Giving up/ Cutting Down Alcohol Thread Part 16

doingitanyway

I had a drink that was unplanned. I did it this evening on autopilot. Just the one but I didn't intend to and that is why I am on here. So 1/22 for August for me please.

maman

cathybird wrote: »

Pollyanna, so good to see you back! I was wondering if you were okay :wave:

What she said.

Don't say there was no point to your AF days. You've hit 100 which is more than me. It really is worth trying for more even if you don't hit your target. Believe in yourself.

cathybird

Pollyanna, when you last posted in early May you said you had done 3 AFDs for May, which together with the other months and 15 for June/July brings you to 91 for the year I think - did you perhaps do some other AFDs in May to bring you to 100? ... I'm thinking you probably did. Maman is right - all your AFDs count and you've actually done quite a lot of them! We're 213 days into the year, if you've done 100 AFDs that's nearly half. :T:T:T

marahouti

2/22 for August please Shaggy. Thank you. X

doingitanyway

2/22 for me please.

cathybird

Morning all, 3/21 for me today please

cathybird

Honey_Bear wrote: »

Thanks for that link Cathy Bird; very interesting reading and if I'd known about it when I stopped drinking I'd definitely have bought the book if our library hadn't got it. I read the article and then the links it contained. I'm not sure if either of them stayed off the booze after a period of sobriety - Jill Stark, at least, discovered that a month without a bottle of booze a night was a huge improvement. (Several years later she then wrote a book about anxiety and depression, so my guess would be that she didn't.) I'm not advocating total sobriety but I'd be really interested to know if they went back to drinking and if they were able to moderate having done so.

No-one stops drinking for a month or more unless they're a bit concerned about their consumption, so that's a valid question that no-one seems willing to divulge presumably unless you buy the book. Both of my neighbours (middle aged women) who stopped drinking a while back then went back to it - I've never asked them about their post-AF time consumption. None of my business and it's a really, really delicate subject, far more than herion addiction. Ex-junkies are far more likely to not mind telling you! I've never been remotely tempted back by the idea of drinking - I've been tempted by alcohol but not the after-effects. It's a different thing.

Somewhere in all that reading someone mentioned the fear of giving up booze for good, and that's something I first heard from my brother around 2000; he's had a really debilitating stroke since and I'm pretty sure that his daily excess booze consumption had a lot to do with it. I was frightened of giving up forever as well, hence doing it the cautious way of the 100 Day Challenge first. Not sure what it says about addiction because I'm pretty sure most people find the idea of never drinking again (while they're still drinking) very frightening indeed, indeed so frightening that they're not usually willing to talk about it. I certainly wasn't.

Sorry to hear about your brother's stroke, HB. I've got a friend at work who had a stroke in the pub about eight years ago and was rushed to hospital. He recovered completely, but still drinks too much.

I think you are completely right that most people who drink are afraid of the idea of giving up alcohol forever and struggle to imagine what life would be like without it. I certainly did. Now if I had to give up completely I would without too many qualms. Thanks entirely to this thread!

maman

I did another AF Friday. It wasn't as difficult as last week although still a few cravings earlier in the day. I know it's all about habit and in my head. I look forward to a drink at the end of the week so it's the anticipation I miss rather than the booze itself.:( I'm not promising it will be a regular thing (it's cutting down on calories that's motivating me at the moment) but they call count.

2/10 AFDs please Shaggy

Honey_Bear

Hi Pollyanna! Welcome back! :wave: 100 days to date this year is a target most people would be envious of, so don't beat yourself up! It's one heck of an achievement.

cathybird wrote: »

Sorry to hear about your brother's stroke, HB. I've got a friend at work who had a stroke in the pub about eight years ago and was rushed to hospital. He recovered completely, but still drinks too much.

I think you are completely right that most people who drink are afraid of the idea of giving up alcohol forever and struggle to imagine what life would be like without it. I certainly did. Now if I had to give up completely I would without too many qualms. Thanks entirely to this thread!

It's an amazing thing, isn't it, this thread. I'm sure it keeps a lot of us on the straight and narrow, and that's quite something. Many thanks to you for keeping the Annual Scores, too.

maman wrote: »

I did another AF Friday. It wasn't as difficult as last week although still a few cravings earlier in the day. I know it's all about habit and in my head. I look forward to a drink at the end of the week so it's the anticipation I miss rather than the booze itself.:( I'm not promising it will be a regular thing (it's cutting down on calories that's motivating me at the moment) but they call count.

Sorry you had those uncomfortable cravings, Maman. Because you're so constant in your targets I always assume you find being AF on the days you don't drink easy but that's me just being dumb. Good on you for sticking to it.

Weight-wise I'm now down to 65.8kgs, so it's coming off very slowly. I didn't weight myself this morning and I won't be weighing myself tomorrow, which may have something to do with a whole bar of chocolate no longer being in the fridge. At least it was half the size of the ones I used to polish off daily, and I haven't done that for a few weeks until yesterday. Chocolate was required, but I'm not sure quite why, and yes, because it was still chilled it did hurt where the teeth had been extracted, but I still kept going. Oops.

3/31 please, Shaggy.

maman

Honey_Bear wrote: »

Sorry you had those uncomfortable cravings, Maman. Because you're so constant in your targets I always assume you find being AF on the days you don't drink easy but that's me just being dumb. Good on you for sticking to it.

Thanks for thinking of me HB. You're right, I do find my planned AF days easy, Monday to Thursday is no problem at all. But Friday has always been a drinking day and as I'm still trying to cut calories to shift my holiday gain I've tried a couple of AF Fridays. I suppose I feel cheated of my Friday treat.

As I said, It's all about habit. There's no real reason why Friday (or the weekend in general) should be any different to any other day.

Thanks for listening (while I try to convince myself).:D