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Everything in Moderation – Fact or Fiction?

by | Stop Drinking Alcohol | 2 comments

Today I wanted to talk about everything in moderation.

Is it a myth or is there some basis of truth behind it?

I think, as with most things like this, there is a bit of both.

Mostly it’s myth.

It’s something that we use to excuse our indulgences.

It’s something that – there’s not a real definition behind it.

What exactly is moderation?

With alcohol there’s a lot of different definitions.

Some people will say, “well it’s one drink a night.”

Another group of people will say “it’s a couple of drinks a night.”

Third group of people will say “it’s a unit of alcohol a day.”

The second group will say “it’s two or three units.”

The problem is, that when you are in the midst of drinking, you can make up your own definitions.

You can choose the definition which suits you in the moment.

If you’re not really into drinking at that time.

It’s easy to go “oh no I have to stick to this moderate amount of alcohol that I’m consuming and I’ve got to the edge of that and I’m not going to drink anymore.”

Whereas if you are having a good time, it’s easy to say, “I’ve heard somewhere that it’s three drinks.”

Three drinks could be anything.

It could be three triple scotches.

We can always rationalise, in our own minds at that time.

We’re a world of drug consumers

There’s the drugs of – the legal drugs of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, sugar – and there’s a whole host of different, so-called, illegal drugs out there.

They all have one thing in common and that’s to give us some form of pleasure or to satisfy a craving.

To meet an unmet need in ourselves.

Often a drug is the quickest way of doing that.

It’s not the safest way.

It’s not the best way, by any stretch of the imagination.

But it’s quick, it gets to the core of the issue very fast.

Throughout the western world, moderation is perceived as being acceptable.

It’s being perceived as being okay, to be moderate.

Most cases it’s perceived as everything in moderation is the best way to go.

It’s the way that’s going to give you the balanced life.

That’s what we’re all looking for.

It’s not going to give you any harm.

And in most cases, that’s complete bullshit.

You’ve to look at moderation in a few different ways.

For a start, you’ve to take the individual drug.

Alcohol, for instance, cigarettes, these are all drugs of dependence – the same as caffeine.

They produce tolerance so, the more you take of these substances the more you need to get to the same level again.

From that perspective, moderation is a very dodgy area.

If you moderate, you are eventually going to hit a ceiling, where the drug doesn’t work anymore.

It’s not giving you any buzz.

What do you do then?

You either stop and wait for the levels of tolerance to die or you increase the dosage in order to get the same level.

Because of cravings, because the drug has a lot of cravings with it and gives you a lot of cravings, the idea of stopping. . .

Now the easiest thing to do is just to increase the dosage.

The idea of stopping is probably – we think about it – but the reason why we’re taking a drug in the first place is because we want to look for the magic pill.

We want to get to the desired result as quickly as possible.

Often in cases, it’s the desired result that we’ve taught ourselves to achieve.

We’ve had since day dot – this is what’s in our minds – the way we do this; the way we relax. . . is to smoke and drink.

The way we eat, is to go down to the local shop, buy processed foods, plenty of sugar in them, get up in the morning and have your daily dose of wake me up, in the form of caffeine, whether it’s tea or coffee.

In the evening you have your daily dose of alcohol to relax you, to knock you out.

This is just the way that we’re brought up.

I like to talk about the similarities between heroin and alcohol and people often think they are on two polar opposites of the scale

If there was a scale and there were puller uppers sat on this scale, then alcohol would be on the top and heroin would be lower down, because alcohol is a lot more harmful than heroine.

We don’t look at it like that.

Heroine is something that we are told to get away from, to avoid at all costs.

Alcohol is something we’re encouraged to do from day one.

If heroine was legal.

If all of a sudden the government decided – “this war on drugs that we’re fighting, is not working. How do we solve this?”

We go with country’s like Holland and Portugal and Spain and we make everything legal for personal possession.

You can take these drugs, but it’s the dealing of drugs which is illegal.

So that’s the next step?

So what’s the next step after that?

The next step is maybe to legalise the manufacturer of these drugs and the distribution of these drugs, because, at the end of the day its more tax dollars and that’s what the government seem to care about more than anything else.

If they can outweigh the tax dollars coming in, with the tax dollars going out, In the form of the cost, the health cost, the cost of what’s going on in the streets and policing and all that kind of stuff.

Then, you know, why not?

It’s all revenue at the end of the day.

What would be the moderate message then?

That the proper way to take heroine is to moderate it?

How would you moderate a drug like that?

How would you start to moderate a drug like that?

I am sure there are more brainer people than me who could work it out and who could make it possible.

These drugs are addictive and certainly make people dependent on them.

How many people in the morning, get up and they can’t function without their cup of coffee?

How many people come home at night and they can’t relax or they can’t sleep, without their drop of wine, or their glass of whisky, or their couple of cans of beer?

I know, I was certainly in that block, at both ends of the scale.

One fed the other.

Getting up in the morning with a dirty hangover, without the cup of coffee was impossible.

Have two or three cups of coffee during the day.

I’d be hyper during the day.

And then in the evening time, I wouldn’t be able to sleep without my drop of alcohol.

I went to my sister’s wedding tasting the other day.

