Health benefits of quitting alcohol, from weight loss to slowing ageing

David Wilson has been sober for almost seven years. Today, the 61-year-old is a sobriety coach, speaker and author of the book One For The Road: Soberdave. He has hosted a popular podcast about sobriety for almost five years.

On his Instagram account @soberdave, which has amassed a following of almost 200,000, he posts daily motivational tips and insights into the lives of hundreds of people who have joined him in his sober life.

It has been quite the journey for a man who was a carpet fitter with a drink problem for decades.

Wilson grew up in a rough area south of London and his parents did not have much money. Home life was happy – until it was not.

His parents began arguing a lot. Then, he says, they moved house “out of the blue”, probably to try to save their marriage. At 13, he had to leave his friends behind and start a new school in a new area in the middle of the school year.

That would have been upheaval enough for a boy who was “shy, not streetwise, nerdy”. Then Wilson woke one day, aged 14, to a letter from his mum to say she had left his dad.

“There was no social media in those days, no mobile phones, no internet. I had no idea when I was going to see her again.” He was devastated.

A month later, his dad met somebody new who told him, “I just want to be with your dad in privacy.” Wilson expected his dad to stick up for him; he didn’t. “I remember to today the acute sense of rejection,” Wilson says.

When a few boys from school came round to invite him to hang out with them, he had his first can of lager, then his second. The group accepted him because of this, he says, and he realised “booze was the magic solution for me”.

Young people’s drinking is strongly linked to feeling they must do so to belong to a peer group; several studies frame this as “drinking to fit in”. The problem is, of course, that a desire to fit in can become a problem, going from a bad habit to an addiction.

Throughout his teens, Wilson would get drunk with his peers. In his twenties, he was nicknamed Glugs in his local pub because he downed beers so fast. One day, somebody asked Wilson if he was an alcoholic. It stopped him drinking as much in the pub, but meant he began drinking at home, alone, instead.

By his late 30s, Wilson was dependent on alcohol: “Drunk every night. Lock-ins at home, parties for one.”

The weight began to pile on. At 40, he remembers Googling which alcoholic drink contained the fewest calories: vodka. He had never been a spirits drinker, preferring beer and wine, but he ditched those in favour of vodka, and it was not long before he was on a litre a night.

How weight loss and quitting drinking can go hand in hand

Jodi Clark, who posts on Instagram as @soberflourish, has been alcohol-free for three years and four months.

“My reason for stopping started with a 100-day alcohol-free challenge, predominantly to lose weight,” the 42-year-old digital marketer says.

Clark had been booze-free for only 30 days when she began to register other benefits that came with not drinking. She felt much more productive, had more patience with her children, was a better wife and a better manager to her team, and was more consistent with her goals.

“I decided I was going to make this a longer-time lifestyle choice,” she says.

Every element of her life has improved since she gave up alcohol, she says. “I drank for over 20 years and only since quitting did I realise I was living my life at 80 per cent.”

Clark, who lives in the UK, describes herself as having been a “middle-lane drinker”, someone who binged at the weekend but restricted her drinking during the week. She was being “good”, she says. “But even three days … a week is unhealthy – but normalised in our society.”

Red wine and Prosecco were Clark’s tipples. “Prosecco because it has less calories – but I’d drink a few bottles every weekend.”

People tend to forget the weight gain that comes with drinking. Clark, who now runs online groups, challenges and retreats for women, has lost 38kg (84lb) since she stopped.

The weight loss was not just about fewer calories from quitting booze – it was also because she had the mental clarity to stay aligned with her health and fitness goals. She committed to 10,000 steps a day and strength training. Now that she is not drinking, she is not snacking as much, either.

Clark says that there has been a rise in people giving up alcohol and cutting back over the last three years. Instagram supports this: there are dozens of newly sober and sober curious people posting their stories on the platform.

How more women are getting sober

Sober Girl Society (@sobergirlsociety) is one such platform. Journalist and TEDx speaker Millie Gooch, 34, started it in the UK in 2018 when she stopped drinking and found she did not know a single sober person. Her Instagram community of sober women now has almost a quarter of a million followers.

There has been a noticeable increase in women’s interest in getting sober or rethinking their relationship with alcohol, she says. The reasons for this are varied.

“Many women come to it through mental health, anxiety, burnout, sleep issues, hormonal health or realising that alcohol is making life harder rather than easier,” Gooch says. “Others reach a point where the ‘wine as self-care’ narrative stops landing, especially when they are already stretched thin.”

Why alcohol can ruin lives: a nurse practitioner’s perspective

US-based nurse practitioner (NP) Cynthia Thurlow, whose book The Menopause Gut is due for publication this year, has never been much of a drinker. Her father, however, was an alcoholic, and booze contributed to his death.

“His alcoholism definitely impacted my lack of interest in alcohol,” Thurlow says. “I did drink, sporadically and rarely, as a young adult, and stopped entirely during the pandemic. It wrecked my sleep, which is precious to me in my 50s.”

As an NP, she says she has seen alcohol ruin lives – “from cirrhosis of the liver to brain atrophy and a decline in cognition” – not to mention the devastating effects it has on the lives of those who live with the drinker.

Alcohol is one of the single greatest toxins we are exposed to legally, she warns. For women, it increases their risk of cancer and high blood pressure, erodes sleep architecture – especially REM and deep sleep metrics – and dysregulates their blood sugar, leading to poor food choices, she says.

It also predisposes women to unhealthy weight gain as it contributes to “weight-loss resistance”, she says.

She adds that normalising the use of alcohol to cope with the stress, exhaustion and isolation of motherhood is dangerous. “The rampant ‘mommy drinking culture’ is pervasive and destructive.”

No amount of alcohol is safe or healthy, she says, so it is best to find alternatives and limit drinking – if not eliminate it entirely.

How alcohol accelerates ageing – and kills

Alcohol is harmful. When consumed, it is transformed into a chemical by-product called acetaldehyde that “pickles your brain – and also pickles your liver and your heart”, says David Nutt, a professor at Imperial College London in the UK.

Alcohol kills 3 million people a year globally, he says, more than all other drugs put together except tobacco.

Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist – someone who studies how drugs affect the brain and behaviour – and a leading expert on brain chemistry and the effects of alcohol. He is also a co-founder of Sentia Spirits, a company that develops alcohol alternatives.

“Alcohol is the drug most closely linked to brain shrinkage,” he says. “People at the extreme ends of alcoholism have visually apparent brain damage” comparable to those with Alzheimer’s disease.

A team from Oxford University found that drinkers had signs of accelerated biological ageing. People who drank more than 29 units a week (10 large glasses of wine) had telomere shortening equivalent to about one to two years of extra ageing compared with those who drank less than six units a week (two large glasses). Telomeres are “caps” on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with cell division, an ageing process.

Why non-drinking buddies are key to quitting

Wilson got sober when a friend suggested he join him in three months of not drinking.

When he received the phone message, he burst out laughing. He did not think he could do three days; how was he going to manage three months? But it got him thinking. The same evening, he went round to see that friend and shook his hand in agreement.

If his friend had told him he needed to stop drinking for his health, or had lectured rather than invited him to collaborate, or simply had not been in that night, Wilson says he would probably still be drinking – or even dead.

But his friend was there to partner in three months of no booze – and Wilson has not touched a drop since.

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