I want to talk about alcohol. This post was prompted by a number of things:
Rearranging the Deck-chairs
Tom Furman had a good post recently which hit a nerve with me. He spoke about how too often we major on the minors. We ignore the really important stuff and fiddle with minutiae. We might have everything right, all the right things in place.....but then we sabotage it with something else we are doing.
You might be eating well and training well.....but are you also smoking? Are you watching your diet, counting calories and macros....but drinking a bottle of wine a night? Are you training hard, eating well but not getting more than 5 hours sleep a night?
Dry January
These posts both came at a time when I've decided to give up alcohol for a while. I'm going along with Dry January I realised that I was drinking too much. I'll not get into details but there was far too much wine going down my neck most nights.....to relax. Much of it was a habit, but I was finding myself looking forward to the drink and the habit was getting too ingrained, so I wanted to cut right back.
Obsessing over diet, exercise, sleep and attitude are all fine.....but I was sabotaging things by drinking.
Rearranging the Deck-chairs
Tom Furman had a good post recently which hit a nerve with me. He spoke about how too often we major on the minors. We ignore the really important stuff and fiddle with minutiae. We might have everything right, all the right things in place.....but then we sabotage it with something else we are doing.
You might be eating well and training well.....but are you also smoking? Are you watching your diet, counting calories and macros....but drinking a bottle of wine a night? Are you training hard, eating well but not getting more than 5 hours sleep a night?
You get the picture. By avoiding the real problem, you can pretend to be courageous. You perhaps act as if you are uninformed, but you are mimicking a child who closes his eyes and believes he is invisible. You really aren’t fooling anyone. Not even yourself. - See more at: http://www.tomfurman.com/rearrange-the-deck-chairs/
Then there was this post on Suppversity.
Alcohol is a killer: According to WHO, morbidity attributable to alcohol in countries with an established market economy (10.3% of disability adjusted life years) comes second only to that of tobacco (11.7%; Murray. 1997). According to a very recent study by published in the scientific journal Addiction by the Pan American Health Organization, a branch of the World Health Organization alcohol was a 'necessary' cause of death (i.e., death would not have occurred in the absence of alcohol consumption) in an average of 79,456 cases per year in 16 North and Latin American countries (Gawryszewski. 2014).Alcohol is not good for you. And there are a lot more statistics out there if you want to look for them.
Dry January
These posts both came at a time when I've decided to give up alcohol for a while. I'm going along with Dry January I realised that I was drinking too much. I'll not get into details but there was far too much wine going down my neck most nights.....to relax. Much of it was a habit, but I was finding myself looking forward to the drink and the habit was getting too ingrained, so I wanted to cut right back.
Obsessing over diet, exercise, sleep and attitude are all fine.....but I was sabotaging things by drinking.
Comments
There's a difference between a cocktail and a snoot full.
Just as there are documented deleterious effects from Alcohol, there are also fairly well studied positive effects.