The Drinking

Not drinking for the month of September is going to be hard. Fortunately, this is an easy goal to quantify: I will not drink anything but water in September.

Alcoholic drinks are far and away the biggest challenge here. I rarely drink sugar soda, juice, or even milk any more. However, if I cautiously estimate my typical "drink" consumption, I'd say at least 40 per week. At an estimated 100 calories per drink (which is fair for beer, but probably low for my vodka tonics), that's 4000 extra empty calories per week, which is easily an eighth day of eating. For another way to look at this, I can still get drunk if I don't eat one day a week.

So what effect do I anticipate from not drinking? The reduced calories should definitely help some weight come off. I'll be doing a weigh-in the last day in August to get legitimate feedback from this experiment.

The Idea

The "Sober September" is what I'm going to call a month-long effort at perfect health habits. Why September? Nobody wants to have to forgo partying on Halloween, and August is almost over.

What do I mean by perfect health habits? Broadly, eating, drinking, sleeping and exercising as nearly perfectly as my schedule and willpower allow. Think of it as the way you would live and take care of your body if you were trying to live forever, or make the Olympic team, or weren't obsessed with food.

For me, these mean very specific things, for you they're probably different.

• diet - strict zone and paleo
  

• drinking - plenty of water and not much else. most importantly (and most difficult) NO ALCOHOL
• sleeping - 7-8 hours a night

• exercise - crossfit at south brooklyn (no less than 4 workouts a week) and hopefully a higher activity level in general

This is a challenge; the goal is to complete it without cheating and without any asterisks.

There are a few things I want to get out of this. For one, consistently following a goal like this over more than about five days is hard for me; I want to see if I can do it for one month.

Another is to see what kind of affect this has on my physical condition and other aspects of my life. I assume I'll be more energetic, productive and perform better physically, but I'm interested in the degree to which those happen. I'm most interested in seeing what one month without my usual drinking (and then late night eating) calories looks like.

Lastly, I'm hoping that this sets a high water mark in healthy living for me. They say it takes four weeks to establish a habit, maybe this will last longer than just September.

However, I can guarantee that I'll be drinking and eating quite a bit October 1.