Free High Sobriety by Jill Stark Page B

feel the same: we’ve grown close, sharing pieces of our personal lives during tea breaks at work, but something is missing. I think back to previous friendships that graduated from work acquaintances to something more, and almost all of them took that next step in the pub or at a party, helped along by beers. There’s something about that journey — the laughs, the silliness, the shared experience — that bonds you to each other. There it is again: that contract to be disinhibited, unsigned on my part, and blocking my path towards deeper friendships.
    It’s a disheartening thought, but perhaps some things are simply incompatible with sobriety.

March
    AFTER TWO MONTHS without alcohol, I barely recognise myself. The settings where I’d ordinarily reach for the wine bottle or head to the bar no longer trigger the Pavlovian response they once did. I can go to a gig and not worry about queuing for beers — and about missing the band in the process. At dinner with friends, I’m much more engaged in the conversation, listening in a way I might not have, had I let booze fill in the blanks. And to my great surprise, I’ve lost two kilograms without even trying. Getting to the gym is a lot easier when you don’t wake up feeling as if you’ve been mowed down by a freight train. The sluggishness that convinced me I couldn’t run has vanished, and I can now hit the treadmill for 45 minutes at a time — a previously unimaginable feat.
    My eating habits haven’t changed. If anything, I’m eating more of the things I shouldn’t, as compensation for denying myself alcohol. I’ve become intimately acquainted with every dessert menu within a ten-kilometre radius of my flat. At the servo next door, the staff nod their heads and look at each other knowingly as I skulk in each evening for my after-work chocolate bar.
    Yet still the weight falls off. There’s only one explanation: I was carrying a two-kilogram beer baby. Those clever marketing folks may have tried to convince us that ‘low-carb’ beer is the guilt-free alcoholic equivalent of Diet Coke, but clearly booze is a natural enemy to weight loss, whichever way you sell it. A big night of drinking, followed by a hangover that leaves you too sick to exercise, plus a day of stuffing your face with carbs and saturated fat, adds up to an unholy trinity of calories.
    My stress levels have also dropped. My natural propensity to catastrophise about relatively insignificant events is diminishing. A bad day at work is now a mere blip on the radar, and I recover from setbacks much more quickly without hangovers, which tend to amplify insecurities and impair rational thinking. My emotions are no longer tossed around like a plastic bag in the wind. When I put the wine in my cupboard, my problems didn’t go away, but they certainly became easier to manage.
    I haven’t felt this healthy for a long time. It makes me worry about what I was doing to my body before I took this break. Sometimes hangovers would bring not only a headache and a fuzzy brain, but also a stabbing pain in my side. My rudimentary understanding of these things, coupled with a quick Google search, suggests that it may have been a dehydrated kidney or a saturated liver working overtime to break down all the alcohol I’d poured into it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. For a health reporter, it’s staggering how little attention I’ve paid to my body’s warning signals.
    But I’m not sure that the average Australian would know much more than me about the health consequences of heavy drinking. Aussies might joke about their big nights out and say, ‘Thank God the liver’s the only vital organ that can regenerate.’ But the risks of a boozed-up lifestyle go way beyond a soggy liver. Australia’s increasing number of alcohol-related health problems are part of a worldwide trend. As a planet, we’re downing