Beer, Wine and sometimes Gin and Tonic

When did it start? Probably during my teens, I loved the floating feeling, laughing and having fun without boundaries!

Years later I met my current partner and he thought me the delights of red wine and the wine and food pairing. So alcohol got a new dimension. It wasn’t only there to party, it was also there to enjoy with food and a nice evening with my partner and friends. There was no “it’s enough” button and I love enjoying my red wine until the end of the party.

Today we love to drink a glass of red wine (sometimes 2 or 3) with our meal, and during the weekend we will have an “aperitif like Gin and Tonic” first and much more then just 1 glass of red wine.

Realising this is not a healthy habit, it’s time for a change. It’s not a great example for my daughter and also, I feel my body needs a pauze from alcohol. As I limited myself only to drink during evenings (I rarely touch alcohol before 6pm), it affects my sleep incredibly. For every glass of alcohol you consume, your body needs 1 additional hour to recover. And I’m not even getting at my 8 hours of sleep a night, what about all that recovering? No wonder that I feel tired all the time. My face is sometimes puffy from drinking red wine and it has some spots that dissapear when doing a detox. So time for a change!

I did some detoxes in the past and restrained from alcohol for a period of 1 week to once even up to 3 months. I thought it would help me to find my responsable limits after that period, like for example, only drinking during the weekend and only 1 or 2 glasses. But it was only a matter of weeks or months before I got back into my old habits.

So after discussing with some of my health coaches friends, I decided to give up alcohol for a year, effective now (actually last Sunday Nov 6, 2016). I want to see how I feel, what will change and maybe I never ever feel the need to drink alcohol any more and still feel that life is great and fun.

I am afraid too though, afraid that I will have boring weekends and how will I survive family parties like Christmas and what about New Year or these great parties and Galas in Shanghai? I’m afraid of having to explain myself at parties, afraid that I won’t be able to keep up, of getting withdrawel symptoms, afraid that my body needs different things as from now and so on and so on … And so to succeed I made a plan, a plan where I wrote down my fears and what action plan I have in mind for each of them. I will sharing these soon.

For the coming year I will be blogging about my experiences and sharing my highs and lows. Some will be long text as this, some will only be short recap or overview about the changes over the week. My purpose for blogging about it is 2fold – You guys are my responsibilty coaches by reading my blog, commenting and sharing. The other reason is that I hope I can help some other people that realise that their drinking habit might need to be adjusted and to give ideas how to move forward.

Thank you guys for reading this and don’t forget to follow me if you like to receive a message when I post a new article.

xoxo

T Love