How One Food Critic Overcame His Bad Relationship With Alcohol And Sugary Drinks

In the final part of a month-long series, Pete Wells and experts suggest how to avoid problems with alcohol or sugary drinks.

Reset your Appetite This is the last of four articles by Pete Wells about how he developed healthy eating habits. First of all focuses on reducing sugar consumption, the second one in stocking the home with proper food and the third on a sensible diet.

When it came time to rid myself of the stupidity of my diet, I had no problem swearing off duck skin, sticky buns, jelly beans and other tempting but ultimately baseless foods. The hole they left in my diet wasn’t huge and was easily filled with sensible choices.

I didn’t feel bad, either, about finding nutritious stand-ins of white rice, pasta and other starchy foods that I relied on whenever my stomach felt like a box of wolverines. I don’t eat bowls full of yellow ramen noodles as often as I used to, but I rely on making soba, delicious and healthy, with pure buckwheat flour.

Cleaning up my drinking habits was very challenging.

Sometimes it seemed to me that I had a richer, more rewarding relationship with alcohol than all but a handful of people. It was a never-ending field of study, a companion of heat during great meals, a reliable comfort for those who have nothing. And it brought me closer to my real friends, at least some of them, sometimes.

Over time, however, the rewards became more uniform and harder to justify. It wasn’t just the weight I gained, it was the predictable result of having a cocktail every night followed by about three glasses of wine or beer. At this point, they were undeniable signs that my liver was in overdrive.

I slept badly with all that alcohol in my system, and it got worse over time. Anyone who lived under the same roof told me that my panting and snoring was not only loud but scary—a symptom of shortness of breath, exacerbated by all that drinking. I was always tired. Early in the morning, I would fall asleep on the couch after my second cup of coffee.

In each cup, I mixed a tablespoon of sugar and two or three that I ate after bed. My head was crying for the sugar to go away in the morning, and it cried the most on days when I was also constipated.

The howling stopped when I started to sleep sober and I stopped when I went down a lot to control my sleep pattern. When I cut back on drinking, a large number of daily calories just disappeared – some from the alcohol itself, some from the sugar in my coffee, and some from the extra alcohol that made me want to eat it.

If I drink at mealtime, I’m always a little hungry. My mind becomes heavy and unfocused – part of the point of the alcohol, of course, but it makes me lose track of what glass of wine I’m in.

And any decisions I’ve made about, say, staying out of the dessert course will be reversed once the alcohol has sunk into the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s supposed to control control and judgment.

Do a Morning-After Check

In his book “The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How To Stop” Judson Brewer, a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, calls alcohol a “double whammy” for binge eaters because it clouds our judgment and blurs our vision.

He suggests people wait to assess the damage until morning.

“They want to ask in a non-judgmental way, Was that drink worth it?”

“Then make a comparison with what happens if they don’t drink,” he said.

Even during sober times, I didn’t think too much about all the alcohol and sugar in the liquid portion of my diet. I knew enough to stay away from soda, sugary bottled tea and other sugary drinks, one piece of advice that nutritionists seem to agree on.

I used to cringe when I saw baristas double pumping caramel syrup into someone else’s latte. But I didn’t notice how much my coffee was starting to resemble melted ice cream or worry too much about how my first glass of wine made it easier to order more.

When I look at the changes I have made, I realize that I am one of the lucky ones. As I enjoy alcohol a lot, it was not mandatory for me. Sometimes I have a glass or two when I go out to eat, but I’m not tempted to have one or two and so on.

I’m lucky, too, that I enjoy my coffee black, the way I drank it before driving my metabolism into a hole.

“Coffee itself is a healthy food,” said Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “One of the good things is that it squeezes calories into your fat cells so you’re less hungry,” he said, citing research showing that caffeine stimulates lipolysis, the process of breaking down stored fat.

But if you add too much sugar, he said, “you undermine the health benefits of coffee.”

Search for Changed

I have water with a lot of food now, although sometimes I don’t, because I’m still an interested person, OK? Especially with Mexican food, I make a lot of agua frescas and find that they don’t need a lot of sugar when made with sweet ingredients like watermelon, cucumber and pineapple. In Mexico, they are often pressed, but I usually leave the pulp, which reduces the level of sugar that hits the blood.

Last summer I tried Indian spiced lemonade, known as shikanji or nimbu pani, to see how much sourness I could drink before I looked at my face. The toasted cumin and black rock salt, with their sulphurous smell of hard-boiled eggs, distracted me from reducing the sugar, to a point. Maybe next summer, I’ll cut out sugar completely, like some people in India do.

I like the soft drink served at Superiority Burger in Manhattan, the Sugarless Cape Cod – unsweetened cranberry juice mixed with a big squirt of seltzer. It is soft and strong, and it rubs in the mouth between bites.

Unsweetened iced tea, which is put aside for those who don’t eat it, has saved me many times. Like wine, tea has tannins, which give a certain crunch to rich foods to go with it, although a very strong tea can be too strong for the table. I prefer the mellow result you get from cold brewing for a few hours. Oolong and hojicha respond well to this treatment. Korean barley tea goes well with food, and is, however, not true tea.

There are nights when I feel lucky to live in a glorious age when humanity finally discovered that non-alcoholic beer tastes good. Brewed with food, it behaves in the same way as real beer, although it is less effective at removing capsaicin, the substance that makes chiles hot. Non-alcoholic wine and cocktails haven’t come far, but they’re better than ever.

But, I’m happy to say, I still have wine every week or two. And I haven’t completely given up martinis, the first drink I learned to love. I order one at the bar, feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I take the first drink, feel like I’ve been reunited with an old friend. At the same time, he’s one of those old friends I don’t need to see more than two or three times a year.

Recipes to Reset Your Drinking

Iced Coffee | Cold Brew Coffee, Profile Style | New Orleans Cold Drip Coffee | Turmeric Tea | Three Herb Iced Tea | Mojito Iced Tea | Peach Tea | Nimbu Pani Limeade | See all the recipes for this series

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