Hung Up About Hangovers

So I’ve decided to renovate my bod starting from 1 Jul 2010; and in 3 months, hopefully I can go from uncle flab to mid-age fab. But the renovation can’t start unless I discard some old habits. My drinking problem is the biggest thing that must go before there can be ample room for improvements.

Or rather, to cut my drinking so that I won’t be 2 steps back with each step forward since alcohol contains empty calories and blocks the body’s ability to burn fat. If I’m determined to change, I can’t be doing the same things and expect to get different results. I won’t get melons if I keep planting peanuts. Neither do I raise a bull with hamburgers. 

I never used to drink at all. I hated alcohol because it dissolved my family. My earliest recalled encounter with alcohol was when I went to Pulau Besar, Malaysia, with some friends more than a dozen years back. It was an island resort so there’s nothing else to do at night but park by the beach bar. 

I had 2 shots – Test-Tube Baby and Grasshopper, and I was down. I couldn’t remember what happened after the drinks but friends told me I was on the floor, talking to the village cat. They promptly piggybacked me to the chalet. 

Then another time, I passed out in a Bangkok club from having some whiskey with Coke. Again, my friends quickly carried me out of the club and into the cab. According to my friends, along the way back to the hotel, I kept chai chai-ing the taxi driver. Chai means ‘yes’ in Thai. Each time my friends gave directions to the driver and he replied ‘yes’, I would apparently chai non-stop. To this day, that group of friends still calls me Chai Chai. Some of them used that nickname so much, they forgot my real name. 

That was how bad I am at drinking and I drank only at rarely necessary occasions. But now, I can out-drink any of those friends any time. There is a rule that we shouldn’t mix different kinds of alcohol. I don’t observe that rule. I am not an alcoholic, I’m an alco-whore-lic. 

 

I don’t discern between my drinks and the higher the alcohol content, the better. Vodka, gin, rum, Jim Beam, red wine, white wine, shooters, cocktails, beer… I drink ‘em all! Where it used to take only 2 mild shots to knock me out, now it takes about 1.5 bottles of wine or 4 cans of 500ml beer at 8.8% each to get me started. 

I won’t even want to talk about the vodkas, rums and gins with 40% or higher alcohol content because I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging. I used to tell friends that if I got a cut, they get Bloody Mary. 

For a period of time, the most expensive thing I possessed was my urine. It was liquid gold. Sometimes platinum. I was spending about S$2,000 a month on clubbing and booze alone. Thankfully, that has stopped. But I continue to drink. At home. Almost nightly. 

So more than just improving my muscle tone, this whole physique remodeling period is about re-wiring my brain off alcohol dependency and other bad habits. I didn’t think it was going to be hard, but it is. I wanted to not drink last night but like clockwork, I had a can of beer and a glass of gin with blueberry juice. The consolation was, I consciously stopped at that. I don’t want to ‘chase’ alcohol no more. 

Tonight, I’m attending a wedding dinner. First thing my friend told me about his dinner was there’s going to be a lot of whiskey. I swallowed my saliva. I’m already feeling thirsty. 

It’s just so hard to quit being an Alcowhore!