Journalled on Monday, 1st of December 2025 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 26°C, hot, sunny and slightly overcast.
It’s Monday, the first day of December, and this year has flown by, taking time, and a piece of my life, with it.
I’m feeling slow today. My body aches and creaks, probably from all the exercise over the weekend, though I suspect the 0% beer isn’t entirely blameless either. Even at a fraction of the calories of the real thing, it still gets me.
On Saturday and Sunday I put away five or six long necks, and by today I could feel it, psychologically and physically, especially the morning after.
Switching from normal beer to 0% seemed like the answer: all the ritual of drinking, none of the drunk, and minimal side effects. To an extent, that’s true. I don’t get drunk. But I still feel slow and swollen, same as with any beer, especially after a few.
And today I’m certainly feeling it. My thinking isn’t as sharp as a Monday morning deserves, and physically I’m a step behind myself.
I got through everything on my list, but my body wasn’t exactly flexible about it. Don’t get me wrong, today has been productive, especially in the second half, once the weekend finally started wearing off.
This morning the gluten from all that golden liquid was still working its way through my system, and I spent the day making frequent trips to the toilet, releasing, I hope, most of what the weekend left behind.
The scales don’t lie. On Friday I was 95.5 kilos. This morning, almost 98, purely from the weekend, and I hadn’t even eaten excessively.
I had a lovely lunch at Nalva’s with Yasmin on Saturday, and on Sunday I kept it simple and cooked for myself. So it wasn’t the food. Which brings me to the real point.
“No half-arsing it”!
I think it’s an American expression, but the idea is universal: don’t do anything by half. And it’s exactly where I went wrong with 0% beer.
I thought switching to alcohol-free would let me dodge the downsides of drinking, and to a limited extent it has. I don’t get drunk, though I still get a little dizzy sometimes. It has fewer calories than regular beer, and I bloat less than I do with the real thing.
But it’s not 100% perfect. I still feel dizzy at times. I’m still swollen. And the day after, I still feel rough. Which means, basically, I’ve just found a more sophisticated way to half-arse it.
The real truth is simple: if I don’t want the effects of drinking beer, I have to stop drinking it. No beer. It’s not rocket science. There’s no escape, no excuse, no clever workaround.
The same truth applies to almost anything negative in your life. There’s no in-between, no halfway. It either is or it isn’t.
When HIV appeared in the late 80s, one of the anti-AIDS campaigns in England didn’t lean on condoms. It leaned on abstinence, full stop. AZT didn’t exist yet. It was a new disease that terrified the world, and the only guaranteed way to avoid infection through a normal sexual relationship was not to have sex.
No half-arsing it!
The same goes for pregnancy. If you don’t want to run that risk, don’t take it, because after the tears, the regret, and the arguing over whose fault it was, the fault was always yours.
The same goes for life and everything we choose in it. There’s no half-arsing it. Either you commit fully, whatever it is: a relationship, a business, your work, a project, or you don’t do it at all. Sit in the middle, and you’ll eventually pay for it. Life always collects. That’s one of its hardest rules.
The real problem is that most of us don’t want to see what we’re actually doing. Being honest with ourselves takes a kind of humility most of us would rather avoid, so we look the other way instead of doing what we know, at some level, we should.
In bed by 10 p.m.
Thank you
Thank you for reading. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
