Intentional Drinking Part 3: Partying Like a Smarty

If you could drink half the drinks you normally would (halves the calories and $ too), have as much or more fun, and wake up feeling exponentially better & ready to conquer your day, wouldn’t you? In this series of articles I’ll discuss zero-cost behavioral tools you can use to adjust your drinking habits so you can have more fun with less damage to your health, wallet, and productivity. 

The core concept we’ll be discussing is “Intentional Drinking” which focuses on three key pillars: How much you drink, when you drink, and how you drink. By putting intentionality behind how much you drink, when you drink, and how you drink you can enjoy alcohol and a vibrant social life with confidence that you won’t be compromising your health and productivity. Intentional drinking has allowed me to balance partying in my early 20s with training for multiple marathon & ironman finishes, starting a business, and working a software engineering day job. I know it can help you too! If you missed part 1 & part 2 check them out here and here.

Part 3 - Partying Like a Smarty

Why control how you drink:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles" - Sun Tzu

Understanding the negative effects alcohol has on our physiology allows us to build a suite of tactics directly targeted toward mitigating these negative effects. Ultimately this will lead to reducing the damage alcohol has on our health, fitness, and productivity. While these tools are great and powerful, I want to emphasize that managing your alcohol intake (i.e. how much you consume) is going to be the most powerful lever for improving the role alcohol plays in your life. Checkout Part 1 & Part 2 for an in-depth discussion on how to do that without sacrificing the fun of being all frickedy fricked up. 

So, let’s dive into some specifics of how alcohol negatively affects our physiology so we can then dive into specifics of how to mitigate these negative effects. I’m going to keep things pretty simple so we don’t get overloaded with information and lose focus on our main goal of using these tactics to drink in a way that better serves our lives. If you want more details I highly recommend listening to this podcast by Dr. Andrew Huberman. References and scientific articles for this information can be found at the bottom of this post.

Sleep

Alcohol is a sedative, meaning it can make us fall asleep quicker, but it reduces the quality of sleep. This disruption in sleep quality is dose dependent meaning it increases the more alcohol we drink. The most detrimental effect alcohol has on sleep is blocking a specific stage of sleep called Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. Alcohol’s disruption of REM sleep causes issues in everything from our ability to learn to our hormones and essentially just makes us worse humans overall. These effects are exacerbated by our tendency to deviate from our natural circadian rhythms when drinking (i.e. sleeping and waking up later than usual).

Electrolytes & Hydration

Alcohol is a diuretic and causes us to lose water as well as electrolytes like sodium, potassium, and magnesium. It does this through effects on a hormone called “vasopressin” (also known as “antidiuretic hormone”) as well as by the sheer volume of liquid one takes in while drinking. This effect is worsened if we are moving around a bunch (e.g. dancing) and sweating. Dehydration and disruptions in electrolyte imbalance can cause headaches, muscle cramps, nausea, fatigue, and more. No bueno!

Gut Health

Alcohol damages our gut by disrupting our gut microbiome and the lining of the gut. This causes acute leaky gut meaning bad bacteria that live in the gut can now pass out of the gut and into the bloodstream. The downstream effects of alcohol’s disruption of our gut are extensive and include a compromised immune system, decreased mood, and reduced absorption of nutrients from food.

Inflammation

Alcohol is a toxin and its metabolism directly causes our immune system to mount an inflammatory response. In addition, the downstream effects alcohol has on our sleep, hydration, gut etc. tend to be pro-inflammatory. Excessive inflammation can cause and/or exacerbate many short term and long term health problems ranging from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to depression and so is something you definitely want to control especially if you have an existing pathology.

Body Composition

Alcohol is considered an “empty calorie”. It does not provide any nutritive value but still contributes to overall caloric intake which can ultimately result in increased fat storage if not accounted for. In addition, your body has to stop burning fat while drinking to focus on metabolizing alcohol. Beyond 1-2 drinks you run the risk of impairing your body’s ability to build muscle as well. Lastly, alcohol reduces inhibitions which increases the chance we eat types of food or amounts of food we wouldn’t normally eat. I speak purely from a place of science of course and not from personal experience of waking up next to a bag of doritos the morning after a heavy night 😄. To summarize, alcohol intake tends to promote fat storage and reduce muscle synthesis.

I could continue, but I’ll stop there for the purposes of this conversation. While it might feel a little scary hearing all the ways alcohol negatively affects us, it’s important to understand in order to implement the tactics we’ll use to offset these negative effects. “Knowledge is power” or something! I’ll now redeem alcohol and its place in our lives by repeating a paragraph from Part 1 of this series so you don’t click away thinking I’m just here to demonize it: 

“So does this mean alcohol is always bad and needs to be avoided at all costs? No, it just means it’s a tradeoff between fun/social-connection and health/fitness in the same way staying up past your bedtime to catch up with a friend is a tradeoff (stakes are higher with alcohol though). Thus, our strategy for changing our drinking habits to better serve us is to frame alcohol as a tradeoff between fun/social-connection and health/fitness and effectively manage this tradeoff. I believe alcohol can be a net beneficial part of life as long as it is effectively framed and managed as a tradeoff. Hint - this doesn’t need to equate to less fun either!” (see part 1 for details on having more fun with less alcohol)

Now that we understand alcohol’s effects on us, we can build our arsenal of tools for drinking in ways that better serve our health, fitness, and productivity! Woo!

Your drinking toolkit:

Here’s a list of powerful tactics for helping you control how you drink. These are backed by science and have been personally tested by yours truly many times over. 

