Don't use the holiday season as an excuse for binge drinking.
Rum in your cake, a peg in your hand, a few more swilling around in your tummy, to keep company with the naans, kebabs and onion rings. Sounds like your average Indian holiday weekend — but is it as much fun in retrospect?
Mornings-after can be dismal because of hangovers, but still feature a residual glow of satisfaction at having had a sociable night and managed to safely put away at least your fair share of alcohol. Socially fortified, however, you may be physically weakened.
If you’re not a regular drinker, and tend to get carried away by holiday spirits (such as the new year’s eve celebrations), perhaps you qualify as a binge drinker. There’s no firm definition of binge drinking, although medical standards in parts of the Western world now say that five drinks or more on “an occasion” (which could last an evening or the whole day), and four drinks for women, qualifies as a binge.
That might strike you as a harsh assessment, because surely five drinks consumed over a full evening’s food and entertainment is not excessive. But here’s a list of types of people, according to the UK Telegraph, considered to be at risk of binge drinking: people looking to de-stress, social conformists and community drinkers, depressives, those who feel a hedonistic need to lose control, macho drinkers, borderline dependents and the plain bored. Such a classification covers just about everybody — which means that most of us face a risk of over-drinking at one time or another.
Drinking more than you’re used to, all at once, can result in some degree of alcohol poisoning. The effects include mental confusion and vomiting, and if severe, can stretch to seizures, dangerously slow breathing and even hypothermia.
Impaired decision-making, a relatively mild effect, makes it unwise to drive, for instance, or even to gamble at cards — another favourite holiday pastime. You can become more aggressive than usual, so you may get into fights. If you binge frequently, you can damage your brain.
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Even smoking and drinking interact dangerously. Studies suggest that smoking prevents the intestines from absorbing nutrition — which means you drink more for the same effect.
The solution lies in drinking slowly and carefully, and choosing the right kind of alcohol. One key health factor is abdominal fat. Mild alcohol consumption, especially of wine, is good by this measure, but binge drinking is terrible: the more drinks per day, the greater the fat deposition, and the greater the health trouble you save up for the future.
