How Quitting Alcohol Changed My Relationship with Food

It’s not the change I expected. But it’s the change I needed.

Dear 52 Fridays Readers,

If you’ve been following of late, you’ll know that I am in the midst of a self-imposed (and self-regulated, poorly) challenge to lose weight.

I have been thinking a lot about my relationship with food lately, even more than usual. Like so many people, I have a complicated, push-pull, love-hate thing going on there. I love to eat. I hate to have to think about what I eat.

But, at this moment (July 13th, 2023), I feel the need for my body to be 10 pounds lighter, and that means I am going to have to think about food: what I eat, how often I eat, why I eat when I am not hungry, why there are phases in my life (I’m in one right now) when it feels so damn difficult to make sensible food choices.

I hate thinking about these things. But I won’t lose those 10 pounds unless I do.

I was 10 pounds lighter when I wrote the following essay, which I am re-publishing today. To be clear, even when I was 10 pounds lighter than I am now, I was not “skinny.” But as I re-read this essay, I remember how happy and healthy and so very Zen my relationship with food and my body was.

I’d like to get back there. I’d like to once again be the woman who wrote “I no longer care what I weigh.” It was true at the time I wrote it — 10 pounds ago.

There’s a part of me that wishes I could feel that way at my present weight. Part of me that says, “Screw it all. Be happy with where you are. Relax. Enjoy life. Enjoy your food. Love yourself because you’re awesome,” and so on.

I’m not there. I’m not where I was when I wrote this. Can I get there again, whether or not I lose those 10 pounds? Should I?

I don’t know. I’m working all of this out. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this essay and, if you’re struggling with alcohol or food or alcohol and food, I hope you find some inspiration in it.

I think, upon re-reading it, I did.

Thanks so much for following along.

xo Kim

As some readers may know by now, I began my alcohol-free journey three years ago, in January of 2018, when I gave up drinking for 100 consecutive days. This period of time was tough at first, and then exciting, and then a revelation: once I got past the first difficult days (weeks) of resisting temptation, the seemingly infinite benefits of being booze-free accrued at a breakneck pace. I was sleeping great. I read a ton of books. I practiced piano every morning before my kids woke up for school. I took long walks in the rain, and then in the sun, and the air smelled fresher and the sky, when it wasn’t a wintry slate grey, seemed bluer than blue.

I felt so damn good.

Something else happened during this time, a possible side effect to giving up alcohol that I’ve deliberately avoided discussing before: I also lost 13 pounds.

This weight loss happened with few other changes to my diet and exercise routine. It was just the mathematical inevitability of giving up a 600-calorie a day beer habit. But apart from that not-insignificant sacrifice, it was that elusive thing that weight loss so seldom is: it was effortless.

It was also, as weight loss tends to be, ephemeral. In the autumn of that same year, I began another 100 alcohol-free days, just as the weather was turning and days were shortening, and in the absence of a warming red wine to pass the chilly nights, I reached for unrestricted quantities of bread and pasta and hot coffee with full fat cream. Those 13 pounds returned quickly, and with interest.

Then in January 2019, after drinking (sort of moderately) over the Christmas holidays, I embarked on a full six months of sobriety. I walked everywhere and took up running, and some weight did come off, but no more than what had appeared during the previous months. I know this because I weighed myself almost daily during that time.

I drank again a little over that summer, then stopped again in October 2019. This turned out to be my last drink for now (or probably forever — I haven’t quite decided). As of this writing, though, I have been alcohol-free for 458 days.

So what, in this 15-month period, has become of my weight?

Fair question. And the answer is: I don’t know.

That’s right. I don’t know what I currently weigh. I do know that for the past 458 days, I have been eating pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want.

And I do know that I feel pretty good, and I’m happy, and that something surrounding my thoughts and feelings about my weight and my body and my food choices has changed, and that that something is very, very good — kind of a miracle, really — and that the something is also directly related to my choice to give up alcohol.

That something is that I do not know exactly what I weigh because I no longer care what I weigh.

That’s right. For the first time in my 50 years of womanhood, I do not care what I weigh.

One more time, in case you think you didn’t read that right: I am a woman, and I eat whatever I want, and I do not care what I weigh.

Some Qualifiers: Do I Really Eat Whatever I Want? And Do I Really Have No Idea What I Weigh?

Yes, I eat whatever I want, whenever I want. But to be fair, there is a balance to this. “Whatever” is not 27 pizzas with a hot fudge sundae chaser.

“Whatever” means that sometimes I eat ice cream and pizza and pilfered Wunderbars from my son’s leftover Halloween candy, and sometimes I eat spinach salad and bananas and broccoli. Sometimes I eat apples, and sometimes I eat apple pie. Sometimes I eat Doritos. Sometimes I eat carrots. And I always drink tons of coffee with full fat cream.

What I never do is count calories or grams of fat and sugar. I never do keto or paleo or intermittent fasting or that thing where you can only eat after you spin in a circle three times and recite the Desiderata backwards (made that one up, but do let me know if you decide to try it). I don’t really know what gluten is and why we’re supposed to not eat it. It’s in bread and pasta, right? If it’s in bread and pasta, I will never not eat it.

I also never — and I mean never — feel shame or guilt over anything I have eaten, in any quantity, and I never tell myself I can’t eat something I want to eat.

As for the second question? Do I really not know what I weigh?

Well, it’s not accurate to say that I have no idea what I weigh. I have a general idea, going by the fit of my clothes and how I feel. My guess is that I weigh pretty much the same as what I weighed at this time last year.

I’m not brave enough to divulge the actual number, but here’s a ballpark: on a BMI chart (if we care about such things) I fall at the low end of the “overweight” range. A loss of seven pounds would put me at the high end of the “normal weight” range. In other words, I am definitely too heavy to be passed around a mosh pit or enter a swimsuit competition. As luck would have it, I have no immediate plans to do either.

I also have no immediate plans to lose those seven pounds, not if it means giving up ice cream and Wunderbars (and, let’s face it, it does). But I will be honest here too: while I don’t care that I am slightly overweight, I may start to care if I were to gain more weight. If one day I find that the zipper of my jeans doesn’t zip, I may choose to rethink my laissez-faire nutrition plan. Or I may just go out and buy larger jeans. I’m actually not sure.

In the meantime, I seem to be able to maintain my slightly-but-not-dangerously-too-high weight with my current level of activity (regular walking and running) and my whatever-whenever approach to eating.

And that’s just fine with me.

So… What Does All This Have to do With Giving Up Alcohol?

People sometimes ask me if I lost weight when I stopped drinking. I don’t mind the question when worded this way — I assume people ask that because they are looking for some extra motivation to quit drinking, and I am always at the ready to help someone quit drinking.

I can’t give them the answer they want to hear, which is often, “Oh, yeah, I lost a ton, and it was so easy, and it stayed off, and if you stop drinking forever, you will never have to worry about your weight again.”

I can, however, give them a much better answer, if they’re still listening. No, I didn’t lose much weight in the long run. But I gained so much more.

I would tell them that when I quit drinking, my confidence skyrocketed.

That when I quit drinking, I began to trust myself again.

That when I quit drinking, I did a bunch of hard things, like running up hills and renovating a bathroom and telling people what I really think and feel.

And that when I quit drinking, I became really proud of who I am, and who I am continuing to become.

When I quit drinking, for the first time in what feels like my entire life, I stopped caring about a few extra pounds. When I quit drinking, I started looking in the mirror every morning and meeting a healthy, well-rested, clear-eyed woman who can keep a promise to herself.

I don’t care what that woman weighs. I only care that she’s happy.

And, for the most part, she is.

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