They brought out a load of delicious food, lovely food that they brought out.

At the end of it they brought out an iced coffee, so their coffee machine was broken, so they brought out this iced coffee and it was a small, little cup of coffee, in a little glass.

It was like a slush puppy but it was made of coffee. It was very sweet.

I don’t drink coffee but I thought “yeah, dessert and stuff, I’ll have some of this.”

I only drank half of it and I managed to go to sleep; but, two hours later I was wide awake and there was no chance I was going back to sleep again.

I went to bed just after ten and I was awake at half twelve and that was it for the night.

I was knackered on Monday, just didn’t get any sleep at all.

I could still feel the coffee going through me in the morning and that’s just the effect of something I don’t do anymore.

I used to do it, as I said, I’d drink very strong coffee when I was drinking it and I would drink three of four cups of coffee in the morning, just to overcome the hangover.

These are drugs.

We talk about moderation in the sense that it’s an isolated thing

Moderation in alcohol is good.

So you’d drink one or two drops of alcohol in the evening – whatever it is that your moderation, idea of moderation, whatever that dictates for you – you drink one or two of these things.

You think that that’s alright.

Then you have to consider in the moderation that you talk about in coffee.

The moderation that you talk about in any other drug that you’re taking, maybe you’ve taken aspirin or something like that in the afternoon.

Whatever else you take – and think about the food that you’re taking.

A moderate amount of cheeseburger – you say if you have one cheeseburger a week – but you also have a lot of other processed foods.

These are all moderation in an individual thing but that mount up together into one big thing.

It’s just a moderation nightmare.

The fact that we say moderation in everything or everything in moderation – it’s bullshit.

There are some things in this world that if you even take in moderate amounts they’re lethal.

Think about somebody that’s got an allergy to peanuts or an allergy to some other food.

Someone who has got sensitivities to milk or bread or all those kinds of things.

Moderation in those circumstances are going to cause immediate reactions.

A lot of the time it’s because we don’t get these immediate reactions, that we sort of think this through and we rationalise this and we go well moderation is not too bad.

Moderation in the moment.

I’m not against alcohol in general, per se.

I’m against the way we use alcohol in our society.

We use alcohol in a day to day basis.

When, if we used it in a ceremonial thing.

If we drank alcohol once a month, or if you drank alcohol at weddings or if we drank alcohol at your birthday or something like that, then there’s no real harm to that, there’s going to be no long-term harm to that.

But because we use it in such a daily fashion.

We want to live like Kings.

Our lifestyle now – the only people in the past that lived this lifestyle were the Kings and Queens.

They all suffered the same diseases that we’re suffering today and it’s all because of what we’re putting into our mouths.

You have to think about moderation in terms of how you rationalise it in your own mind.

To me, abstinence, is a word that I hate

It just goes back to all that world of sobriety and tea-totaller and all that kind of stuff.

For me it’s just not putting this shit into my body.

This is something that I learned in the past three and a half years.

What I put into my body, what the inside of my body looks like, is much more important than what the outside of my body looks like.

It’s the same – you can have a car that’s all dolled up on the outside and you lift the hood and the engine looks like a piece shit because the guy hasn’t look after it.

He hasn’t changed the oil regularly, he hasn’t changed the filters, he hasn’t changed the spark plugs, he hasn’t done all the jobs that you should do in order to regularly maintain the body.

So underneath and inside that engine just looks like a piece of crap.

That’s what most people treat their bodies like.

The put stuff into their mouths and once the stuff has gone in and past the taste buds they forget about it.

Once the feeling of the drug that they’ve take has worn off, they forget about it.

They don’t take any notice of the underlying consequences of what all this stuff is doing to them.

Moderation to me is bullshit.

It’s just something that we use in order to justify what we are doing to ourselves.

So always try and think about the inside of your body first.

It doesn’t make any difference what you look on the outside.

People will spend thousands and thousands and thousands on plastic surgery.

They will spend thousands on boob jobs or dick jobs – to make these things look bigger and better – whatever.

They will pay no attention to what’s going on in the inside.

You see people in gyms, every day of the week, pumping up and pumping up and looking at themselves in the mirror and marvelling at how fantastic they look.

Then you’ll see the same guys, the same women, in the bars at night – filling themselves with a toxic poison, not giving a shit what’s going on in the inside.

That’s what my message is all about.

Take more care of what’s going on, on the inside, than what’s going on, on the outside.

You can’t see the inside, so you have to be careful about what you put in there.

Everything that you see on the outside, what you put in through on the outside, this is what you have to educate yourself about.

What the fuck that’s doing to you, inside.

What’s it doing to your insides and what it’s doing to the quantity of your life, how long you’re going to live but more importantly – what it’s going to do to the eventual quality of your life.

That’s it for today.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live” – Jim Rohn

Until next time…
Keep the alcohol out of your mouth.
Keep all the other shit out of your mouth as well.
Everything you put in there has got a consequence, whether a good consequence or a bad consequence.
It’s up to you man. It’s up to you.
Take Care.
Onwards and Upwards!

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2 Comments

  1. Geraldine

    One of your very best messages Kevin. This would make for a great TV program.

    Reply

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