I have to be honest. Part of the reason I got sober was vanity. My biggest concern was that I would end up looking like Kathleen Turner (what happened there?) and I was heading in that direction – lax and bloated, my hair lackluster… I didn’t develop that horrible, bourbon-baritone or wear round toed slipper-shoes on red carpets, but I’m sure there was the occasional whisper behind the hand or that classic, explanatory mime, where a person tips a pretend glass and pulls an unfortunate face.
She’s a bit of a boozer*.
When I drank I didn’t eat much. And when I did eat, it was usually beer nuts or chips or candy. I have since learned that sugar and highly processed junk foods can have the same effect on the brain as drugs or alcohol. They function as “superstimuli” – flooding the brain with much more dopamine than we would get by eating real food, like an apple or a piece of chicken.
Talk about a double whammy. The booze is high in empty calories, add snacks to the mix and it is very hard to not develop a paunch. And I was also in the vicious cycle of: drink, eat junk, feel like shit, drink more, skip exercise, drink… So on top of it all, I became sedentary.
Yesterday Claudio sent me a link to a website that calculates how many calories a drink contains, compares it to hamburger consumption and gives you an estimate of how long you would have to run to burn those calories. Drinkaware.co.uk. What fun, right? Based on my previous wine intake, I consumed a daily dose of: 1908 extra calories, 6.5 burgers worth, and I would have had to run 3 hours a day to burn it off. Yikes.
For those of you who still drink, give this a try and weep. For those righteous non-drinkers among us, try it and giggle.
Then go eat a hamburger.
Today I’m not drinking because I’m eating a hamburger…
How come you’re not drinking?
*Me not Kathleen Turner. And now I’m feeling kind of mean about singling her out…
