Trying to cut back on drinking, with mixed results
One of the things that can easily slip into your life when you are part of an expat community overseas is that there is one particular situation that sort of brings all the foreigners together in an easy way. This of course, is going out drinking and while it isn't unique to our group and exists around the word in all groups, I feel as though it is easier for us to fall into this trap since we don't really have a ton of activities to participate in since we are not really part of the local culture and have difficulty branching out for a lot of things. This has a lot to do with the fact that we don't learn the language - which is damn near impossible - and we, just like most people, don't want to overly complicate our lives.
I live in an area that is lovingly referred to as "cracker town" and it is basically Chinatown in reverse. Virtually everyone that lives in this are is a foreigner and very few members of the expat community live out side of it. This is in stark contrast to the areas that I live in Thailand where the expats were dispersed all over the place and there was no central designated foreigner area. To be fair to the area, they didn't try to make this happen. It just kind of did happen many years before I ever moved here. If you do not live in cracker town you are simply setting yourself up to have a lot less things to do or need to taxi taxis to almost anything that is going on in English.
Anyway, a lot of my life is similar to the lives of almost every other expat here in that we meet up with our friends for beers almost daily and these "few drinks" can easily turn into what I call a "slobberknocker." That is, you end up getting near blackout drunk and realize even before you go to bed that you have doomed tomorrow to be a terrible morning at the minimum. You also start to gain weight when you are in your 40's as I am, so I decided that just for the hell of it, I was going to have a go at cutting back on the drink other than for special occasions.
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This information probably wont be impressive to anyone that isn't a borderline alcoholic like I am but last week I took 5 days in a row off of drinking. To understand why this IS impressive to me please understand that in the past 18 years I don't think I have EVER taken that many days off in a row unless I was seriously ill. Since I don't get sick very often, I don't think that I even did that. So bottom line is that 5 days in a row without drinking is a big deal to me.
It started on Sunday when I woke up feeling hazy from the night before and decided that I was going to "try" to make it all the way to Thursday bowling before having any alcohol. Sunday night I went to bed at a reasonable hour, totally sober, and woke up on Monday to feel just as crap as I would have if I had gotten drunk the night before. This surprised me, but then I also realized that from 20 years of relatively heavy drinking, one day off isn't going to be a super-cure. I was a bit surprised that when I repeated the same process on Monday into Tuesday, that the morning feeling was the same. I was groggy with a bit of nausea for the first hour or so that I was awake, but then noticed that I started feeling better after that initial time.
By the time Wednesday came around I was feeling pretty great after just a few minutes of being awake and my days were a lot more productive because of it. I have heard old wives' tales about how it takes "3 days for it to get out of your system" and I don't know if that is true or if it just appears to be true because that is the idea that I put into my brain at the start. The mind is a powerful force after all.
There were other motivations for me to stop for a bit other than just wanting to avoid hangovers though. I also feel as though I have reached that point in my age where if I don't regulate my beer intake a bit I am going to end up like most of the guys in their 50's and 60's that I see on a regular basis and that is kind of gross looking with a gut. I have been rather fit most of my life and I really would prefer to not end up like that. On a regular day that I meet people at the pub it is extremely common for me to have 10 beers. These are not light beers so let's do some quick math here and go ahead and say that this is around 1500 calories. This is more than half the amount of calories that someone my age should have in their entire day including food so it is a roadmap to fatness if I don't change this.
One big downside of all of this is that nearly all of my friends are daily pub visitors and they rarely go and do anything in their lives outside of getting together for drinks. The expat community, at least the parts of it that I have been exposed to over the past near 20 years, doesn't really get together for anything else so on those 4 days away from booze, all but one of them I also found myself simply being away from basically everyone that I know. I briefly made a stop to have some food with friends and had a soda water but then I quickly realized that I don't really have anything else to say to these folks and started to worry that maybe the only reason why I ever got along with these people is because of the fact that we were always drunk around one another.
I'll see if I can make this a weekly thing because I sit here now on week 2 of this booze strike and instead of starting on Sunday, I am starting on Saturday with the intention being that I am going to make it all the way to Thursday again without drinking at all. With me, there is no such thing as going out for a "few drinks." I am either going to drink all of them or none of them and the only reason why I leave on most days is because I am too hungry to hang out any longer.
I hope that this will result in me losing weight and just generally feeling better. If I can manage to make it though not drinking on all the days except one I suppose the only logical step would be to first step it down a notch on the Thursday gettogethers and then maybe even have a go at not drinking during the bowling events either.
I've dedicated a lot of my life to drinking and I am good at it. Unfortunately the equipment (my body) is no longer cooperating and if I don't change this, I am going to end up fat and I really don't want that.
As it stands now I guess I do feel a lot better physically from not going out drinking but I also am spending a lot of my time alone watching movies and playing video games and well, I guess that isn't such a terrible thing. Nadi enjoys the company.
