For those of you who don’t know me and have not met me I have an excessive personality.
I could easily be a gambler or a drug addict and in the past I have drank relatively large amounts (under the guise of a social drinker)
When I was younger I ate crisps in huge excessive amounts and when I was at University I went from being the Captain of the Scottish Basket ball team and 12.5 stone in the first year to 18 stone at the end of 5th year.
As far as weight is concerned, chocolate is my major downfall… I am an addict. I identified an amazing phenomenon of chocolate amnesia where I can open a packet of Marks and Spencers mini chocolate rolls, taste the first one and then find myself standing in the same spot 2 or 3 minutes later with an empty pot, not realising what has happened.
The alcohol problem is slightly more subtle than that I enjoy a drink, usually red wine, with friends but generally speaking I have an inability to stop drinking once I start of an evening. I have to be the last man standing however late that is and however much I have consumed. I suffer terribly with hangovers which last for days and if I drink reasonably heavily on a Saturday I will still be aware of the fact on a Wednesday or a Thursday. I have tried allsorts of strategies to defeat these and tried to moderate my amounts of both alcohol and chocolate but at the end of the day moderation doesn’t work for me. I am an all or nothing type of person.
It is with that in mind that I was thinking about what to do for 2013 during the Christmas holidays when we had a get together on the 27th December with 30 people at the house. I genuinely felt that I had had enough by then of Christmas excesses and as I was drinking another glass of red wine I thought “I’m going to stop this for the next year”
Bold sentiments during the Christmas holidays and a resolution shared by many people but I am a fan of symbolism and significant things and on that day I received a Christmas present of 3 bottles or Rioja in a presentation box. I has also received one of the most thoughtful presents I have ever had from my 11 year old daughter who had taken her own money when she went to guides one night in December and bought her mummy and daddy some fair trade chocolate. The expiry date on the chocolate was March 2014 so I put the 2 bars of chocolate in the box, shut the lid and wrote ‘do not open until March 2014’
I added to this a condition response where I would say to people when they asked me if I wanted some chocolate “I don’t eat chocolate” but I was not brave enough to begin to write this blog post until 16th February when I had been through 7 weeks of no booze and no chocolate, The only lapse so far came when, the night after we had friends round to the house, there was a small amount of wine left in a bottle (it was my favourite type of wine) and my wife said “oh just finish the bottle, it’s a terrible waste” I had half a glass of red and decided that was definitely the last for the year.
The main point in doing this is to be as lean as possible for the events that I do this year and also to not let alcohol get in the way of Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday as well as Sundays with my children.
An almost impossible task I think and doomed to failure but as I heard the great Tom Peters say when I heard him lecture some years ago “the problem is not that we aim to high, it is that we aim to low and hit”