24 Units
I've got pretty good at noticing when I don't need the food. Turns out I needed to point the same question at what's in my glass.
Today’s number is 95.3 kg. Fifteen stone, near enough.
That’s pretty decent. It’s not diving down some steep decline, but it is moving, or at least maintaining a direction of travel. I’ll take steady over pretending every day has to set a new low.
It does put my BMI right back at 30, though. I crossed below that line a few days ago and apparently it’s not a one-way door. That’s fine. It’s a number, not a verdict.
Last night was a willpower night again.
There were KitKats in the fridge. I left them there.
All the crisps are gone, though. That wasn’t me.
I still felt a flicker of guilt about knowing they were gone, which, on reflection, tells you I checked. I don’t know what I was expecting to find. Crisps I hadn’t eaten, presumably, confirming that I hadn’t eaten them.
The thing I’m genuinely still losing to isn’t snacks. It’s alcohol.
It was my birthday last month, and I’ve got a surplus of gifted spiced rum that has been quietly calling my name ever since. So instead of just drinking it and not thinking about it, I sat down and worked out what it actually meant for the numbers.
My usual drink is 70ml of spiced rum topped up with Pepsi Max. Pattern-wise, that’s roughly two on a Friday, two on a Saturday, one on a Sunday.
At 40% ABV, one of those drinks comes in at about 155 kcal, and almost all of it is from the rum — Pepsi Max isn’t the problem here, it’s basically free. Across the week that’s about 775 kcal from rum alone, which on its own isn’t the end of the world.
Then there’s Sunday.
A bottle of red wine with the Sunday roast isn’t up for negotiation. My wife’s roast without a glass, or several, of red would be sacrilege, and I’m not about to be the one who suggests otherwise.
Put the two together and the real weekly total is somewhere around 1,400–1,500 kcal from alcohol. Averaged out, that’s roughly 200 kcal a day, just from drinking.
And in units, it’s worse than the calories make it look. Five rums a week at 70ml comes to 14 units on its own. Add a bottle of red at 13–14% and the week’s total lands somewhere around 24 to 24.5 units.
The UK guideline is 14 units a week. I was at nearly double that, and I didn’t actually know it until I sat down and did the sum.
I’m not giving up the ritual. Friday and Saturday rum, Sunday roast with red — all of that stays.
What I’m planning to change is the measure. Dropping from 70ml to 35ml per rum keeps exactly the same pattern — two, two, one — but should knock the weekly rum total down to about 7 units and 388 kcal, roughly half of what it was. Add the wine back in and that puts the week at around 17 to 17.5 units instead of 24.
Still over the guideline. Still a lot more honest than not looking at it at all.
I’m not pretending that’s an easy switch to make, though. Half a measure poured into the same glass, on the same evening, as part of the same ritual, is exactly the kind of thing my brain is going to argue about. I’ve spent months getting genuinely good at noticing when I don’t need the food. This is just another front in the same argument — I’ve simply pointed the question at what’s in my glass instead, and I haven’t actually won it yet.
There’s a thought I keep coming back to, though. The crisps, the KitKats, the late-night food noise — sometimes that seems to turn up around the same evenings as the rum. If less alcohol means less of my judgement getting quietly switched off, cutting the measure might not just be one more battle to fight. It might make the other one easier too.
I don’t know that yet. It’s a theory, not a result. But it’s a decent enough trade-off to actually test.