There are health benefits of giving up alcohol, and the longer that you don't drink, the better your body functions.
Week 1:
Better sleep
After one week of not drinking alcohol, you may notice that you are sleeping way better. When you drink, you usually fall asleep right away, missing the important REM or rapid eye movement sleep. While you are supposed to have between six and seven cycles of REM sleep every night, you usually only have one or two when you've been drinking alcohol.
Better sleep comes with a lot of benefits. You will be more productive and your ability to control your emotions and your behavior will also improve. You will also have more opportunity to manage your food and your drink intake. Sleep also helps to balance the hormones that make you feel full or hungry. After drinking alcohol, your ghrelin levels go up and leptin goes down.
More hydrated
When you consume alcohol, you lose four times as much liquid as what you actually drank. Dehydration can cause headaches because your organs take water from the brain due to their own water loss. Potassium and salt levels also reduce, which can impact the nerve and proper muscle function while also causing fatigue, headaches, and nausea.
This means that giving up alcohol can help keep you well hydrated, and in turn, beneficial for your brain. Your concentration and your mood will be more stable and the frequency of headaches is likely to decrease. You also won't suffer from the effects of dehydration like lack of motivation and increased fatigue, so you will have more energy throughout the day.
Calories saved
If you were to give up drinking at least six 175 ml glasses of wine every week, you will save around 960 calories, which is equivalent to three burgers or five and a half bags of crisps. And if you were to stop consuming six pints of average strength larger every week, you would save at least 1080 calories, which is equivalent to six bags of crisps or five chocolate bars.
Week 2:
After two weeks of not drinking alcohol, you will continue to reap the benefits of hydration and better sleep. As alcohol is an irritant your stomach lining, after two weeks, you will see a reduction in symptoms like reflux where the stomach acid burns your throat.
After two weeks, you will start to lose some weight as a result of giving up the empty calories of alcohol. If you were to stop drinking six 175 ml glasses of wine every week, you will save 1920 calories at this point, and 2160 if you'd stopped drinking around six pints of lager.
Week 3:
Drinking too much alcohol can cause your blood pressure to rise, but after 3 to 4 weeks of not drinking your blood pressure will start to decline. Reducing your blood pressure can be crucial as it can help to lessen the risk of health issues from happening in the future.
As the calories in alcohol can cause you to gain weight, giving up alcohol can also help you to reduce your blood pressure as a result of the weight that you can lose. By this point, if you'd previously been drinking six 175 ml glasses of wine in a week, you would have lost 2880 calories in over three weeks. And if you'd been drinking six pints of lager in a week, you would have lost 3240 calories.
Week 4:
Giving up alcohol will have a very positive impact on your skin because you have better levels of hydration. As more water will have been absorbed instead of wasted, you are likely to have more hydrated-looking skin, as well as reduced eczema and dandruff. Completely removing alcohol from your diet for four weeks can also help improve your liver function as your liver will start to shed some excess fat. If your liver function is not too badly affected by alcohol, it can recover within 4 to 8 weeks.
The liver plays a very important part in over 500 vital processes, you also give your body a better chance of removing contaminants, storing minerals and vitamins and converting food nutrients.
Zero alcohol consumption
After a month of not consuming alcohol, your body is likely to have benefited from giving up alcohol. Improved hydration and improved sleep will have increased your productivity and daily well-being. Your stomach, liver, and skin will also have benefited from not dealing with alcohol. You will also have reduced your calorie intake by 3840 for the month if you usually drank six glasses of 175 ml of wine in one week, or 4320 calories over the month if you used to drink six pints of lager in one week.
If you are having problems with alcohol and struggling to quit, you may want to think about getting support in order to cut back from your alcohol consumption.
