Your body deserves better

Drinking is the new smoking

Yesterday I visited my family. My brother announced that he had not been smoking for 6 months. He had smoked cigarettes for over thirty years. Congratulations were obviously in order and my mother in particular, said she was so relieved that he had finally kicked this dangerous habit.

I then mentioned that I hadn't had an alcoholic drink for nearly a year. Silence. Followed by the well-known jokey saying, "I feel sorry for people who don't drink, when they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel all day."

Feeling a little deflated I think I mumbled something about loving the fact that I feel great every morning, but everyone just kind of changed the subject and carried on drinking their white wine.

This stark difference in reaction really does explain why it is so hard for people to take the leap to stopping drinking alcohol. The seriousness of it just isn't known or cared about. So I've decided on this post to just outline the dangers of drinking alcohol.

Don't say nobody ever told you.

• No level of alcohol consumption is safe for your health. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage.
  

• Alcohol is a toxic, psychoactive, and dependence-producing substance.
  

• It is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (decades ago) – this is the highest risk group, which also includes asbestos, radiation and tobacco.
  

• Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer.
  

• The risk of breast cancer increases with each unit of alcohol consumed per day. More than 10% of alcohol-attributable cancer cases arise from drinking just 1 bottle of beer (500 ml) or 2 small glasses of wine (100 ml each) every day.
  

• Cancers due to alcohol consumption are preventable
  

• Drinking excessively, even on a single occasion, increases a person’s risk of detrimental heart effects. These effects include:

  • Cardiomyopathy, which means that your heart muscle has a harder time pumping blood.

  • Arrhythmias, which is an irregular heartbeat.

  • High blood pressure.

  • Stroke.

I could go on.

Your body is the most amazing thing you own. It is unbelievably forgiving. Its impressive ability to recover is, unfortunately, the reason we keep on drinking. Every hangover is the symptom of a body that has been poisoned, and yet give it a few days (or even hours) and we're quite happy to do it all again. If you ate a dodgy chicken sandwich and were sick, you wouldn't go back for another one the next day, would you? So why do we do it with alcohol?

Your health is the most precious thing you have. Without your health you have nothing.

You don't have your freedom, your hobbies or your work. You can't visit your friends, spend quality time with your loved ones or travel.

You have one life, why would you want to live in a way that not only wastes money but wastes hours of your precious time and risks your short-term and long-term health. I don't know about you but I hope to live a healthy life for as long as possible. Quitting drinking has given me that chance.