The 50 beer challenge

Beer is great. It tastes wonderful, it makes you feel pretty good, and one or two drinks can make you a little more sociable.

Beer does have a lot of negative effects. It destroys your liver. It makes you unsafe to drive. It can become an addiction.

How much alcohol should a man consume? It is different for everyone.

How much alcohol does it take to become an alcoholic? That is an easier question to answer. Sort of.

A quick search through Wikipedia for Alcoholism brings up the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The guidelines state that moderate consumption of alcohol is no more than 2 alcoholic drinks a day for men and 1 alcoholic drink a day for women. Moderate use of alcohol most likely would not be considered alcoholism but drinking 365 to 730 beers in a year would have detrimental effects on the liver.

I think I may be more risk adverse than most men. Almost each time I have a beer, I feel slightly bad about having it because it is causing harm to my liver. And I know that without discipline, it can be very easy to consume more and more beer. I do have a couple of friends that drink a case of beer throughout a week.

So I wanted to do something to make sure I don't become an alcoholic. The best thing I could think of was to keep track of all the beers I drink and try to scale the amount down year after year.

The first year, I just drank normally so I could have a bench mark to use for the future. When 2013 was finished, I drank a total of 45 or 46 beers.

When I told my friends this, they told me I was crazy. I am nowhere even close to becoming an alcoholic. And that is exactly where I want to keep it. I want to try to live to the age of 88.

So this is the 50 beer challenge.

Keep track of all the alcoholic drinks you consume and keep it under 50. If 50 is too difficult, you can always scale the number to something that is more realistic. Maybe on man will struggle to keep it under 100 and a different guy could easily keep it under 20.

Setting a goal like this is a SMART goal.

1. It is specific. Drink less than a certain amount of alcohol.
2. It is measurable. You can keep track of all the drinks in a notebook or excel file.
3. I forgot what the A stood for in this acronym. Maybe it stood for action driven.
4. It is realistic.
5. It is time specific. One year.

It is really important to have a realistic goal. It is very common to hear about some guy making a New Year's resolution to give up beer for an entire year and failing in March. After that he goes back to his regular habits and ends up drinking 80 beers whereas if he set the goal to 60 beers, he could have achieved the goal.