BTB, or By The Book moderation refers to the book Responsible Drinking and means drinking no more than 3 drinks a day and 9 a week for women, or 4 a day and 14 a week for men, with at least 3 or 4 non-drinking days a week.

I remember the first time reading about this guideline. It seemed so unbelievably little! What - *only* four drinks (that's small beers, not pints!)? 14 for a week? You got to be kidding me. I remember ordering two pints at once just as a start.

Then as the time passed and I have learned more about tolerance, practiced moderation etc, the BTB limit started looking too big. 4 drinks is a lot. Especially 4 days of (moderate) drinking. Especially if you make it consecutive. Consecutive drinking days bring quite some risk with them.

What I was actually experiencing was the flexibility of the BTB guidelines. On the one hand, it provides for quite a lot of moderations days, and quite a lot of drinks on an occasion. With some innovation, you can turn those 4 into 8 halves, or mixers, and with combining that with some other tools (dalay, sip, alternate with NA, etc.) you can even handle difficult long events. A full BTB week is an option for holidays and vacations too, because it allows for many drinking days in a week. On the other hand, BTB is all about limits, and it's those limits that make you safe. Still, outside difficult periods, following a full BTB is probably a tad too much. Especially important is having more of those abs days.

Which brings me to a first BTB limit: the number of abs days. That's a golden one. Absing helps change the mindset. While absing, especially for longer periods, we don't think about booze too much most of the time. A lot of us are very successful the first few days after the 30 - the effects of absing are there (unless you rush into making up for all the missed upon drinking). If we start skipping the abs days and get in too many drinks, these effects are canceled, and we start feeling more urges again. In order to keep the right mindset, we need to offset this by absing again.This is what true moderation is all about, a constant balancing act between abs-driven alcohol-free thinking, and occasional respectful enjoyment of positive effects of the magic potion - always followed by the necessary curing effect of absing to regain the balance and the right mind set. Once the balance is achieved, no big actions are required, but the continuous risk observation and gentle steering in the right direction. This is exactly why moderation is an art!

Let me go back to BTB limits again. There are three: the abs days, which I talked about, the max per day, and the max per week. An important aspect of these limits is that they provide an excellent basis for alarms. We all know about the creeps: when a number of drinks we're having starts gradually increasing over time, a timed bomb ticking, faster and faster, waiting to explode in a form of an ugly WTF. What can you do about it? Install alarms (a credit goes to my dear friend from MM of course). You can choose to install a continuous monitoring mechanism in place that observes your behavior in an objective way, and that sounds alarms when there're an indication you're starting to slip. This is a mouthful, but it's about using very simple tools. You need no more than the abstar and BTB. Abstar even has a built in alarm indication: your number goes red when you cross over. So if you keep on logging your numbers in abstar, and observing that limits, you're fine. As soon as you cross the limits, you need to gather your forces and re-start the fight. My personal advice here would be to first post about it on the list. That will help tremendously in gathering insight, enlisting support, and setting the right mind set.

There is nothing wrong with drinking above BTB guidelines. Even natural moderators do it from time to time. There is nothing wrong in having your own plan that may include numbers above BTB. Every body is different. The principle of moderation is having alcohol as an enjoyable but small part of your life, how you interpret that is up to you. Another danger here is letting these numbers define us. We should do our best stay true to ourselves and follow through on our commitments out of self respect. Drinking 1-2 during lunch, and then 3-4 in the evening on a vacation is a perfect moderate day if you ask me. Or having even 7-8 spaced drinks on a long drinking event, a few times per year falls under the same category. It's all about staying safe and being true to ourselves. That is why it's important to think things through, and follow your decisions.

In my experience, BTB is an excellent practice tool. After doing a focused BTB practice for about 6 months, I decided to let go, and try to moderate without. I am glad I did, because I learned how to shake the sticking to it as a rule. But after another 6 months of life without the training wheels, I decided BTB is for me, but as a guideline. So this will be more after 30 formula: get back into the habit of BTB counting. I will about a vacation MOP (my own plan). I discovered it's good to have guidelines, they are a simple and objective way to have a direction.