#drynuary

I decided to do Dry January on a whim for the following reasons: 

A Dry January primer for any month of the year

@ourbestmomever, @itsmarkhayes — we didn’t really talk about it that much during our visit, but @thinkinggood-blog and I are doing Drynuary again this year and thought you might be interested in joining us. Look at this gif:

The kid on the skateboard is the month of January. The guy in the suite is me, @thinkinggood-blog​, maybe you. It’s going to be good, maybe a little difficult at times, but good.

Anyway, for the two of us, now that our student loans are behind us, 2018 is going to be a year of focusing on our physical selves. @thinkinggood-blog​‘s going to run 5 marathons this year 😳, and learn new knife skills … and I’m going to try to lose 50lbs 😱, and take a Contemporary Dance class!

It’s going to be a pretty fun year, and we’d love it if you’d join us, or just like follow along and tell us good job every now and then.

Happy February, everyone! Looks like we made it... through the first 11 days of this horrific administration. And I have officially made it through Drynuary, huzzah! Actually, I’m going to extend the prohibition through today and tomorrow because why not, and I’m going out to dinner on Friday, so a glass of wine will feel more celebratory then. 

In keeping with the drumpf-ian theme of the times, not only am I soon to be off the dry wagon and back into the wetlands—or, The Swamp, if you will—I’ll be dining at NYC’s premier Trump-baiting restaurant, the Waverly Inn.  

Detox. Fad diets. Juicing. Kale. I have done these things!

I have taken supplements that do not work! I tried to quit coffee––the worst idea I've maybe ever had! I tried making smoothies with kefir, but they just gave me stomach aches because I can't process dairy! I've given up carbs, slowly reintroducing them over the course of 17 days!

And this is just in the last couple of years.

But nothing worked, especially in the long term.

There was one thing I tried last year that might have worked, if only by accident.

I don’t recall where I first read about the phenomenon of “Dry January”––it might have been this 2013 piece from The Hairpin that refers to it as Drynuary, one of the worst portmanteaux I’ve ever heard––but I was intrigued by the idea of it. As the piece puts it, “denying yourself in the name of some greater good. Even if that greater good is just lording your teetotaling over weaker friends.”

It’s pretty self-explanatory: no alcohol for the month of January, as a kind of detox to begin the year. It goes along with the idea of beginning a diet and an exercise regimen, to clean yourself up the month after you’ve engaged in some indulgent food behaviour.

When I brought up the idea of this blog topic when out for drinks the other night, my best friend looked at me, and her eyes narrowed.

"How much are you drinking?"

Hmm. She makes an excellent point.

When I did dry January last year, I lost about 20 pounds. Yay!

But as someone who has a glass or two of wine maybe once a week, is that a viable variable in the experiment?

Also, this January was screwed up by the fact that I had a cold/flu for at least the first week of the month, barely eating anything but soup, or peanut butter on toast.

There goes another variable.

So is Dry January––or Drynuary, if you prefer––worth it?

Not to me, I guess; I was planning on doing it again this year, but then the first snowstorm hit, and I hadn't really had any wine for a couple of weeks, so I had some Chardonnay.