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How Xanthelasma (a skin mark around the eyes) became my wake-up call to tackle high cholesterol by addressing my alcohol intake and diet.

Making hard lifestyle decisions in your forties — such as changing your relationship with alcohol — can be rewarded with better fitness, clarity and energy when you enter your fifties. I turn fifty next month. I'll be entering my sixth decade alcohol-free. Three years ago, I stopped drinking after consuming it for thirty years. Not because I had an issue or dependency, but because I was tired of how it was making me feel and finally seeing the signs of an unhealthy lifestyle

Many people who change their relationship with alcohol describe a gradual shift from actively managing the absence of drinking to no longer thinking about it at all — a transition that can take years to fully settle. This is my story. Three years without alcohol has taught me something I did not expect. Not that life is harder without it, or easier, or more virtuous. Just that it is calmer. More balanced. The noise I had not quite noticed — the planning around drinks, the rec

The biggest challenge of an alcohol-free summer for social drinkers is not the cravings — it is the occasions where alcohol has always been present, from the BBQ to the holiday, and learning that those occasions are navigable without it.

Stopping alcohol is not a direct cause of weight loss — but it can act as a catalyst for the dietary awareness, training discipline and lifestyle changes that make weight loss and body recomposition possible. Let me say this plainly at the start: stopping the flow of alcohol did not make me lose weight. Not directly, and not quickly. I lost 3.6 stone (23 kg/50 lbs) over a period of years, and removing alcohol was the beginning of that journey. If you are expecting that cuttin

For many people in their forties, the relationship with alcohol does not change dramatically overnight — it changes gradually, as the recovery takes longer, the weight becomes harder to shift, and the energy stops bouncing back the way it used to. I did not have a dramatic moment of realisation at forty-five about my drinking because I was your average guy who liked a few controlled drinks each week. Yet, I had a passing thought, a vague awareness that I had been drinking mos

Before I took my first abstinence challenge, I had built up the moment in my head when someone would ask if I wanted a beer — the raised eyebrow at the bar, the friend pushing a pint towards me, the slightly awkward standoff while everyone waited to see if I would cave. I had a whole defence prepared. What I found, almost every time, was that the conversation was nothing like I had imagined. Out with friends, off the booze Telling People That I Wasn't Drinking The simplest ex

Changing your identity as a drinker takes longer than changing your habits — for many social drinkers, the shift from "someone who has stopped drinking" to "someone who simply doesn't drink" takes up to a year. I was a champion of drinking. Not in a destructive way. Not in a way that anyone around me would have flagged as a problem. But alcohol was woven into the fabric of my social life so completely that I could not have separated the two if I had tried. Every significant s

When you stop drinking alcohol after years of regular consumption, the body begins to repair itself almost immediately — but the changes you can actually feel take considerably longer than most timelines suggest. Three years ago I took a break from alcohol after thirty years of social drinking. I was not ill. I was not in trouble. I was just curious — and quietly tired of how it was making me feel. The Xanthelasma under my eye had been a nudge. The weight I could not shift wa

When people stop drinking, cravings get all the attention — but boredom is the harder test, and the more revealing one. Everyone talks about cravings. Ask anyone who has taken a break from alcohol what they were bracing themselves for and the answer is usually the same: the cravings. The pull to reach for a drink and the willpower required to resist it. And cravings are real. I am not dismissing them. In the early days of my first seven-day abstinence challenge, they arrived