Drinking - A 5 Year Study

I've used an app called Daylio for many years now. Something I started January 1st 2020 to collect customizable metrics, goals, and activities. My intent was to try and correlate things I did in life to my mental state, to see what may impact my ability to focus, and if there was things in life I was doing that was messing with my sleep.

One of those things I began tracking was drinking. And for four years now I've tracked how many drinks I had, and generally what I drank. There is one easily identified flaw, I didn't always record something. The other major flaw is, my drink counts are not to standard serving sizes. My liquor pours are usually 2.5+ ounces, not 1.5; my wine pours were 8+ oz, not 5oz. And I drank mostly craft beers, which rarely were 12oz servings.

My first year I was diligent. It was a leap year and I recorded 366 entries. In 2021 I only missed 2 days. Most of my missed entries started in September of 2022. Travel, mental lows, and other factors led to 82 days in a row of me not touching the app.

To help pad out the data I used an average from the same day in other years to fill in the values. The averaged data doesn't look bad. I had first thought I was going to have an over count of days drinking, since averaging would eliminate days where I may not have drank anything.

COVID removed all the drinks I would have had dining out which can explain the ~150-200 differences compared to other years. I definitely made up for missed drinks during COVID in 2021; my heaviest year of drinking.

I drank 14 days less last year than I did in 2022, but drank more per day. The word "Sitting" below isn't fully accurate, as many times drinks would be separated by meals or activities.

So the above Drinks/Day is averaged over all days; for a general idea. The real stat is Drinks Per Day that I did drink. Which is more telling.

I started recording this because I'm a data driven person. It's how I make many of my decisions; from where to live, to things I buy, etc. The thing is, I have to look at the data for it to work and this is the first time I sat down to do so.

I should have been looking at this every year. And if it wasn't for some recent health numbers, I may still just be collecting and never looking.

My blood work last year showed I am in the warning zone in Blood Pressure, Triglycerides, and Cholesterol.

Discussion with doctor went like this:

Doctor: So what's your diet like?

Me: I eat mostly vegetable heavy meals, and I was getting a pizza a week but I've already cut back on that.

Doctor: Well continue to cut back on cheeses and other dairy products. How much do you drink?

Me: I have a few drinks during the week but usually drink more on the weekends.

Doctor: How many drinks a week?

(I was looking at my recent week to week data, but wasn't really looking at trends or even stepping back and comparing my numbers to reality)

Me: I've been cutting back, right now I'm around 12-18 drinks a week. Down from 16-22 last month. My current goal is to get it down to average 2 a day, so around 14.

Doctor: Fourteen? That's way too much alcohol! So that shouldn't be your target. With what we are seeing here, I'd start with trying to hit 6 a week.

Me: ...I gotta look at some things. :)

The thing is, it never felt like I was averaging 3 drinks a day nor that I was drinking on average 4 drinks every time I did drink. Which, let me take a quick internet look here, by all medical assessments, isn't healthy. And my goal, what my doctor probably found laughable, of averaging 2 drinks a day is what the maximum a healthy person should consume. Which my blood work clearly showed I'm not.

She indicated the recommended drinks per day for me was 0; but she also knows people, and didn't expect that much of a change, but emphasized I really needed to heavily lower my number of drinks.

So that put the fire under my ass to do this. To look at data I was collecting for this very purpose. To see what things I was doing that was impacting my mood, my focus, and my sleep. I'm on target to only drink 17 drinks this entire month.

Drinks per sitting is going to be a little high, as right now the only other day I'm drinking is my birthday, and I'm budgeting 4 drinks that night. So I'll be close to a 3.4 drinks/sitting, but having alcohol only 5 days the entire month makes my drinks/day average a beautiful .56.

I'm already sleeping better, I already have better focus, my mood has been better but I'll need more time on that front, as it's a tricky shithead.

Other pluses, my face seems to have shrunk a bit, alcohol and blood vessels and all that jazz, and I can tell I've already lost some weight. So here's to a big fuck you to heart disease. Let's see how this year unfolds.

For some fun numbers, using an average of 180 calories per drink, in 2023 I consumed ~180,000 calories of alcohol, in addition to food. On a 2000 calorie a day metric, we should only be consuming 730,000 calories for an entire year. The alcohol I consumed in 2023 was in essence eating an extra 3 months of food.

In conclusion. I have one fucking tank of a liver. Time to give it a long holiday.