Do you need to give up your Cabernet or your Pinot Grigio for your health?
Many women would riot in the streets with such an expectation.
Although giving up wine or any alcohol sounds extreme, when you know the real risks and what it’s doing to you, long-term, you might decide to do just that–give it up. If not, then it’s a good idea to at least consider reducing your intake of alcohol on a weekly basis.
I love my red wine, and I know lots of ladies (young and old) who love it too. Not just red, but white, rose and sparkling too.
We love it after work. We love it with dinner (on the weekends, with brunch). We love it as an evening drink. We love it as a nightcap.
If you look around, you’ll notice that wine is the go-to beverage for so many women. Whether it’s drinks with the girls, grabbing wine coolers on the way to the beach or a party, or having top notch red wine with a fine dinner, we love our wine.
Ok…it might not be love, but it’s definitely lust for many of us.
I know. The idea of something else being bad for us is just too much to take. The last thing women want to hear is that there’s something wrong with their wine. We don’t want to hear it’s bad news, or that we’d be wise to give it up or drink less of it.
Over the years, I’ve made some surprising discoveries (or realizations) about wine, well, about alcohol in general. What I now know has made me look at my wine with a different perspective and has led me to change how often I drink.
The Wine Escape
Women are turning to wine to relieve their stress. And there’s a lot of stress out there. I’m not saying men don’t endure stress because they do, but women carry the load of society.
Women who work full time are also usually the primary caregivers for children or the elderly, and they usually manage the household. Sometimes that’s by choice, and sometimes it’s related to parental role expectations due to upbringings or culture.
The end result is the same. Women are lugging around high levels of stress on a daily basis. For some of us, that stress is almost constant, like a quiet engine humming. We don’t really hear it or notice it, necessarily, but it’s quietly burning our energy and exhausting us.
I used to walk in the door after a stressful day or week of teaching, and shortly after, I’d have a glass of vino in my hand. It flowed through all my arteries and calmed me down. This was me time. That wine washed all my troubles away.
What I didn’t realize was that I was trying to manage my stress with wine. I knew it felt good, and I would even say things like, “I definitely need wine tonight!”, but I truly didn’t make the obvious connection. I didn’t see the dangers of living with such levels of stress on a daily basis. I didn’t see the dangers of drinking a couple of glasses of wine almost every night (more on the weekends) to escape my stress.
We shouldn’t try to escape our stress; instead, we should understand where it is coming from and learn how to reduce it (we have more control than we realize).
If you’re interested in digging into what your key stressors are and how you can turn your life around by discovering the secrets to decreasing your stress, have a look at my mini-course/guide called A Roadmap to Calm: A Practical, Step-by-Step Guide to Discover your True Stressors and Shift to Calm.
A glass of wine gives us relief from stress for a short time, but in the long run, that stress permeates our bodies and leaves us tired and with health issues. In the long run, turning to booze for some form of escape becomes a habit that also negatively affects our bodies.
A better route to manage our stress is to try to determine what’s causing the stress, and to see what can be done to prevent it or at least decrease it. Finding alternative ways to handle the stresses we encounter in our lives is a healthier solution.
Alcohol Causes Cancer
There’s been a link between alcohol and cancer since the late 80’s, but most of us aren’t aware of the dangers. I sure wasn’t.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has labeled alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen, which means there’s enough evidence to show that the carcinogen causes cancer. Research doesn’t show that alcohol probably causes cancer. The Group 1 classification means it does. Other Group 1 carcinogens include (but are not limited to) asbestos, tobacco and formaldehyde.
Are you going to get cancer if you have a few glasses of wine each month? Probably not. Will you get cancer if you drink ten or more glasses of wine each week? Not guaranteed, but more likely.
None of us think that our wonderful wine can really cause us any harm. After all, we’re always reading about how good wine is for us. Unfortunately, like in the food industry, financial forces are at play to keep us confused.
Alcohol in any form can cause cancer. No amount is considered safe. However, it’s the regular consumption of booze, over time, that’s the real problem.
If you start drinking wine in your 20’s, and it becomes a regular habit in your 30’s and 40’s, you’ve been drinking wine on a regular basis for 10, 20 or more years.
I was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in January of 2020. Does this mean, for sure, that my alcohol consumption caused my cancer? No, but based on the research, it does mean that there’s a good chance that all the wine I drank increased my risk of getting cancer.
Especially breast cancer.
The World Health Organization/Europe recently announced…
“There is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The risk of breast cancer increases with each unit of alcohol consumed per day.”
