I pretty much stopped drinking after getting a Garmin and working out regularly (zwift).

Even a single bottle of beer completely wrecks all of my stats for the next 24 hrs. Sleep quality nosedives, heart rate shoots up and I'm sweating like an idiot on very moderate cycling efforts. No surprise this is bad for your health, 3 evenings a week mean, you'll spend close to half your time in this hungover state.

> by definition, my alcohol consumption from my late teens to late 20s would be considered binge drinking.

“I’m a social drinker”

Social binge-drinking is the norm. Amongst my peers, I’d define this as drinking to the point of severe drunkenness on a roughly biweekly basis.

I think it’s genuinely frightening how normalized this is.

> After my blood tests came back as abnormal I was sent to Glasgow’s New Victoria Hospital, where I had an ultrasound, and finally a fibroscan. All this took place over the course of about a year. A fibroscan is a type of non-invasive ultrasound which measures liver stiffness. A reading of seven kPA (a unit used to measure the level of oxygen in the blood) or below is considered normal. My reading was 10.2.

> Several months after my diagnosis, I went back for a repeat fibroscan to see if there had been any improvement. I was relieved to see that my fibroscan reading had gone from 10.2 to 4.7 - back in the normal and healthy range.

That's a pretty dramatic recovery. Reassuring for those who are thinking about quitting alcohol.

Alcohol Is poison.

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