Sorry for the (for most of you I guess) incomprehensible title. This was a saying of my grand granddad. I never had a chance to meet him, but my dad talks about him with great respect and fondness. He was a man from another time. He fought the First World War. In fact, he went away from his home to join the Balkan wars in the 1912 and came home 7 years later. He was riding with calvary - and at the time they used to carry their rifles around their shoulder, so it was bouncing off his back as he was riding his horse. He had a blue trail from it as long as he was alive. He had to retreat to Corfu, where the Greeks welcomed the army to recover. He barely survived typhus (he was already written off), and fought his way back to his village, some 1000km up north.

There are different ways to translate his saying, and it very much depends on how you interpret it. He used to say that about food, and a first, obvious translation could be something like: "stop when you are enjoying the most". The way I understood this for long was as a saying of an old disciplined soldier: a sort of ascetic proclamation that in life you should give up the things you like for bigger things (like health, or maybe spiritual growth).

That was until I discovered moderate drinking and (intuitive) eating. What I discovered then was that problem drinkers tend to want too much of the good thing. As I learned to listen to my body, I start hearing that my body was saying: it was enjoyable, fun, but it's been enough. And if I listen really carefully, I hear that if I cross that border, it actually stops being enjoyable. Same with food: food tastes best when you are hungry (not too hungry, but healthy hungry); as soon as you are full, it actually starts loosing taste and it stops even looking nice. When we overdo with alcohol or food, we tend to try to keep the good thing going, but that's not how it works. And that's where all the negative effects start kicking in.

Once I understood that, I finally got what my grand granddad's wisdom was all about: "stop when you feel satisfied" (or more precise: "stop when you feel the most satisfaction"). There is a point at which our body is completely satisfied with alcohol or food. That's the moment to stop. If we stop then, we will remain satisfied. With food, it's this neutral satisfied feeling. With booze, it's a gentle coming down from the enjoyable little buzz we might have been feeling from moderate amounts of alcohol (e.g. 1-2 drinks).

So I take this wise man's words to my heart as a mantra. "Stani kad ti je najsladje" - "Stop when you feel satisfied". The best solutions are almost always the simple ones. I would like to learn to associate the positive spirit and meaning of this sentence to most of my drinking and eating experiences.

Here it is also for you. I wonder what my grand granddad who unfortunately died before I was even born, would say if he knew that three quarters of a century later, in a completely different world, his message would travel around the globe, and maybe inspire other people to respect and honor their bodies and their souls.