Dry January – Our Results From Not Drinking Alcohol for ONE Full Month

My wife and I……well more my wife decided that this year we would try “Dry January” – 31 days of no alcohol.  We aren’t big drinkers but through the holiday season and the pandemic, our intake definitely went up.  We typically would have a few glasses of wine/champagne/margs/beer once a week or every two weeks but during the holiday season, we cranked that up to several times a week.

In comes Dry January and how did it go?

It was pretty easy for us to just stop drinking and my wife stumbled upon those Heineken Zero Alcohol Beers.  They are actually really good and if a craving hit, we would just have one of those.  About halfway through the month, we were both kind of like, do you have more energy?  Are you feeling a little better?  We were both on the same page but didn’t want to jinx anything.

Fast forward to the end of January and here is what we’ve noticed:

  • Extreme uptick in energy: we used to have have daily crashes around 2-3:00 but since cutting out alcohol, we are like two Energizer Bunnies running around.
  • Our bodies just overall feel better: no more random swelling or sweating, no more headaches, and our joints feel young again.
  • Clearer thinking: it’s almost like a fog is lifting off of our brains.  We are coming up with all types of crazy shit to do.
  • Increased motivation: I’m not big on motivation as it can’t be relied on but in this case, we’ve just had more get up and go to us and our TV time has greatly been reduced.
  • Increased sugar cravings: we were a little surprised by this one as we don’t drink a lot but we’ve had some crazy sugar cravings during the month.
  • Decreased bloating and puffiness: my wife always laughs at me because after a night of drinking, I always wake up with extremely puffy facial cheeks.  Like so puffy, my eyes are almost closed.  No more of that!

So the big question, will we continue our sober journey?  Our plan going forward is to keep this going with a few caveats.  We will give ourselves the option to drink on Holidays if we would like but other than that, we are going to stay on this sober lifestyle as drinking just isn’t worth it anymore and the positives FAR outweigh the negatives.

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