Let me give you the actual numbers.
November: 106kg. May: 87.5kg. 7 months.
No diet. No gym. No calorie counting. I didn’t change a single thing about what I ate.
I stopped drinking. That’s it.
Where the weight was coming from
I was drinking roughly 3 litres of vodka a week.
If that number shocks you, it probably should. But I was functional. I didn’t drink in the morning. I ran my business. I showed up. I just drank every evening, every night, and it added up.
1 litre of vodka is around 2,200 calories. So 3 litres per week is about 6,600 alcohol calories. Every week. On top of everything else I ate.
That’s nearly 4 extra days of calories. Every single week. Just from the vodka.
But the vodka was only part of it.
The chain reaction
When you drink, you don’t just consume the alcohol. You eat differently.
For every litre of vodka, I was mixing roughly 2 litres of juice. More sugar, more calories.
Then: chips, salami, bread, cheese. Not because I planned to eat them. Because when you’re drinking, your impulse control is gone and food tastes great.
The chain looked like this: drink more, eat more, feel worse, drink more to fix it, eat more.
Every. Single. Night.
When I stopped drinking, the entire chain stopped. I didn’t just cut the alcohol calories. I cut everything downstream.
The actual timeline
Month 1: a few kilos, mostly water. Alcohol-related inflammation leaving my body.
Month 2 to 2.5: the drop got serious. Already around -10kg from the start. My wife noticed before I did. Pants getting loose.
Month 5: still dropping, slower, but steady.
Month 7: 18.5kg down. Stable. A new normal.
I watched this happen in real time without doing anything for it. I just stopped one thing.
What else changed
The weight is the visible thing. The number people ask about.
But honestly, the other stuff hit harder.
Sleep. Alcohol sedates you but destroys sleep quality. You pass out, you don’t actually rest. When I stopped, I started sleeping properly for the first time in years. I now wake up without an alarm most mornings. That was new.
Face. Within a few weeks, people started commenting. The puffiness I thought was just how I looked, the redness, the swelling. All alcohol-related inflammation. It went away.
Mornings. I used to need a cold shower every morning just to function. Just to think. That was my normal for years. Not anymore.
Why I’m telling you this
Not to brag about the numbers.
The point is: I thought my weight was a separate problem from my drinking. A diet problem, an exercise problem. Something to deal with separately.
It wasn’t. It was the same problem.
The drinking was messing with my sleep, my appetite, my hormones, my behaviour every evening. Everything compounded.
If you drink regularly and you’ve struggled with your weight, seriously consider: maybe these aren’t two separate problems.
Maybe they’re the same one.
Stop the drinking and watch what happens to everything else.