1 year ago I decided to embark on a challenge with some family and friends called ‘75 Hard’. 75 days of committing to various things like
- 2x 45 minute workouts a day
- Reading for 10 minutes a day
- No cheat meals – pick a diet
- Drinks 4 litres of water
- Take a progress photo every day
- No alcohol
Andy Frisella is the tough dude that came up with this challenge (not a program as he says) to work on your psychological toughness not necessarily your physical…the latter being a by product of the process.
So I said yes!
I’m very open about the challenges that I’ve experienced with auto-immune disease, I have Hashimoto’s Disease and just prior to starting 75 Hard on April 16 2022. I ended up a guest in our local Coronary Care with Atrial Fibrillation due to my thyroid medication ‘T3 Toxicity’. This came about due to firstly missing my specialist appointment 3 months earlier and my health journey. I was T3 toxic because my health was improving and because I had missed that appointment we didn’t pick up the rising T3 level which caused my Thyrotoxicosis and AF episode.
Push forward a year and a few weeks ago my beloved Apple Watch picked up something a little more insidious, that’s another story for another time and a work in progress.
75 Hard wasn’t hard, you just needed self-discipline and I was totally in, especially with the support of the little group we had. Family and friends all up and down the east coast were totally in and with some wit, grit and a lot of sweat we all got through.
It was in these 75 days that I evolved physically and my lens on alcohol consumption broadened, deepened, expanded….and expanded. I deliberately didn’t read any books on the cessation of alcohol for many reasons, and to be totally honest some arrogant reasons mostly being that ‘I already knew it all’.
I now know that I absolutely do not know it all…(don’t tell my husband)
What I did know is that I was feeling better every day which was life-changing.
Growing up in the late 70’s early 80’s the culture around alcohol was and still is, remarkably disgraceful. Many of us remember ‘Passion Pop’ – ‘West Coast Coolers’ – ‘Sparkling Rhinegold’ and the top of the marketing tree as ‘Coolabah Casks’.
Here is Australia – Coolabah came with a catchy song “Where you find your Coolabah” – you’re singing it – I know you are….. it also came with a 5-litre cask and at the end of the night when you finished it, you would blow up the bladder and use it as a pillow. We would and we still do, fill up our esky’s with bags of ice, cartons of beer, cheap bubbly, no water, a couple of kilos of bangers, a loaf of bread and we were off to the river, the beach, camping or whatever filled our buckets. Sounds like fun and it absolutely was.
My question now decades later is why and how did we learn that having fun equated to getting shit-faced every weekend?
The answer is culture, our social and cultural paradigm still dictates that having fun to a greater degree is consuming alcohol and lots of it. I hope to write more on this later, perhaps in a book but I do know I now want to find out more, and I want to find out how we slow down this cyclic maladaptive pattern.
The trouble is our ‘drinking thinking’ is embedded in many things such as our family system, trauma, what we choose as a soother for our hurts, our social expectations and norms, our concept of ‘happiness’, connection, socialising and so on. My ‘drinking thinking’ was embedded in all of the above and growing up in the 70’s when alcohol consumption was considered the normal thing to do and do it often. I personally didn’t experience the drug culture in great depth, sure, it was there but not heavily. Lots of people smoked pot, some dabbled in ‘trips’, I knew very few people injecting heroin and cocaine was a ‘rich persons’ choice of drug only. We knew it as the ‘Eastern Suburbs Only’ drug in the 80’s. I actually have never even seen cocaine or heroin, just the end result in the ED or ICU in my nursing career.
Alcohol was my choice of drug, my soother, my socialiser, my connector and a year ago today I chose to change my lens dramatically, the way I thought and felt about drinking.
I had been working on my health actively since my diagnosis with Hashimoto’s in 2010 and the subsequent removal of a parathyroid tumour in 2012. I gave up red wine in June of 2021 – almost 2 years ago, at the behest of my amazing Naturopaths Nic and Jess here in the Hawkesbury. My external observation of my internal response to this I found extraordinary – I actually recall going into a grieving response and it astounded me. For almost a decade I had been rigid in my Alcohol-Free Days (AFD’s) and reducing consumption in any one sitting. Succeeding most of the time, but not all of the time. By the time 75 Hard came around, there wasn’t much alcohol I was enjoying and had decreased consumption dramatically. Even just a few glasses of wine would leave me depleted, lethargic ‘dragging the chain’ the next day. I wanted to feel better and stopping for 75 days wasn’t a big deal…or so I thought.
