Pushing Thirtyy

Life Without Beer

one of my last beers for the next few months

Following my 29th birthday, I decided to stop drinking beer, at least until after my wedding. I am just finding that it is too much effort to drink beer if I am trying to get intoxicated and the empty calorie intake was overwhelming.  I know that in order to fit into my wedding dress, I need to start getting my diet under control, and that might possibly mean removing items from it that I normally ingest.  I’m not getting too crazy about my diet just yet, but I wanted to take at least one step towards getting ready to fit into my dress, and quitting beer was a fairly easy thing to cut out…kind of.

You see, me and beer have a long-standing relationship.  Ever since the first time I got drunk off of scotch whiskey as a teen and got so unbelievably sick that liquor didn’t seem like the best first choice for drinking.  In high school, the drink of choice was typically a 40-ounce of Budweiser or some Old English (there was that Mike’s Hard Lemonade phase but we won’t get into that dark period).  When I started to get into the bar/clubbing scene, I added Long Island Iced Teas to my repertoire of go-to drinks.

I started to become more interested in higher quality beer when I got to college.  When I wasn’t drinking from a keg, I was at a local brewery sampling fresh brewed beers or at a bar with 30+ beers on tap ready for taste testing.  I really liked the raspberry wheat beer that I would regularly sample.  I would eventually come up with the beers that I really liked, and for very different reasons.  Today, I enjoy a good Stella, Yueng-ling or Blue Moon if I’m looking to get a little tipsy on good beer.  Every so often I’ll enjoy a good Boddington’s if it’s on tap.  But often, I’ll stick to some basics: Corona and Pabst are always good friends.

But all of that will have to wait.  Now I am consciously switching my drink of choice to wine (red or white), and will probably start carefully adding in some liquor drinks for the real rough nights.  I will miss the casual brew after a hard day’s work, but I have to make the sacrifice, and hopefully I’ll see some results in the form of getting some weight off.