Of course, there are many other risks for breast cancer including being overweight and being sedentary…yep…I fit into those categories too. Thankfully, I’ve lost about 25-30 lbs since my diagnosis, and I started walking outside 5-7 times a week ever since. Check out last month’s update on my 1200 km walking goal for 2021.
I’m writing this post because I want women to know that we can no longer ignore the fact that alcohol can give us breast cancer.
Just knowing this can help us watch our alcohol intake. Knowing this can help us find other ways to relieve our stress.
Giving up wine isn’t easy. I still drink wine, but I’ve gone for months at a time without it. I’ve realized that alcohol could contribute to my cancer returning, so I’ve made efforts to greatly reduce how much wine I drink.
My goal is to drink alcohol only on occasion or not at all. Maybe one day I can give it up completely, but for now, all I can do is my best, which is working at having it much less frequently than I used to.
Hmmm…if I haven’t been able to give up wine yet, does that mean I have a drinking problem? Does that mean I’m an alcoholic?
No, it doesn’t.
There’s a stigma attached to the idea that we need to reduce how much booze we consume. In fact, I think one of the reasons many of us don’t look at our alcohol intake is because we don’t want to even associate ourselves with the idea of having a drinking problem.
Like many of our vices, drinking alcohol becomes a habit. If you’re used to having a glass of wine with dinner, then that’s a habit. If you always drink beer when you watch a hockey game, then that’s a habit. If you drink tequila shots every weekend in the summer, it’s a habit.
Just because you have a habit of drinking regularly doesn’t mean you are an alcoholic.
The habit of drinking alcohol is pervasive in our society. Whether you’re sipping it slowly, or slamming it back, alcohol is a harmful drug that’s been normalized at the dinner table.
The more women start to realize the dangers of alcohol, the more we can start talking about it, and the more we can start to turn to healthier forms of distraction, relaxation and escape.
See resources at the end of this post.
What to do?
If you want to spend less time with wine and want to increase the likelihood of a healthier future, here are some recommendations based on my take of good, better, best.
Good: The WOW Approach (Wine on Weekends)
Work towards drinking only on the weekends (Friday and Saturday nights). This means you don’t have any alcohol Monday to Thursday. If that’s too tough to start, then pick one day not to drink. Then choose two days, and build from there.
Good: With the WOW approach, keep an eye on how much booze you’re drinking. If you drink a whole bottle of wine to yourself each weekend night, that could be excessive. As long as you’re sticking to just the weekends though, you are off to a good start. Once you’ve mastered the WOW approach, then you can look at cutting back on the number of glasses you drink each weekend night.
Better: Modify the WOW approach, so you drink on only one night on the weekend. Once you’ve conquered that, you can look at how much alcohol you consume.
Better: 30 Day Challenge
This is a terrific way to see how wrapped up you are in your wine. Can you go 30 days without drinking any alcohol? If you can’t, you know you’ve got to take a close look at why you’re turning to booze, and you need to find other ways to access whatever benefit you get from drinking.
If you need to build up over time, start with a one week challenge. Then two weeks, and so on. If you make 30 days, can you go longer?
I include the challenges as a better approach because it gives you large chunks of time to see what your life is like without booze. You might be surprised to see how you don’t miss alcohol at all, and how it was really just a habit.
Once you build large periods of time without booze, you might find that you want it less. You may naturally begin to consume alcohol less frequently. I’ve gone as long as seven months without any alcohol, so it’s easier for me to drink less and not rely on wine to make me feel better.
Best: If you can give up alcohol completely, then of course, that’s ideal. This approach doesn’t mean you can never ever have a glass of wine again, but if you have a few glasses a year, that’s pretty much the same as giving it up.
Before you Go
How often, how much and why you drink is your personal journey, which is connected to how you handle the stresses in your life. I encourage you to look at those stresses to see if you can remove or reduce them in some way. If you can’t change them, discover methods, other than alcohol, to manage them.
In A Roadmap to Calm: A Practical, Step-by-Step Guide to Discover your True Stressors and Shift to Calm, you will find all the steps to unveiling the real contributor to your stresses.
If you decide to re-evaluate your alcohol consumption, do so with self-love.
It’s important to remember to be kind to yourself as you make any changes in your life that will produce better or future health. No one is perfect, but you can take small steps to move toward the health you desire.
Live your true life,
Access my FREE Downloads!
—See Resources Below
Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker
I listened to this book on Audible and was amazed to learn of the damage that alcohol does to the body. This blog post didn’t get into all the details of how toxic alcohol is to your body and how hard your body has to work to get rid of it. A great read for anyone interested in health or for anyone considering the idea of reducing their alcohol intake.
World Health Organization: Europe
2 thoughts on “I’ll have a Cabernet, with a side of Cancer”