In an article published by UNSW’s ‘National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre’ there has been a substantial decrease in overall youth drinking globally including Australia and that also correlates with a decrease in illicit drug use. Today’s youth are leaning towards a shift in culture choosing to focus on healthy living practices, food, fitness etc which is refreshing considering the way our youth are presented in media.
Sadly for the older generation over 30, this isn’t the case. I’m seeing more and more clients of all ages wanting to either cease or moderate their alcohol consumption, doing a quick calculation often shows incredible amounts being spent on alcohol, tobacco, vapes, cocaine, and time….time in recovering from so-called ‘great nights out’. Some people spend in excess of $50,000/per year on alcohol and tobacco alone.
The other issue is binge drinking which is another layer of risk and layer of problem consumption. Binge drinking or alcohol induced problems correlating with violence, injury, Emergency Room presentation and over 1500 deaths in 2021 according to the ABS, stating that alcohol was the ‘most common principal drug of concern’ in 2020-21 period. In the USA the figure is around 88,000 deaths attributed to alcohol abuse/use every year…incredible statistic.
So one year on, what does this mean to me?
- My drinking thinking has totally changed, I don’t think about ‘deserving’ a glass of wine or ‘needing’ a glass of wine. I don’t think about ‘FriYay’ in terms my first glass of vino signifying the end of the working week. I don’t think about ‘FriYay Eve’ (Thursday) or ‘FriYAY Eve’s Eve’ (Wednesday) to justify starting my weekend earlier.I don’t ‘think’ about stocking up for the weekend.
- I don’t ‘think’ about alcohol as my connection and socialisation tool.
- I don’t ‘think’ about alcohol as my soother for anxiety or a remedy for a challenging day.
- I don’t ‘think’ about alcohol or consuming of alcohol at all.
The I Do’s:
- I do go to bed earlier every…single…day!
- I do exercise in some form or another every…single…day!
- I meditate or engage in mindfulness practices every…single…day!
- I do focus on my whole health picture including nutrition every…single…day!
- I do drink AF bubbles on occasion now, I refrained for the first 6 months with intention to ensure I was in a good place in my thinking.
There’s so much more in my thoughts about alcohol and our social and cultural position on it, however I have a great deal of reading and research to conduct in order to create a rich a worthwhile read for you.
For now my reflections are embedded in my own experience, that of reclaiming my health and life. Yes I’ve come down 3 dress sizes and feel overall incredible, my gut health has improved dramatically, I don’t really experience anxiety at all, I have an incredible awareness of my psychological evolvement sans alcohol and that amazes me.
75 Hard evolved into something far greater and far more meaningful for me…simply put my life has greater meaning without alcohol. I have an aversion to the term ‘sober’ which I will explore at greater length in time. I don’t consider myself in recovery or sober….or to be argumentative…am I in denial??? These are questions that I may or may not answer, I just simply choose to not drink any more and I don’t want to be the minority and have to explain the ‘why’ to people. A ‘no thank you’ to the offer of an alcoholic beverage should suffice however I’ve found it doesn’t and I’m very curious about it. One incredible observation has been others discomfort with me not drinking alcohol with them, the declining of the offer…the social connector…disconnected.
I learned very young that the humble glass of wine can fix everything, alcohol was my go to, my ‘fixer upperer’, my soother, my symbolic connector and representation of holidays, weekends and nights out and much more.
I now have learned that life has so much more meaning than a FriYAY arvo drink sesh. I have re-wired and re-fired my nervous system to know peace, joy and happiness in different ways rather than popping the cork.
Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely enjoyed, in fact I have ‘loved’ drinking wine historically. It was just my time to experience what we call sobriety and understand my ‘non-drinking’ self.
Will I drink again?
I have no idea to be honest.
The question is if I go to a restaurant and the sommelier recommends a single glass to go with my expensive, grass fed, grass finished steak then am I a so called ‘drinker’ again or is the 100mls of artisan wine as much of an experience as the steak?
Or if I ever get to fly First Class will I say ‘hell yes’ to the complimentary glass of Bollinger on offer? Isn’t that an experience also? Or an excuse?
I did say I was argumentative didn’t I!
For now I choose to not drink and that feels good on Sunday mornings when I get on my mountain bike with my friends to enjoy our country side. It feels good to get on my horse and feel the wind as we canter along in the sunshine and fresh air and it feels good to grab my kayak and paddle to splash up the Grose River for hours and hours.
It just feels good.
https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/dont-believe-hype-teens-are-drinking-less-they-used
https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/health-advice/alcohol