Tactic #1: Party Like a Smarty with Alcolyte

Alcolyte is the world’s first electrolyte-infused cocktail mix. It has zero sugar, calories, or artificial ingredients and provides electrolytes while you drink, offsetting the dehydrating effects of alcohol. Maintaining adequate hydration while drinking relieves dehydration-based hangover symptoms and supports overall health so you can wakeup ready to conquer the day! Whether it's a workout to burn off those empty calories, a productive work day, or time with family, Alcolyte has you covered. We have both a margarita flavor and an unflavored version with more flavors on the way soon! 

Generally, the more drinks you have with Alcolyte the better. I personally aim for at least 75% of my drinks in a night with Alcolyte. It works best when paired with adequate water intake which is usually around 1 glass of water for every 1-2 drinks. If you can't or don't want to pair Alcolyte with that level of water intake, using it just in your alcoholic drinks will still be a big help and much better than doing nothing.

My personal experience is that electrolyte replenishment is one of the most powerful tactics to alleviate the negative effects of alcohol. In addition, proactively replenishing electrolytes while drinking yields a much better outcome than reactively attempting to recover optimal levels once the damage has been done. This is why we designed Alcolyte to fit seamlessly into the drinking experience unlike any other electrolyte product on the market. Learn more about Alcolyte here.

"Some people say for every glass of alcohol you drink, you should drink 1 glass of water, I'd say better would be 2 glass of water, ... and even better would be water with electrolytes. That certainly would set you up for a better day the next day" - Andrew Huberman 

Tactic #2: Don’t Sleep on Day Drinking

Day drinking is a sneakily powerful way to mitigate the negative effects alcohol has on your sleep. By drinking earlier and further from your bedtime, you give your body a better chance to clear alcohol from your system before your circadian clock comes knockin. It also means you have a better chance of maintaining your typical sleep-wake times. All this equates to you waking up more refreshed and ready to conquer your day. Also, who doesn’t love a good day drunk? 😎🥂

In practice, this tactic can be hard to make work with social commitments and cultural preferences. But, next time the drinking plans are up to you, opt for day drinking and tapering off a few hours before bed and see how you feel!

Tactic #3: Fermented Foods FTW

Low sugar fermented foods such as greek yogurt, kimchi, etc. have been shown to increase gut microbiota diversity and reduce systemic inflammation (while some alcoholic beverages are technically fermented foods they do not count lol). The ideal version of this tactic is incorporating 2-6 servings of these foods into your daily life as eating them consistently over time is the most effective way to strengthen your gut. I personally do this and highly recommend it as both a defense against alcohol and just a general health promoting practice. If you don’t want to commit to incorporating fermented foods daily, then I’d suggest at least eating these foods on the days surrounding drinking. I’ve noticed a big improvement in my gut and overall wellbeing the day after drinking when taking active measures to bolster my gut health and I bet you will too. Note though, the process of strengthening your gut through these low sugar fermented foods takes some time so you may not see the results of your efforts for a couple weeks.

Tactic #4: Keep it ~Pure~

Most people are (hopefully) not exclusively taking shots and drinking on the rocks, meaning the alcohol in their drink is combined with other things. Whether this comes pre-packaged (e.g. beer/seltzer) or you make it yourself (e.g. using a cocktail mix), you are going to want to make sure that there are not excessive amounts of calories, sugar, or other additives in there such as artificial preservatives/flavors/colors/sweeteners. When health-demoting additives are ingested with alcohol the negative effects can compound. A 1+1=5 situation where the two combined together do more damage than alone. 

This is why we made sure Alcolyte has no sugar, calories, or artificial ingredients. Below are the ingredient lists for margarita and unflavored Alcolyte. 

 

Even if you don’t use Alcolyte, you’d be wise to be conscious of the ingredient labels on your favorite alcoholic beverages and preferentially choose those with minimal calories, sugars, and health-demoting additives.  

Drinking with Intentionality, Forever

"Powerful life change is just one convicted decision away" - Unknown

The information I've presented in these 3 articles on intentional drinking are a mix of the latest science and years of personal experience. If you feel the role alcohol plays in your life can be improved but you don't want to give it up completely (which if you read this far, I'm guessing is the case) then becoming an intentional drinker is for you. As with any challenging behavioral change, to do this effectively you must keep fresh in your mind why you are making this change. So, please take a couple minutes right now to write down why you are becoming an intentional drinker and then put that somewhere you'll see it frequently (desk, notes app, reminders app, wherever). Return to your why often and especially if/when you feel your conviction waning. 

Without having a clear sense of why you are making these changes in the forefront of your consciousness, everything we've discussed will likely be for naught. This is because our brain is quick to filter what information reaches our consciousness and tactics without a foundation of strategy and objective ("why") just feel like annoying rules we have to follow. This combo causes our conviction to slowly wane and fade away as we slip back into our hold habits. Don't do that. Be convicted and stay convicted by keeping your "why" in the forefront of your consciousness.

The transition away from your old drinking habits might be uncomfortable at first. But if you are diligent with your intentional drinking practice, within a month or two, the habit will start to become engrained and part of who you are. You'll rely less on willpower when making decisions surrounding drinking and really start reaping the benefits of your new relationship with alcohol. All you gotta do is start! So go fricken do it! Like, today! You won't!

 

References:

Sleep

Electrolytes & Hydration

Gut Health

Inflammation

Body Composition

Fermented Foods

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