I have to start this entry with a flashback. Back to 2016 when I was recovering from my 6th wrist surgery and using this terrible “torture brace” to force my wrist to turn in order to get my range of motion back. Let me tell you, it was terrible. It was painful. It was 3 hours of sitting and basically torturing myself. There was no exercise. There wasn’t even any extra walking to be done. I would just sit there and wish I was done. I realized, maybe a week in, that I couldn’t just do the brace without some help. I thought maybe ibuprofen? No I’ve had way to much ibuprofen in my life to start taking it every day. I decided that, since I had a bottle of whiskey, I would take a few shots of that and it would make the experience less painful, maybe even tolerable. It did so I continued every night to have some shots of whiskey before I did my evening torture.

I wasn’t aware of the nutritional value of alcohol, or the lack there of, when I started shooting it. I didn’t realize that when you drink alcohol your body sort of just stops processing anything else and focuses on metabolizing that alcohol until complete. That means whatever else you eat in the mean time pretty much just gets stored as fat until the alcohol has been processed. I’m sure I’m not explaining this the best but I’m close to the mark.

Basically I was killing my metabolism while I was doing that brace and didn’t even realize it. The worst part is that once I was done with the brace I continued to shoot the alcohol in the evenings because it had become habit. It’s probably only been in the last month or so that I actually quit drinking every night.

WHY am I telling you this? Well I’m noticing a difference. Not in my weight so much, but in the appearance of my stomach. Where it use to be rounded, it’s flattening out a bit. I’m not going to say my stomach is flat yet. That’s going to take some time. I’m just saying that since I quit drinking the alcohol every night I’m seeing positive progress in appearance.

I’ve also set a new goal for myself. Aside from trying to always be under my sugar macro on MyFitnessPal, I’m also trying to go to the gym 4-5 times a week. I thought I would take a day off yesterday and ended up overeating at dinner so I decided to go. I went around 7:45pm and the gym wasn’t nearly as packed as it has been at 5pm when I’ve been going. Because of this, I was able to get a good leg workout in and I’m even sore today.

No weight loss progress but, like I said before, my appearance – stomach and face – seem to be thinning out a bit.