Is it October yet?

Day 15 of the ‘Dryathalon’ challenge and these are my findings:

A lot of the time, in the past, when I thought I was hungover, I was actually just really, really tired!

How do I know this? Because I have experienced that same fuzzy-headedness, lethargy and low-level despair several times now, without having consumed a drop the night before. So I can now conclude that it was sleep deprivation rather than dehydration, that was making me feel like a chewed-up weevil.

Giving up drink doesn’t necessary lead to weight loss.

I put on a pound and a half in my first week off the sauce!

It’s not that alcohol makes you thin - that would be an outrageous claim, I think it’s that, for me, I compensate for not drinking by eating sweet things. I keep thinking - ah well, I must be saving so many calories by not drinking, so I may as well eat this, as I shovel in the biscuits. The other night I was home alone, quite content with the twin tranquillisers of Netflix and chocolate trifle at my disposal and I binged on both.

‘You are replacing alcohol with sugar’, a couple of people have observed.
(They had some of those posh biscuits at a training day, last week; the ones that have been decorated with real gold and have 3 different types of chocolate, applied in different ways, onto different surfaces.)

It’s not that you can’t have fun, without drinking, it’s just that life seems a little lacklustre without it!

This is worrying; the fact that I’m finding it so difficult forces me to wonder whether I have a problem, seriously, am I an addict? I keep craving alcohol at random moments.

I think this is a result of the ‘I’m on a diet’ phenomenon: as soon as you cut something out and tell yourself that it is forbidden, you want it. (This is just one of the many reasons why diets don't work, people!) I could go into a melodramatic reverie here about how I’m seeing the world in black and white at the moment and that food has no flavour but that wouldn’t be accurate. Struggling for an analogy for the world without booze, I was thinking about the parched, flat, unyielding landscape of Kansas, in The Wizard of Oz, the other day. However, the thing about that is that, ultimately, Dorothy preferred Kansas (‘there’s no place like home’) to the vivid candyland of Oz, didn't she?

By the end of this month will I suddenly decide that I don’t need to drink any more? Somehow I seriously doubt it and am already planning a celebratory bottle of fizz for the first of October.

I’m beginning to understand why everyone makes such a fuss about coffee

I love tea but coffee carries more of a hit.

I am no more motivated now than when I allowed myself to drink

I’d just like to get something straight here - I don’t actually drink that much, no really, stop chortling, it’s true! Three or four times a week at most! Sometimes just once a week, at the weekend. And if I drink at home I have one or two glasses of wine (before falling asleep on the sofa), so perhaps it was somewhat unrealistic to expect a sea change in appearance/attitude/sleep patterns etc. But it is all too easy to focus on certain things as being factors that are holding us back or making us behave in a certain way, when really the responsibility lies within ourselves, our own psyche.

So, of course, the tea-totalling me is still lacking a little in courage and drive.

Also, I don’t think that being in a state of inebriation ever made me say anything I didn’t mean, it’s just that alcohol amplifies and sometimes slightly distorts things.

So, with that, I leave you to go and make myself a ‘real’ coffee.

It’s nearly the weekend, have fun my friends, I shall be raising a glass of soda water and lime at a friend’s birthday celebration. Cheers!

And if you want to donate to the fundraising page, here is the link:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Shyama-Kasinathan-dryathlete2016?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=20160915_70371