Alcohol and exercise, bad and good sweat, abeyance and stairs

Tuesday 3/10/26

I saw a headline for an article this morning about the relationship between alcohol and exercise. Specifically, can one exercise to a degree such that this exercise cancels out their alcohol consumption in terms of their fitness. Can the exercise win that race, if you will.

I went to click on this article, but it was behind a paywall and why would one pay money for what is almost certainly to be formulaic writing that resembles the rest of the formulaic writing? Rare is the writer who couldn't be replaced by just about every other so-called writer. But I digress.

I didn't need to read this article because I know the answer anyway. I have lived the answer. And the answer is a decided "No."

Here's what you can do. If you're drinking a lot, a great deal of exercise will keep things from being worse than they are, but you'll still be a mess--especially on the inside, ever-trending to worse--no matter what.

From 2013-2015--so we're talking three years--I walked 3000 miles each of those years. That's a real number. The width of this country.

The booze would sweat out of me, and it didn't take much to get me sweating that booze. That's because it's poison and your body wants it the hell out of you.

This wasn't the good kind of sweat. The good kind of sweat is when you're running stairs and there's no poison in your body seeking egress. That's a sweat that makes you feel good about yourself, your effort.

When you exercise to try and offset the effects of the alcohol, the best you can achieve is a sort of lessening abeyance. A holding pattern, but you still keep going down. You can only hold yourself in place so much.

I was about as far from sedentary as one could be, and yet my heart started having all these problems. I was going to the emergency room because of my heart. In a way, I was an extreme case, because I believe that if I kept going the way I was--even with all of that mobility--that I wouldn't be alive now.

I feel like people do things so they can tell people they did them so they can get attention. And that they're often scam artists with nothing else in their lives. So you get the woman who hasn't had a drink in two years trying to monetize that and fill her empty existence with a fraudulent version of purpose by writing in her Threads bio that she's a sobriety coach while she fills up her feed with one platitude after another--and bullet points; lots of AI-type bullet points that were probably written by AI--all the livelong day.

Wellness doesn't work in this fashion. No form of wellness does.

If you want to exercise and have it really mean something--physically, mentally, emotionally--it's best to cut out the alcohol entirely. Otherwise, it's not only in the back--or maybe closer to the front--of the mind, but it's weighing you down in those workouts. You may be getting pennies back on the dollar, so to speak. You're definitely not getting a dollar for a dollar.

You're always working to overcome what you're doing to yourself. Instead of going one-against-one--to put it in hockey or basketball terms--you're going one-against-two. Or one-against-three. Or trying to do a one-person show thing through the entire unit your opponent has out there.

Things are hard enough without you also helping to be against you.

People will bemoan a lack of results from their workouts, but I think you'd find that other choices they're making elsewhere is a big factor, and often the salient factor.