Dry January

hotpot

I cant remember the last time I had a beer. I had beer in the fridge prior to Christmas that had gone over the sell by date, Do I lose my mancard for that!
)

Phil_aka_Pip

chillidoggy said:

I'm on the wagon as of this morning.

until this evening

ICBM

hotpot said:

I cant remember the last time I had a beer. I had beer in the fridge prior to Christmas that had gone over the sell by date, Do I lose my mancard for that!
)

If you chucked it away without drinking it, yes.

Sassafras

ICBM's idea of a mini-keg.

Nomad

Good luck to the wagoneers.

Suggested non-alcoholic tipple: orange juice and tonic water, about 60/40. Not too sweet, not too sharp, has a bit of fizz when the tonic water has just been opened.

WezV

Nomad said:

Good luck to the wagoneers.

Suggested non-alcoholic tipple: orange juice and tonic water, about 60/40. Not too sweet, not too sharp, has a bit of fizz when the tonic water has just been opened.

when I am not drinking for a few days I often go with tonic water and a splash or two of bitters.  technically the bitters is alcoholic so its not alcohol free, but does have the feel of a real drink.   

just googled it and apparently its a thing I didn't invent.  oh well

Snap

soda & bitters is good, also with a dash of or slice of lime.

THing you have to watch with soft drinks is the sugar and the acid, for rotting your teeth.

Dry January = nonsense. If you like the odd drink, the misery of depriving yourself offsets any health benefits of abstinence IMO.

If on the other hand, you are a piss artist, then no doubt its a good thing.

you're a long time dead, live the life you enjoy, drink or no drink.

eSully

Thanks for the tip @Nomad. A friend reckons San Miguel 0 is quiet nice too but haven't gotten around to picking up a bottle yet

tone1

I think the trouble comes when the odd drink on a Friday becomes habitual 7 days a week..
It's cheap, instant relaxation and it's legal..
Dry Jan just breaks a cycle of repetition

eSully

Snap said:

Dry January = nonsense. If you like the odd drink, the misery of depriving yourself offsets any health benefits of abstinence IMO.

If on the other hand, you are a piss artist, then no doubt its a good thing.

you're a long time dead, live the life you enjoy, drink or no drink.

I don't actually disagree with you. I'm certainly not preaching that everyone else should be joining me. When it comes to having a beer I've never been shy about it, life definitely is for the living. Perhaps I should have added that my wife is due next week and I would have had to keep it to keep my intake extremely low anyway so I thought, screw it, lets go the whole hog.

ICBM

It's less about making myself miserable by depriving myself of something I like, it's more of an experiment to see if I was in fact a borderline alcoholic. Same with my wife who is doing it too. Until now I rarely went a day without at least a small drink, always telling myself that it was just a habit, something we enjoyed, and not an addiction. But I was never sure so I decided to set myself a challenge.

If successful - and since I have not had any 'withdrawal' that I've noticed yet, just a couple of times thinking that a beer would be nice but easily being able to say no - and I think I've probably proved the point already, but I'm not going to give up now . I might or might not do it again next year. It won't do me any harm, anyhow.

Snap

of course, each to their own, but honestly, I don't see the point of it at all. If you think you need to cut down, cut down, but stopping for a month, then starting again, in the wider scheme of things is utterly pointless.

I found myself drinking something, couple of beers, sometimes more, most nights, so i stopped drinking during the week, save it fpr the weekend. Yep its tough at first, but then it just becomes part of the routine.

January can be miserable enough as it is, without abstaining from what IMO is one of life's nice things- good beer, good wine, good whisky.

Aah = new baby though! Fantastic news mate. Drinking will have nasty penalties in the first few weeks!! But after that, you will be so knackered, it doesnt make any difference whether you get up at 2am sober or not, you'll still be feeling like a zombie most of the time!!

All joking aside, giving up booze for a month is certainly something that would test my resolve, at first for sure. But once I'd done a month, my immediate thought would be that if I didn't carry it on, it would have been pointless. In for apenny an all that.

tbm

richardhomer said:

I'm sleeping better and saving money.

When I did this before these were the two things I noticed most of all. These days my kids wake me up all the time anyway so I wouldn't get that benefit. I don't drink that much anyway. A few beers or whiskys of a weekend evening is about the height of it. On the rare occasions I go on a mad one I suffer after. It's no longer worth the 2 day hangovers I get now so I tend to avoid big beery sessions.
 
