At the end of December, I committed to doing dry January this year to isolate any effects of my moderate drinking habit and try to make a decision on what level of alcohol consumption fits into my ideal life. Your holistic health picture is an important piece of the FIRE journey — what’s wealth and time without health? My monthly spending on alcohol for the second half of 2021 was $72.17 per month on average, and I was also curious to evaluate the value proposition of this, if it was money “well spent” or not.
I went from about 14 standard drinks per week to zero for this experiment. But I failed in finishing out the whole month. On January 29th, we were blasted with over a foot of snow and I just couldn’t resist the temptation of my regular tradition to enjoy a beer from the comfort of indoors while watching the snow come down. So I completed 28 days without drinking, or 90% of Dry January. I’m not too broken up about it as I certainly went long enough for the purposes of evaluation and experimentation.
I did set up a very simple experiment with a sample size of one to attempt to measure any immediate benefits of a sober lifestyle, so let’s take a look at my results.
Results of my barely scientific self-experiment
Workout performance
This was an interesting semi-quantitative metric. I have a rotating calisthenics upper body routine involving chin ups, push ups, and dips. I do six sets of each to maximum effort and recorded my repetitions per set at both the end of December and the end of January to compare. Over the month of January I gained 1 total chin up across all six sets, 2 push ups, and 1 dip. Which translates to a 1.5–2% increase. I had anecdotally noted my progress plateaued for many months prior, though I wasn’t tracking statistics before. Of course this apparent improvement could also be traced to minor factors like the first workouts occurring on off days such as when I was overly tired.
I additionally tracked my statistics on our Peloton bike and found a neat tool to visualize my data over at peloton.lutterloh.dev. All data points were within the normal distribution when compared with historical trendlines. No apparent effect with aerobic workout performance between “had a couple beers the night before” and being sober for nearly a month.
Weight
I averaged a couple data points of my weight both at the end of December and the end of January, taking measurements at the same time each day. I really changed nothing about my diet, just cut out beer. As a result I lost 3 pounds over Dry January.
A quick estimate shows I avoided consuming about 9,000 calories worth of alcohol over the month, so this lines up with the oft-quoted 3,500 calorie deficit to lose one pound of fat. It’s nice to know that if I ever seriously need to diet, I could just cut out the alcohol and be patient to see results.
General daily feeling
Major anecdotal subjectivity here. Before starting Dry January, I noted “most days I wake up with a slight headache, lay in bed for 20–30 minutes before getting up, and do a bad job focusing at work (especially in the mornings).”
I didn’t notice much change, so I think I can declare that alcohol isn’t to blame here. I sleep pretty soundly and I think I can chalk the morning headache up to dehydration from not drinking water during the night, and absent drinking a ton of alcohol to the point of having a hangover, having a couple beers really doesn’t seem to make a noticeable difference in the morning headache phenomenon. I did notice the faster I drink a cup of water in the morning, the faster I’m ready to get up and go, so I’ve been making that addition to my morning routine as soon as I wake up.
As far as focusing at work, no improvement there. This isn’t a big surprise as I’m truly not passionate about my job in engineering. It’s not engaging work, not in a subject that I particularly care about either way, and not difficult for me to put forth a minimum amount of effort to be an average performer. It pays well compared to the low amount of effort and little stress, and at this point is little more than a means to an end in reaching my FIRE goals.
Overall experiment conclusion
As I expected, cutting out alcohol isn’t the silver bullet to a vastly improved life. My workout gains were inconclusive, and I didn’t become a superstar at work who jumps out of bed in the morning to take on the entire office. I did lose a few pounds which was cool, but essentially guaranteed by thermodynamics since alcohol is calorie dense.
Overall I think it was a good opportunity to step back and take a conscious look at my relationship with alcohol, but I’ve concluded that the long-term sober lifestyle is not for me.
The cost/benefit proposition of alcohol
Obviously there’s a myriad of reasons why people who drink choose to do so. Believing that it improves those fun nights out with friends. That enhanced zone of creativity in a slightly buzzed state. Relaxation after work.
We accept those things in return for a trade off with the negative health effects of alcohol, some of which may not be fully quantifiable by the research. Trying to avoid all risks in life would lead to a pretty boring existence, so instead we must determine if the trade off is worth it, and mitigate risk where practical.
There’s also obviously bad reasons why people choose to drink, such as coping with negative emotions and physical dependency. Many of us know someone who has fallen into the negative spiral of alcoholism.
However, most people very clearly can walk the fine line of moderate consumption without slipping towards alcoholism. The data on self-reported drinks per week clearly supports this. 28% of men and 38% of women do not drink at all. Only about 10% of men and women drink at levels that the CDC and NIAAA define as heavy drinking (more than 14 drinks per week for men, and more than 7 for women). Most people float along in the middle there, though more heavily weighted towards the lower end — 3 drinks per week is the 66th percentile for men, and 80th percentile for women.
Consumption monitoring
As I noted prior to Dry January, conscious monitoring of one’s consumption habits may be needed here (even if informally) as I had noticed a trend of slowly increasing my alcohol consumption over the past several years. Effective and honest monitoring requires the knowledge that a “standard drink” for the purposes of measurement consists of either:
- 12 ounces of 5% ABV beer
- 5 ounces of 12% ABV wine
- 1.5 ounces of 40% ABV liquor or spirits
So drinking a pint (16 oz) of a 7.5% ABV IPA isn’t “one beer,” it’s actually two full standard drinks.
For easy conversion to standard drinks and logging consumption over time, there’s some neat phone apps out there. Android users can check out AlcoDroid on the Play Store, while iPhone users may want to take a look at DrinkControl on the App Store.
My rules for alcohol consumption going forward
For self-discipline, accountability, and establishing a healthier relationship with alcohol consumption moving forward I wanted to create a few general drinking guidelines:
- Target an average weekly consumption of no more than 10 standard drinks.
- At least 2 days of zero alcohol per week.
- Each excess drink over 10 per week, adds one extra non-drinking day during the following week.
- No more than 3 drinks in any given day.
- If my BMI hits overweight territory (25 or higher) I’m limited to 3 beers per week until I’ve lost 8 pounds.
I think this is a good set of rules with some flexibility for special occasions while still maintaining a lower risk level of alcohol intake. A daily maximum of three drinks ensures that bad hangovers will be nonexistent. For example if I had 12 standard drinks one week, the next week I would need to complete 4 zero alcohol days. Ergo I would only have 3 drinking days, but be able to consume no more than 3 drinks each day for a total of 9. 13 drinks in one week leads to a maximum of 6 the following week, and 15 drinks in one week forces an entire week of sobriety.
Targeting 10 standard drinks per week would be about a 30% reduction compared to how much I was drinking prior to Dry January, and a commensurate 30% reduction in my alcohol spending.
I’ve been testing out the AlcoDroid app for the past couple weeks. It’s super easy to log drinks using the app (it converts for you from volume and ABV to standard drinks) and consumption trends over time are visible for daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time histories. I’ll be making use of the app so I can be sure I stay on track with implementing my new rules.
I’ll come back after a few months and add a section to this article with some updated thoughts on how these rules for moderate drinking have worked out for me!