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If you missed Part 1, click here. Welcome to Part 2…

Between making A) fat much easier to keep off and B) the noticeable increase in mentality acuity after a couple weeks, I’ve almost completely convinced myself on life with dramatically less alcohol.

I am now on another no booze challenge of 60 days, and this is simply to test my own willpower and resolve, and if there are any other noticeable changes.

Now that I am used to the whole “No, thanks I’m not drinking” line, I am able to have more fun with it. At a birthday party at my friend’s condo this past Saturday, everyone was raising their glasses for a photo and I decided to pick up and raise a Palmolive container instead.

[I remember cheap pitcher nights in university. Unfortunately pillow-top mountain was replaced with sprawl- across-the-bathroom-floor valley!]

The important thing is to not be the Debbie Downer of every social engagement like a lot of non-drinkers are.

All in all, what I have learned more than anything else during this challenge is that drinking is almost laughably not worth it.

That’s a lesson I wish someone would have beat into me during my early and mid-20s. It may have saved me six dozen hangovers and more than a few conversations that started with, “I did WHAT last night?!?”

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On June 14th when I decided to give up alcohol of any kind for 30 days I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

Originally, the goal of this challenge was to experiment with my body to witness what, if any, affect the absence of even the limited amount of alcohol that I do consume would have on my overall health.

However, this challenge quickly evolved into a battle of wills and the ultimate social experiment before I could say, “I’ll have a virgin Pina Colada please“.

[Sure sheep are cute, and love to party, but it's best to climb out of the pen and think for yourself]

I never realized what a central role “drinks” play in our everyday social environment. When I posted the idea for my challenge here, I received a message from a couple of people undergoing the same challenge.

A Facebook friend said when she read my initial post she believed she was the last person to ever use alcohol as a social crutch, yet during her own 30 day challenge she found herself avoiding all social situations that involved drinking (aka most of them). She said she’d rather “avoid temptation then to suffer through it“.

As I contemplated her message I wondered:

“Are many of us really so eager for group approval that something as “everyday” as alcohol has such an enormous impact on how we function socially?”

Unfortunately, it appears the answer is an inebriated and slurred “yes”!

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Looking at the food court in a local shopping mall today I thought about these two questions:

How many people have calories on their mind?

Do any of them count calories?

I’m gonna go out on the proverbial limb here and say probably none of them.

Harsh? Maybe. But I too was once a frequent visitor of the common food courts eating fattening foods and feeling my clothes getting tighter by the fry. So chalk this up to experience.

After several failed attempts at losing weight, I finally took some responsibility and found an unlikely weapon against fat-> The PENCIL!

[I used to yawn or skip right over any talk about goal setting. But after giving it a go in my fat loss journey, I'm using it everywhere now!]

Keeping a Food Journal

In the beginning, I tried keeping a food journal but it never lasted more than a few days at a time. It was time consuming and an inconvenient exercise to calculate all of those calories ingested over the course of a day. In the end, calories were either forgotten or grossly under-estimated.
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