8 years alcohol free as of tomorrow
Nice!
Good job! I’m at 10… months…
Keep it rolling buddy, wont be long befoe you look back at 10 years sober
Nice job Hule, you got this!! Once I started knocking months behind me they soon became a year, then years. Knowing you can never get that time back helped me continue forward, after a few years they just start flying by.
Congratulations!!
hungry
angry
lonely
tired
The halt method! For those that don’t know of it, before you pick up a drink, ask yourself if you’re any of those four things. If you are you address those first. They could be contributing to your desire consume alcohol (or other drugs for that matter) I first heard of this in one of my many attempts at recovery.
You mean “life?”
Broke
It’s caloric, IIRC low effort to break down and numbs feeling. No wonder the lizard brain will be dancing and singing if it has been lacking fuel for a bit
That makes sense for beer and wine since theres usually still unconverted sugars in those but the body cant really get energy from ethanol, so it makes significantly less sense for addictions to hard liquors.
Ethanol metabolism does feed into the Krebs cycle and results in about 7 calories per gram. It just passes through some pretty nasty intermediate steps, with acetaldehyde circulating and causing tissue damage in the meantime.
But you can get usable energy out of ethanol.
I’m not sure how much I trust the cited experiment from 1902 you seem to be referring to. And more recent research seems to imply that alcohol has some suppressive effects on the mitochondria, which would interfere with the Krebs cycle.
Alcohol definitely interferes with all sorts of stuff, I’m not disputing that. The body prioritizes getting rid of circulating alcohol.
But if you look at the way the body metabolizes alcohol, using alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzymes to convert to acetaldehyde, and aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) enzymes to convert to acetate, the process accumulates acetate in the body. And acetate is metabolized in the Krebs cycle.
I don’t know what experiment you’re referring to, but the metabolic pathway that ethanol follows, to acetate, is pretty well established. And that pathway accounts for how the body gets rid of something like 98% of the alcohol it consumes.
As the body gets rid of that poison, it consumes oxygen and releases carbon dioxide, generating energy stored in ATP molecules.
Alcohol has calories. This is basic textbook nutritional science.
In drosophila, a.k.a. fruit flies. They have a whole different relationship to alcohol, since their lives revolves around rotting fruit where yeast thrives. Drosophila eats yeast.
I mean, you are not wrong, but this is research on the neuronal pathways underlying this behaviour, not research comparing the daily life of fruit flies and men.
You may not be aware but fruitflies are used for many developmental and neuronal research topics since their signalling pathways are pretty similar to the ones found in humans. They are also the origin of some of the quirkiest gene names researchers made up, like the hedgehog gene.
Considering the way that glp-1 agonists curb alcohol cravings, and how various forms of cravings can increase others (like a smoker craving coffee more when they can’t smoke temporarily, or vice versa), it makes sense that there’s thing to be some underlying connections.
I wouldn’t have pointed to norepinephrine as a layman, but after reading the article and thinking a bit, then doing a quick refresh on the less obvious effects of that, damn if it doesn’t make sense.
And, with the mechanism being through an equivalent neurotransmitter in for fruit flies, I’m wondering if this isn’t a very fundamental function of having a nervous system of any kind. I mean, we already know that other mammals and some birds exhibit behaviors aligning with alcohol addiction. Maybe addiction is so bloody universal that anything can be addicted to something, even if it isn’t alcohol.
That may seem obvious, that it would work that way, but insects are vastly different in a lot of ways. And if it’s that universal, it could revolutionize addiction treatment for humans. Assuming, of course that it both pans out andreaches a level of acceptance what with the way people reject new information
What if addiction is just a negatively associated instance of normal psychological processes?
Intuition is kind of like addition, in the sense that I didn’t ask for it; it simply seems to invade the mind. Intuition can help you get home in the dark — good. Alcohol can make you feel like you feel to drink to be normal — bad. Both cases are invasive thoughts, in a sense, no?
It sort of is a normal process when negative associations. There’s chemistry involved, so it isn’t purely psychological, but addiction is a perfectly normal process that’s gone off the rails.
But the psychological side of it is essentially what you describe. None of the addiction specifics, alcohol, gambling, sex, meth, whatever; is inherently bad, they have benefits even. Unbalanced vs their drawbacks in some cases, but still.
I don’t crave it, but lite beer definitely helps to dull hunger. Less calories than eating solid food.
