A cup of coffee with an aperitif, a glass of wine with dinner, a drink with friends. Everything great. As long as you don’t drink it because you feel you have to, I say to my kids, who are both legally allowed to drink alcohol. And: there are many more wrong reasons to consume alcohol. Boredom. Habit. Voltage. frustration. I found myself picking up the glass again and again for precisely these reasons. Not daily, and not per litre. Anyway: I literally preached water and drank wine here. That had to change. And I thought: if so, then so. I’ll start with a total dispensation: Dry January.
I have to admit that while my main goal was to become more aware of my drinking, I secretly had hope for this Dry January. After all, getting rid of the toxins should somehow make me feel better, maybe even get better skin. And lose two or three kilograms. That was an extra incentive for me.
Well, that was wishful thinking. Physically I felt absolutely zero difference. Which was probably due to the fact that I was reaching for bags of chips and the like more often than usual, totally without a guilty conscience, because I did without the alcohol calories. And the replacement drugs. I enthusiastically emptied the racks of non-alcoholic beverages at the retailer I trusted. I don’t like beer anyway, with or without alcohol, and without alcohol I can safely do without wine. Unfortunately, I found one or the other “dry” drink that I thought was really cool. And as in life, they contain a lot of sugar. A can of non-alcoholic gin & tonic contains almost as many calories as a whole bottle of white wine! Dom.
Where replacement medicine is the wrong word. I didn’t miss anything. At least for the first two weeks. Of course, it was a bit silly to toast with a glass of water while eating with friends. But in keeping with Kate Moss’s famous joke “Nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels”, I can say: Nothing tastes as good as willpower feels. Triumph across the board!
Until I had this dream. I floated in a cable car above an aperitif party. Everyone was drinking wine and I was, as it were, glued to the window of the cable car, panting. When I woke up, I laughed and shook my head. And then thought about that dream all day long. In the evenings, when I was alone at home, I must have opened the wine fridge a dozen times. Then to tell me: “If I break through this damn Dry January, I definitely won’t be home alone.” And let it be.
Unfortunately, the fantasy was not gone the next day. I agreed to eat. “Where are you going?” texted my friend. “I don’t care. I want wine,” I wrote back. Well, he wasn’t exactly helpful in keeping my dry January resolution. But how I enjoyed that first glass of wine. And the second too.
Contrary to what I feared, the next day I didn’t feel like the biggest loser in the world. After all, I had been drinking for the only acceptable reason: pure pleasure. And unlike my second fear, I didn’t feel the need to do it again the next night. I had no trouble giving up alcohol for the next few days.
Still, I decided to stop the Dry January experiment, and instead before each drink, ask myself: Am I enjoying it now? Or am I drinking for some other reason? lI’m giving up crisps and non-alcoholic gin & tonics again. And I have no more cable car dreams. And: since my official resignation I have only had one glass of wine. Goal achieved, I’d say – even if I didn’t quite make it through Dry January.
And you? Do you have experiences with the Dry January? Looking forward to it in the comments column.
