Dry January

This year, I decided to do Dry January. This started in the UK by Alcohol Change UK and was designed to encourage people to sign-up to abstain from alcohol for the month of January. The idea was that over the year-end holidays, people tend to drink a lot of alcohol. This allows a focused time to basically break the habit and provide incentives to cut back (or eliminate) alcohol from your diet. While I’ve given up alcohol during Lent a couple times, this year, doing Dry January actually felt different from previous occasions. Here’s what I found:

1. It’s much easier to get started when you have RSV. Just kidding, but the fact that I had an upper respiratory virus the first week of January meant that not having a drink was much easier. Basically, I wasn’t really feeling well and it didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice to not have a glass of wine with my dinner. Now, the timing of this was coincidental, but it certainly helped kick start the month of abstaining from alcohol.
2. The fact that companies manufacturing ‘mocktails’ has grown in number and quality also helped a great deal. Rather than try different brands, I decided to go with Curious Elixirs. For me, having an alcoholic beverage with my dinner is more about the taste complimenting the meal, then the effects of alcohol itself. So, these beverage options helped a lot. Previously, I just went to my go-to for non-alcoholic beverages of sparkling water since I don’t drink soda pop (stopped drinking that over 30 years ago when pregnant with my first child and never went back). Sparkling water, even with bitters or other flavors just didn’t satisfy my desire for something to go along with my dinner.
3. Many, not all, restaurants and bars are getting in on the trend towards having mocktails on their menus. In one case, a bartender made me a special, bespoke mocktail since they didn’t have them on the menu. It was delicious! Real bartenders know how to combine flavors and get something good, with or without alcohol.
4. The larger beer companies also seem to have NA beers. While I tried one that wasn’t great (Heineken), the other one I tried was perfect with the pizza dinner I had (Sam Adam’s ‘Only the Haze’). Once again, I tend to pair beer with pizza because it suits it well as an accompanying beverage. So, the fact that I could have a similar flavor to regular beer was great.
5. As before, when abstaining from alcohol, there’s a noticeable difference in how well I sleep and with weight loss. Alcohol has a lot of calories that aren’t necessarily tied to nutrition (leaving aside the benefits of a glass of red wine), so a great way to quickly cut calories. The Curious Elixirs do have calories, but significantly less than wine, and somewhat less than hard liquor. While weight loss wasn’t the purpose of what I was doing, it’s a nice side benefit. The better sleeping was also helpful in not feeling so tired by the end of the day. Another interesting impact is that I had been experiencing ‘night sweats’ from time to time (thank you impending life change). I found that not drinking alcohol stopped these, which got me to wondering whether they’re truly related to perimenopause, or to the sugars, or other components, in the alcohol.
6. Having others that are doing the same thing helps. One of my coworkers was also doing Dry January, so it was nice that when we were attending company dinners, I wasn’t the only one looking at the mocktail list. That said, these dinners were often with 8 or 10 people, so two of us not drinking wasn’t a significant number, but it was certainly better than just me being the odd one out.
7. Dry January has crossed the pond. While most things tend to go the other way, this is one British program that has made the leap over and I’m hearing a lot about it in social media and other places. For example, even on Peloton, some of the instructors mentioned doing Dry January. It’s still somewhat different, depending on where you are, but my observation is that it’s gaining momentum and we’ll continue to see beverages, other than soda, that don’t contain alcohol but are aimed at the adult market.

Overall, this Dry January has been a great experience for me. In fact, with the collection of mocktails I now have at home, I expect that my overall consumption of alcohol will, in fact, go down. Will I stop drinking alcohol all together? No, I don’t have a plan to do so. I still enjoy the way a good red wine compliments a steak dinner, or how certain white wines enhance the taste of various fish dishes. I may reduce my consumption, and I know the overall health benefits of that are significant.