Good Life Cuisine

The "stop button" (feeling when enough is enough while drinking and stopping there) for me looks like this:

I've gone through different phases on my moderation journey. After learning about practice, I set myself a goal to drink BTB for 30 days. The 30 days were extended to 6 months. Then I started noticing the negative effects of setting myself strict rules.

Weight loss is sometimes compared to to dealing with problem drinking. Indeed the underlying process of change may share some basic mechanism. But I would like to point out a key difference.

It's so easy to get caught up in day to day management of our behaviour, that I find it important to go back to fundamentals, re-examine our beliefs and see how we can be consistent with them. I see three basic ways to look at a drinking problem:

There was some discussion on the list about what moderation is. Is it drinking to BTB¹ limits? Is it drinking less than before? Is it being able to have just 1 drink and be satisfied? My goal is not to define moderation in a scientific way; but I believe that taking a step back and thinking about what moderation actually is, or what it means for you - is a useful exercise. Here are my thoughts.

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.

This is a story about my moderation journey. Every person and every story is different, but by listening to many different stories, doing a lot of reflection and practice, you can piece your own puzzle.

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.

Today I would like to share with you what others have shared with me during my first 30¹ two years ago. I started absing, and then there was it: the first social trigger. Social triggers were my major triggers for many reasons:

Some time ago, we were talking about the risks of consecutive drinking days. Most agreed that doing more than 2 or 3 in a row is simply flirting with the creeps. This I found to be especially true in the practice stage, when we are still fighting the old habit. In a later stage, (maintenance?), you might be able to afford some exceptional periods (e.g. vacations) with some more drinking days - but the Creep will always be smiling around the corner.