Worryingly I can drink as much whisky as i want and not get a hangover...

therose789

Mrs rose and I are doing it, we are also not having refined sugars and takeaway food! 

The booze and chocolate really isnt that difficult but i really WANT PIZZA!

Phil_aka_Pip

Snap said:

of course, each to their own, but honestly, I don't see the point of it at all. If you think you need to cut down, cut down, but stopping for a month, then starting again, in the wider scheme of things is utterly pointless.

If you've been overdoing it, then cutting out for a month lets your liver recover. If you just cut down, your liver may recover more lowly, or it may just stop getting worse without getting any better.

eSully

therose789 said:

Mrs rose and I are doing it, we are also not having refined sugars and takeaway food! 

The booze and chocolate really isnt that difficult but i really WANT PIZZA!

Bet any weight is absolutely falling off you though. Beer is enough of a sacrifice, anyone tries to take my pizza and there'll be a knife fight

Snap

Phil_aka_Pip said:

Snap said:

of course, each to their own, but honestly, I don't see the point of it at all. If you think you need to cut down, cut down, but stopping for a month, then starting again, in the wider scheme of things is utterly pointless.

If you've been overdoing it, then cutting out for a month lets your liver recover. If you just cut down, your liver may recover more lowly, or it may just stop getting worse without getting any better.

You do know that most of the research done on alcohol levels is assumptive and applied in that there is no definitive research that says what the best unit level is, or what the level of drinking should be?

its all a conspiracy to turn us into a country of miserable bastardos.

Snap

Phil_aka_Pip said:

Snap said:

of course, each to their own, but honestly, I don't see the point of it at all. If you think you need to cut down, cut down, but stopping for a month, then starting again, in the wider scheme of things is utterly pointless.

If you've been overdoing it, then cutting out for a month lets your liver recover. If you just cut down, your liver may recover more lowly, or it may just stop getting worse without getting any better.

my point being, that if you stop for a month, then go back to your previous levels of drinking will achieve nothing in the long term, or even medium term.

For example Its like playing russian roulette every day and then stopping for a week - you are still back into risky behaviour.

Long term health wise, a dry January will do nothing at all if you go back to your old drinking habits. Total waste of time and effort.

BigBearKris

I didn't have a drink since NYE.

Unlike the most of You in this thread I used to drink quite a lot. Never seen it as a problem but I could go through bottle of whiskey over two nights, sometimes one night only.
I could not drink for two weeks, then I could have a small glass of wine in the evening. On some.other week I could be drinking every night (mostly at home). I'm 31 and alcohol was always a part of out nights out or meet ups with mates. Since my life these days is consumed mostly by work I don't get to go out much and drink mostly at home.
Not necessarily a New Year solution or Dry January (I didn't even know it's a thing ) but decided to stop drinking for health benefits and to see if I'll miss it. So far - very little temptation. I fancied a drink after first couple days but haven't since. Time will tell...

Oh, and good luck to all dry January participants good luck fellas!

Grunfeld

Snap said:

Long term health wise, a dry January will do nothing at all if you go back to your old drinking habits. Total waste of time and effort.

I see what you're saying but I disagree -- because something interesting can happen between the "if" and the "total". 

Here's what I mean:  alcohol addiction lies on an continuum.  I think of it sometimes like a gravitational pull... alcohol tends to pull you back to itself, and making changes to get free of it is like a rocket trying to achieve escape velocity.  When you only take a few days break from drinking you don't have long enough to achieve escape velocity... and the alcohol pulls you back. 

But with a decent break from it your thinking can change... (alcohol is a psychoactive substance after all).  And once you've escaped the gravitational pull of alcohol then things look different.  Maybe you don't want to return.  But if you do then you'll soon find yourself held by that pull as firmly as ever.  Many people will recognise this and that's the bit about what you're saying @Snap which I agree with.

Yet we're all different (living on different sized planets of addiction as it were), and therefore some of us will achieve "escape velocity" much quicker than others.  I needed about three months before I started to think differently and so one month's abstinence wouldn't do it for me.  But for other people one month will be sufficient to start looking at alcohol differently.  For these people a month off drinking won't feel like a total waste of time.