else over Christmas. I will write more about this in a follow-up post.

For now, to everyone who has been following this thread: you have my extreme gratitude for your suggestions, ideas, words of encouragement and all the interesting discussion that you've brought. Also thanks to lurkers (if any) who have been observing from afar. I hope this has provided some measure of entertainment and education - even if you were only following for the schadenfreude of hoping to see a few slips

Congratulations on your experiment and sharing your experiences along the way. It's way more effort into stopping a habit than I ever put onto the habits I want to have.

We really don't drink much at our home, or even socially, so its fascinating to see the opposite side of the coin.

You cited us three instances where you didn't stop yourself. While it's good that you're conscious of it, are you sure you are as careful as you want to be?