Over the last few weeks I have made a couple of posts about my drinking habits (one here and one here), well yesterday was the end of my first week of tracking my alcohol intake using the NHS Iphone app. As you can see below I didn’t do too badly.
My alcohol intake - week 1
As you can see Friday’s intake was huge compared to the other days which would suggest I drank lots of beer, but the truth is I only had 4 bottles that day – 2 bottles of Thornbridge Halcyon, 1 bottle of Okells IPA and one bottle of Shepherds Neame 1698, the problem with this was that they weighed in at 7.7%, 4.5% and 6.5% respectively. This meant that just one bottle of Halcyon meant I was close to the recommended daily allowance and 2 bottles made me a binge drinker.
If you look at the other days these were days where I only had one bottle, but again a couple of them were rather strong so put me close to the red line again, so I dread to think what would happen if you had a good session on the ale or went out drinking spirits, I have a feeling the graph would look quite scary.
The app overall seems pretty good although it does limit the way you can enter the drinks you have had, for example the beer strength only goes up to 9% and there are some rather common drink serving sizes missing such as the 500ml bottle. This means that you have to put a 500ml bottle, the same goes if you have a 6.3% beer you have to put it in as 6.5%, it wouldn’t take much for the developers to remedy this but I can’t help think the NHS’ money would be better spent else where.
Judging by the comments on the Itunes store, some people have come across the same problem with other drinks others seem to think its a game to see if you can drink more than your mate or drink more than the day before, so no doubt someone will point this out to the NHS at some point and they will get a bit of a ticking off through no fault of their own.
In the meantime I will continue to track my intake and post it on here so you can all see how much of a problem I (supposedly have)
It’s funny you should be looking at your alcohol intake over the same two weeks as me. I actually went to the doctors this week as I’ve been a bit worried about feeling run down and having a couple of odd symptoms that a foolish search on Google got me worried about (doctor said not to worry about it!)
I’m definitely trying to get in shape and part of that will keeping my alcohol consumption in check. I’m not stopping drinking (I have a beer blog to keep up to date after all!), I’m much more focussed on improving my diet and eating more fresh fruit and veg, but I will be perhaps having one less on a Saturday and making sure I don’t get into a habitual routine of drinking most nights.
I wrote a little bit about my new beer diet (well running diet really!) – it’s all fruit, low glycaemic food and things like beans and nuts. To be fair I can’t really avoid carbs but if you’ve seen my frame I probably need some of those, especially when I get back into regular running.
On the iphone app, I think it has potential to be useful, and I don’t think the misuse of it will be encouraging the types of people who would misuse alcohol anyway. I’d like to think it will raise awareness of units and sensible drinking. Whether or not units actually work as a way of helping people understand alcohol intake I don’t know…
I’ve seen the physical effects of regular alcohol abuse and there’s no doubt alcohol affects your health and your body. Yes, I get sozzled and shit faced as Pete Brown put it the other day, but it isn’t something any human can do night after night or should do to extremes. Even a few bottles a night every single night isn’t a great idea.
Beer is something I love but I want to enjoy it along with all the other things I love doing in life (including writing about beer!)