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.