What’s the difference between losing weight and quitting drinking?
Today, I want to make a few comparisons between quitting drinking and losing weight?
What are some of the things that are similar, what are some of the things that are different?
And where are the big differences?
I just want to put a different spin on alcohol.
We’ve got a fixed idea about what alcohol quitting is like.
When I started quitting drinking, I was very nervous about the whole prospect, about what I was going to go through, about how I was going to be treated by other people.
When you start out, you’ve got expectations laid down by your own society, and culture-your wider culture and your family culture, your friends.
And, if you’re a drinker, then it’s a big shift to come out of that lifestyle.
They say that you can tell a lot about a person by their 5 closest friends.
I’d imagine it’s the same with people who are overweight, that they tend to hang around people who are overweight in general.
If you’re overweight, you’re not really going to be hanging around people who are going to the gym and eating healthy all the time.
There are exceptions to the rule, though.
The first comparison is how it looks from the beginning.
You can tell someone is overweight straightaway.
It’s blatantly obvious that they need to lose weight.
Maybe not to themselves but to the outside world.
When a person needs to get drinking out their lives, it’s not so obvious.
Alcohol drinking is something that’s done by an awful lot of people throughout the world, about 45 %.
The second is that when you quit drinking, it’s over in an instant.
As soon as you stop drinking, then that part of it is finished.
If you know what I mean.
When you’re losing weight, it’s an ongoing process.
Your first week, you might lose 4, 5, 6 pounds worth of weight, mostly.
But then it’s a continuous process.
You can’t short-circuit it.
It’s like being pregnant.
You can’t go ‘’I’m 4 ½ months into this, and I’m fed up of it, and I want to get out of it and give birth’’, you have to go through the whole 9 months.
It’s the same thing with losing weight, you have to go through it week after week after week.
I notice the similarity with alcohol in the sense that you’ve got to change certain areas of your lifestyle but that’s the same thing with losing weight.
You’re not going to lose weight if you don’t change your lifestyle.
You’ve got to change your ideas about exercise and the amount and quality of food that you’re eating, about the type of food you’re eating.
You’ve got to cut back on the fats.
The fat you eat is the fat you wear.
With weight loss, it’s measurable.
If you’re using the same weighing scale, you can measure with accuracy from one week to the next, exactly how much weight you’re losing, and how much you’ve lost.
It’s not so cut and dried with alcohol.
When you stop drinking, that’s it, it’s finished.
As long as you go forwards, and you get away from alcohol and you’re committed to quitting alcohol.
You’re committed to building a new life and replacing the old habit.
Then you’re going to be tracking other things.
It’s not going to be about the alcohol.
Quitting alcohol drinking is about moving forward and trying to see how you’re feeling on a day to day basis after you’ve quit.
Do the pains in your liver go away?
The hangovers?
That happens sort of pretty quickly.
When it comes down to cravings, you will get them for alcohol and the old food.
That’s basically what it is,
you will get cravings for your old lifestyle no matter what you’re doing.
People say ‘you can’t compare one with the other because alcohol is a drug’.
Food is a drug.
Sugar is a drug.
Salt is a drug.
Fat is a drug.
That’s why the cravings are there.
People want this kind of stuff.
They want to have salt and sugar.
I’ve recently given up salt.
I found it very difficult in the first few days because my food tasted very bland without the salt, but you get used to it.
There’s something that you build up.
I’m going out to a restaurant for the first meal since I’ve stopped taking salt, and I know that some of the stuff I’m going to be getting there will be laden with salt. I’m unsure whether I’m going to like it although I think I probably will.
I don’t think there’s any doubt about that after only a week.
But I’d be interested to see how life pans out after a month.
But, I’m saying that when you look are the different struggles in life, quitting drinking is over in a very short space of time.
The reason why people prolong it is about what’s going on in their heads.
It all depends on what your outlook is, what framework you put around it.
If you put a good framework around it, if you are positive and you face forwards and you say ‘I’m committed to quitting drinking, that’s my commitment day after day, I’m never going to put another drop of alcohol in my mouth’, it’s exactly the same thing as saying ‘I’m committed to losing 2 pounds every week’.
For me, losing 2 pounds or 1 pound every week is a challenge because it’s an unknown quantity.
Since I’ve changed my diet, I feel a lot better than I used to.
That’s one benefit of changing my diet.
But losing weight, I’m sort of up and down and I exercise a lot.
I eat the right types of food but I eat a lot.
That’s my problem.
One week I’ll go down 2 pounds, another, I’ll go down a pound, another I’ll put on 2 pounds.
There’s no consistency with my weight loss.
I’m not worried about it, it’s not something I’m complaining about because I know that if I carry on with this diet, I’m losing weight overall.
I’m headed in the right direction, so it’s not an issue for me anymore.
But, I knew that if I stopped drinking alcohol and I never put it into my body again, that it was going to be consistent.
It was finished.
There is no if or but about it.
Don’t put the alcohol into your mouth and you’re not a drinker anymore.
You can’t be harmed by it, by alcohol.
You can’t say that about weight loss.
That’s just something I wanted to make a comparison with because I was thinking about it the other day with my own weight loss, same with cigarettes.
If I compare quitting smoking with quitting drinking, I had a much tougher time quitting smoking and that was because I was younger and didn’t have the same commitment.
I didn’t have the reasons behind it, I didn’t understand it.
So, I was sort of in a cycle of quitting and going back that lasted a long time.
That’s it for now.
If you have any questions or comments, any suggestions, leave them down below.
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Until next time, stay safe and keep the alcohol out of your mouths.
COMMITMENT MEANS STAYING LOYAL TO WHAT YOU SAID YOU WERE GOING TO DO LONG AFTER THE MOOD YOU SAID IT IN HAS LEFT YOU.
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
Great as usual. Love ihe commitment line, and funny, the b&w immediacy of quitting drinking seems -when fully committed pretty straight forward. Thanks Kevin.
🙂