How I cut back on drinking

Drinking is just one of those things. At least, it always has been in my family. Me? I started drinking as a teen. Some weeks I'd have one drink. Others, I'd have six or seven in a night. But I never thought I had a problem. And till I was in my 40s, it was just one of those things. Then COVID hit.

My wife, Heather, and I started consuming even more booze, made poor decisions at mealtime and developed other unhealthy habits. After a while, the scale and my annual blood work told me something had to give.

One day, while nursing our hangovers, we made a pact to stop drinking for 75 days.

Every day was not perfect, but 95% of the days, I worked out and drank half a gallon of water by 7am. That gave me the momentum to win the day.

The first ten days on this journey were rough; I felt bloated and irritable.

For the first 60 days, I was planning in my head what I wanted on day 76. Would we get IPAs at the pub, or go crazy with tacos and margaritas?

Come late afternoon, I was craving that pick-me-up. Screw the hangover or tomorrow; I wanted that immediate hit.

Now, instead of craving a drink, I just “remember tomorrow.”

Week after week, my cravings for alcohol started to subside. But some nights, I still just wanted a beer. I needed something to satisfy that craving but help me stay on the path.

That's when I turned to non-alcoholic beer, which did just that.

My wife Heather did this with me. More than the results, we were in this together. I also had an awesome peer group — we just created a text group to make it as easy as possible to interact.

As the world started to open back up, Heather and I found it challenging to stick to our new habits when almost everywhere we went, it was all about alcohol. We loved the ambiance of bars and breweries but didn't have a lot of options if we didn't actually want the alcohol!

That's when the idea of Go Brewing emerged.

No joke — at day 60, it all started to sound appalling.

Around the 60-day mark, it hit me. I was just... happier. Lighter. Cracking jokes and letting things roll off my back, kind of like how I was before alcohol ever entered the equation.

When I started Go Brewing, a non-alcoholic—or NA—brewery, quitting drinking wasn't the endgame. Actually, NA beer was my strategy to reduce the alcohol, not eliminate it.

Will I drink again? Maybe, but it'll be an intentional decision, not a compulsion. And when I get that craving? Well, I have an arsenal of the best NA beer on the planet at my disposal. Not a bad safety net.

Whether you do a challenge like this or not, I've found just committing to do something uncomfortable at least once per day makes all the difference. Just start small if you are stuck. If I can do it, you can too!