Getting Sober

2 years in the making, that’s how long it has taken so far. Not for lack of trying or wanting to give up. However, with the pressures of daily life, family members point of view and the general questioning of what if I really am missing out?

Let me start at the beginning, why would I want to get sober? Well it came from a health prospective.
Originally, it was more about my diet and weight loss not even considering alcohol and my endless drinking was part of the problem. Around 5 years ago frustrated with my body image, at the grand age of 43 I was doing everything I could and was told to do to help with weight loss and health yet I kept gaining weight, struggling to move even a pound without either staving myself or constant vigorous exercise.

Allow me to explain –  I was at the time a member of a running club, running between 10 and 30 miles a week, in between I would do a little resistance weight training, perhaps 2-3 times a week, oh and then I was either playing tennis or squash once a week, all the while doing daily 40 minute to 2 hr dog walks. I felt tired most days, was bloated all the time, felt down and narky quite often, found it difficult to focus on anything, everything seemed like such a chore and I needed to nap during the day, I was told to eat carbs before every exercise I did for my energy but that energy soon seemed to burn out leaving me feeling dreadful.

I was during all of this eating our good old UK /American standard diet which is drilled into us from a tender age from the widely trusted food pyramid – High carb for energy, lots of vegetables for nutrients and low fat as lean as I could of meat preferably staying away from red meat, and some fish (not so much as I don’t have a natural taste for the stuff).

Then one day, i’m in my kitchen with my then 2 youngish children poking fun at me for looking pregnant! Seriously, they were only playing but it hit home hard. Why am I looking this way? I was eating healthily, yet the body I yearned for was no where in sight. It was around this point that something pinged, I pondered on whether something was wrong, with me, my health? You see all this time I was so absorbed in how I looked I didn’t really focus on what I was feeling.

On reflection, around that time I was always tearful over silly things, i was unable to open some of our post because of ridiculously, irrational high anxiety yet it never entered my mind that this was not the norm, I spoke to friends and they were saying similar things, apparently it was just what happens as you got older.

Now, i’m not one for always taking things at face value, I had seen other women my age and older looking fabulous, I wanted to know why I wasn’t one of them. so off I went to get my self checked out.

To cut to the chase, it was after a few simple test and a lot of my own researching that I discovered my answer, my diet was to blame, I found the keto community and began to learn. What on earth has this got to do with not drinking you ask, well, once again one of my kids struck. I was a few years keto, feeling great and finaly looking more like the picture I had in my head when my son turned to me one evening around 2 years ago – the conversation went a little like this:

Son “Mum, you know how you are now keto and focused on your health”

Me – “yes, I wish I had found it sooner”

Son – “Then why do you still drink like you do?”

Wham – another blow and I had no answer, I had worked  my way up to a bottle (sometimes 1.5) a night of prosecco, but I wasn’t on the hard stuff, that’s alright isn’t it? oh except for when we went out for an evening, which thinking about it now became more frequent, probably around 2-3 times a week, where I would mix prosecco, red wine with a nice G & T or 2, those would be doubles of course, we was usually in Weatherspoons so why wouldn’t we it was so cheap and of course you couldn’t taste the gin for the mixer with just a single, god forbid!