Have you tried the patches? Those things worked like a charm for me. I only had to wear them for one week and I was done.
The patches keep the cravings numb for a general sort of time, my problem is I get sudden, sharp cravings like first waking up, after a meal, getting in the car etc and the ability to pop a piece of gum on the spot works better for me.
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Grunching gout…I was a tiny bit skeptical about how much people said it hurt until I got it. I’ve only had one brief episode in a big toe, but it felt pretty much exactly like a broken big toe, and I’ve broken a big toe. I think routine toe wiggling has done something for preventing a recurrence for me. My dad had it in his fingers pretty much all the time for the last few/several years of his life.
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Well I made it through the entire month of November without a single alcoholic beverage. I could easily keep going. However, only thing I did in November that I do in a “normal” month where alcohol is involved is visit this local outdoor eatery that features $1.50 margaritas one night a week. I didn’t really feel tempted to order a margarita though. But I’m not sure I was actually “tested” properly. I definitely didn’t feel cravings like I feared I would
I’m highly disappointed that I did not lose a single pound as a result of not drinking for a month, though. As someone who drank to buzzedness or drunkenness 2-3 times per week prior to this, I frankly assumed at least 5-10 lbs of weight loss. I’m sure part of it is a result of an overly-large Thanksgiving feast I prepared for our tiny family unit, and I’m surely snacking more at night because my weed intake has absolutely increased substantially. But still I can’t imagine I’m eating as many empty calories as I was consuming weekly in alcohol, there’s no freaking way.
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This is a pretty bold assumption, really. Weight loss is hard, dropping 10 pounds of body fat in a month usually requires either precise calorie calibration or full blown crash diets.
5 pounds would be the caloric equivalent of about 50 to 65 alcoholic drinks. Seems like the missing calories must have been made up with excess food. Or there was a steady monthly gain when drinking which was reduced/eliminated by reducing the alcohol calories, thus breaking even on the weight.
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That’s right. So like, when I completely eliminated the 800-1200 calories (give or take) I was taking in on days that I used to drink heavily, I must have replaced them with something right? Because my weight stayed the same.
One thing I’ve never understood is severe weight loss among alcoholics. Like I genuinely don’t understand how it is physically possible, but it is somewhat common.
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Amazing. Thank you for sharing.
Have you found yourself replacing the space in your life with anything that used to be taken up by drinking and everything around it? You were looking at just weight loss as one potential cost of drinking. Just curious what time would reveal has been waiting to manifest or be cultivated as soon as you took a break from drinking.
My personal definition of abstinence is “freedom from a compulsive relationship.” The relationship can be with anything or anyone, which keeps me mindful that dry drunks are still drunks if they’re exchanging one compulsive relationship with alcohol for a compulsive relationship with something (or someone) else.
But by the same token, that also means abstinence looks different for each person. Freedom from a compulsive relationship with alcohol doesn’t necessarily mean never having a drink again.
I quickly found that the things I liked about drinking are readily and more healthily available through all sorts of other nouns, but most of all it helped me focus on cultivating better relationships with the things that had so much power over me. Otherwise I am the sort of person to turn something healthy into something compulsive and toxic.
It’s when I find that I am incapable of having a healthy relationship with something that I lean into abstinence in the literal sense of never letting myself touch that thing again. But even in that, I now see that as cultivating a healthier relationship with the thing. Sometimes ignoring something or someone is an act of kindness to you both.
Our personal worlds only contain time and space enough for so much before we die. There’s no reason we’re required to fill that time and space with things and people who bring us away from healthy living.
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I’ve replaced 700+ calorie meals with 4-5 Miller Lites before and not felt hungry at all, that’ll do it over time.
I dont know, it usually takes pretty big calorie swings to have noticeable weight loss over a month. Losing 5 pounds means you’re ballpark going to need to be net negative 17500 calories or in a 580 calorie deficit. Every. Single. Day.
Yeah, you probably replaced some of the calories but I think you are also overestimating how much impact cutting alcohol calories has.
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2 or 3 pounds could also easily be accounted for by differences in water retention between weighings.
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Yes, definitely. Weight loss is a vexing endeavor!
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I found out last night one of my old friends from school died over the Thanksgiving break. He was found Friday evening by his two daughters who are in their early 20s, poor things. He and I have the exact same birthday. We were pretty tight up until about the 9th grade, then I got a steady girlfriend and we sort of drifted apart as friends will do. I had not seen him in many years. They found him in his house after someone went over to check on him when he repeatedly didn’t answer his phone after several days. Apparently no one had been over there in a while. He was covered in feces and urine and his skin was as “yellow as a Simpsons character.” Stomach was all distended. He was awake and alert and would look when people spoke to him, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t respond. Paramedics picked him up but he didn’t survive the night. I guess he’d been drinking very heavily for years but it finally caught up to him :(. RIP.
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I’m sorry to hear that. Painful way for him to go. How is it affecting you?
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It’s definitely an eye-opener. Plus his death was the second in like four months. There was another guy back in September back home who died. The booze only indirectly killed him. He was stumbling around the parking lot of his apartment complex drunk off his ass, which my friend/his ex gf told me was basically every day, and tripped over one of those concrete parking block things. He fell and cracked his head open on the sidewalk and bled out before anyone found him. DOA at hospital. I hadn’t seen him since high school either. She sent me one of his mug shot pics from a dui he got a few years ago and the fking guy looked almost 70. I’ll see if I can find the pic, I guess it doesn’t matter if I post it since he’s dead now.
If it can happen to them surely it can happen to me or you or any of us, right? I can certainly see myself falling into the pattern of daily drinking —> daily getting drunk —> congrats you’re now Otis the town drunk. I can even recall a few months ago waking up all hung over with pain in my right side and wondering if my liver was finally shutting down.
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Agreed. Glad you’re doing better and able to reflect on it like this.
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I’m sorry about your friend. I often have feelings like you describe here, I definitely have a drinking habit but it only adds up to probably 5 to 10 drinks per week depending on the week. Nonetheless I also have that personal experience that makes the risks feel really present. My father was a severe alcoholic. Almost all of my early childhood memories of him are of him drunk. It just seemed to be his natural state. I’ve seen first hand the destruction - my poor mom dealing with it for years, my older siblings all hated him, he eventually died in his 50s shortly after I graduated university. I know that alcoholism tends to run in families so I always worry about it. That’s probably a good thing.
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Yeah I grew up without a father because of his alcoholism. Mom kicked him out for the final time when I was really little because of his drinking, and her not wanting to raise me in that environment…even though he was a musician and she knew full well who he was and what she was getting into when she met him. For context, she married and divorced him three (3) separate times, I came along on the third go round. I’m lucky to even be here.
She’s told me lots of crazy stories that sounded funny years later but were I’m sure horrible at the time, though. Shit like her running him off with a gun when he showed up drunk to my first birthday party at our house, or him saying he was running up to the store to grab cigs and a newspaper and not coming back home for three straight days after an extended bender, or him waking up on neighbors’ back porches after she kicked him out and not remembering how he got there, things like that.
I can’t imagine having to grow up around that. He remarried a couple years later and had a daughter and son and my half sis and brother DID grow up like that. It wasn’t until my sister was in middle school that he finally got sober.
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That is terrible. I saw my mothers boyfriend drink himself to death a few years ago. It was a brutal way to go.
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