Beating the booze

'Beating the booze' may be an exaggeration. All I have done is to come up with a new approach to cutting down my alcohol intake. Why? Am I a drunk, an alcoholic, a problem drinker? No, to at least two of these questions and 'not really' to the other. I will admit that I drink more than is strictly healthy so that, from time to time, I make attempts at cutting down my alcohol intake. Some are quite successful... for a while at any rate.

My doctor has told me more than once that if I don't cut down and lose some weight, bringing down my blood pressure, cholesterol and suchlike, I'll be dead within ten years. She first told me this well over ten years ago, so it just goes to show doctors don't know everything. She, of course, did not put it quite like this, talking about risk of death rather than certainty.

To be fair to my general practitioner, she is a great doctor and a lovely person and of course she has my best interests in mind. Recognising the need to moderate my drinking I have, from time to time, tried to cut down. I have found that the most successful method is simply to count units consumed. When I do this, I usually write the tabulated daily score on my trusty whiteboard. Seeing the numbers reduce gives me sufficient motivation to continue. This only works, however, if I am sufficiently motivated in the first place.

So what about the new approach? From time to time I try different brands of zero-alcohol or low-alcohol beers. Mostly I don't like them but some are better than others. I wondered whether I should conduct my own taste test of low/no beers, so I could keep a stock of the ones that were acceptable as a substitute. I'm not going to drink no/lows instead of real beer but even if I swap out one beer for a no/low, it's gotta be a gain, right? Then, if I am going to try out different no/lows, I might as well keep a note of how many real beers it cuts out.

My plan, then, is to set myself a specific budget for alcohol units over a given week. Just one week to start with, to see how it goes. During that week I will also be trying out a few different no/lows. Clearly there would be no limit to the no-alcohol drinks, but the low-alcohol beer would of course count towards the total.

According to UK medical authorities, men and women are advised not to drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week. I am sure it was 25 units for men at some point, then 20. Limits seem to get lower and lower as some po-faced committee of fun-sucking civil servant who went to med school decide to turn the screw.

On which basis, I am going to go a step further and begin with a budget of just 12 units of alcohol over a seven day period. My aim will be to drink no alcohol on at least three out of seven days. I will use the budget for emergency imbibement only. If you are a regular or heavy drinker you will know what I mean. If you are a heavy chocolate eater you can probably work it out too. Any emergency drinking will be limited to a moving average of 1.5 units per day. This makes 10.5 units in total, plus a reserve of 1.5 units which can be applied at anytime without affecting the moving average. For example, if I want a drink on Day 1, it will be limited to no more than 1.5 units of alcohol. If I drink no alcohol on Monday, the limit for Day 2 is 3 units and so on. I could, if I wish, drink nothing for five days and drink up to 9 units on day six or 10.5 if I include the 1.5 unit reserve.

My reward for not drinking for a full five days would therefore be a blow-out of 3 or 4 pints of strong beer (my favourite) on day 6. I'm looking forward to it already. Not least because it goes against the advice from the Medical equivalent of the Committee for Public Safety's killjoy edict which is to spread the weekly booze allowance over at least three days. Ha! ha!

Just one more thing. Psychobabble theory suggests that if a person with any kind of obsessive/compulsive behaviour wants to give something up, it helps to build in a level of accountability. By this, the gobbledegook means you need to tell someone else about your intended abstemiousness so they can have a good laugh at the inevitable failure, make you feel small, etc. At least I presume that's what's meant by it. I guess it could also help by encouraging one to keep on the straight and narrow.

I have in the past discussed my alcohol cutting binges with loved ones but this has the disadvantage of the additional fear and stress of letting others close to you down. My solution to this is to publish and be accountable instead. I am not asking for encouragement or support, as I think this is a bit wimpy. Success or failure is down to me and so I am going to man it out and see what happens.

More importantly, this is an experiment and the great thing about experiments is that they are, if properly planned, always successful. It doesn't matter to the experiment whether I cut down (or even cut out) the booze for this week, or I don't. The experiment will be a success either way. I will learn from the experiment whether this new approach works or it does not work.

Either way, I will be a winner.

Next move is to decide on a good week to run the experiment. I will write up the results in diary format.

And here’s the first bit of the diary

Bottoms up!