05.08.26
On life changes · on drinking
This morning’s reflection is one of those that are more personal, a touch raw. I don’t want this to be read as self-helpie, although I make this journal publicly available, its main purpose is as my own record, a map of what I’m doing, thinking and feeling. Don’t take the below as self-help babble, it’s just an account of my thoughts, as they drift through…
This morning, a family friend posted a photo from a couple of summers ago to a WhatsApp group that we’re part of. My wife audibly gasped. I’m in the photo, and I’m a fat bloke. “I didn’t realise how bad it was”, my wife said, “it just doesn’t look like you at all. It’s funny what memory does. I just don’t remember you being like this. I can’t stop looking at it”.
Over the past year I’ve lost four and a half stone in weight; 63 pounds, or 28.58 kilos. It’s an old cliche that the body reflects what’s going on in your mind, I was unhappy in my life and work, and my weight had ballooned beyond all proportion. I definitely had become “a fat bloke”. I was carrying a huge amount of weight; I’d pant and gasp when walking up hill or tackling steps. I’d been an intermittent gym go-er for at least a decade, but working out didn’t touch the sides of the weight gain.
The process of reckoning with where I was in my life, and that I needed to make a change, accelerated last year when my wife had taken the kids to her sister’s for a week and I was alone in the house, in front of the mirror, looking at the fat bloke staring back at me. What happened?
It struck me that, before anything else, before my mind is going to right itself, my body needs to take the lead. I’d read an article in The Guardian about weight loss, the piece argued that there’s a kind of Calvinist shame around weight loss and, in particular, about GLP-1s. People who are taking GLP-1s often hide it, feel a sense of guilt that it’s a form of cheating, that to lose weight you have to suffer through it, that it should be a penitent experience. Why? There’s a technology, it solves this problem.
Later the same day I was scrolling on Bluesky and I noticed an animated discussion of the article, particularly between people with sedentary jobs: people who work in the creative arts, writers, journalists; including big names, people who I admire. Many were reposting the article and confessing to all being on GLP-1s. I made the decision there and then to climb on board, I signed up to an online pharmacy, bought Mounjaro and started injecting it. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
I lost all that weight in under a year. I have now come off the drug, but I wouldn’t hesitate to return to it if I ever packed on weight again. I’ve never felt better. It’s changed my relationship with food, it’s changed my relationship with my physicality, I feel good, I’m able to exercise better than ever, I’m able to accomplish this walk far easier. As part of the walk I have to climb a cliff face, up a vertiginous set of steps, and I’m now able to do so without hyperventilating by the time I reach the summit. One day my six-year-old asked if he could step on my scales, the reading showed his weight as two stone. God - I was climbing those stairs, up the cliff, carrying two six-year-olds on my back.
Dropping the weight was the key to changing my entire outlook, getting healthier, getting in shape. It led me to reflect on the source of my unhappiness, the first step into embracing the decision that I had known for a while I needed to take, but had not yet taken.
Once you’ve made a drastic lifestyle change, it becomes easier to make subsequent life changes. The big one followed: as anyone who’s read the opening entry in this journal will remember, I left the business that I’d built and run for more than twenty-five years. After that, the most recent revolution: a reckoning with my alcohol consumption.
Like many people who work in the arts and entertainment, I drink too much. I’m a child of the ‘90s, and 90s Britain in particular. The legal drinking age in the UK is eighteen, but with our national pub and drinking culture, most people of my generation would start at fourteen, fifteen years old – at fifteen you could reliably get served in a pub, the law was nowhere near as stringently enforced as it is in the US. And so, of course, over time I developed a drinking habit.
The whole film business is built around parties and drinks receptions. We were young, and I had a thriving film company in the heart of the most exciting area in London, with huge offices, with people coming and going. I was there late every night, going out to bars, and meet-ups, drinking through what was a convivial, optimistic time.
It was an easy thing for my drinking to become excessive. Again, an old familiar story - I developed the habit of drinking for emotional reasons: as a support, to cure boredom or dissatisfaction, to mask problems, as a pick-me-up. A few weeks ago, I decided to follow both the weight loss and the liberating process of quitting my company with the next logical life change, which is to drastically reduce my alcohol consumption.
Now, I am not an alcoholic. But I have learned a few things about alcoholism which may be of use to anyone stumbling across this journal:
1. “Alcoholism” isn’t a particularly useful concept. Alcoholism exists in the form of someone who has a physical dependency, who wakes up every morning and drinks first thing, stops when they go to bed; but those people are rare. Far more common are “problem drinkers”, and so the preferred term in the alcohol recovery community is “alcohol use disorder”, deployed to describe people who drink excessively and for unhealthy reasons. I fall into that category.
2. This was a shocking revelation for me: the effect of alcohol is not a universal one. Not everyone experiences alcohol in the same way, people with alcohol use disorder derive from alcohol a particular, euphoric sensation which most people do not. I thought everyone experienced that sensation when drinking, but apparently not; it’s only some people, I am one of them.
3. For those people, it is very, very, very difficult to reduce alcohol consumption through willpower. Now, as I said, I’m not an alcoholic and I can go for long stretches without drinking. I don’t drink, for example, through the month of January, I take a month’s break after the heavy Christmas weeks of eating and drinking. I also try not to drink during the week, and most of the time I don’t, but I will be constantly assailed with alcohol noise during those periods. It takes willpower, I need to consciously think about not drinking. I want to drink, that’s the point: at any moment where I face a setback, a disappointment, a moment of stress, I’ll reach for a drink to medicate with.
This is the pattern I need to stop, and following my positive experience with GLP-1s I thought “there must be something for alcohol” – there is. A few weeks ago I started taking Naltrexone according to a protocol known as the Sinclair method. Naltrexone is a cheap, generic opiod blocker, it interrupts that euphoric sensation that the disordered drinker derives from alcohol. The theory is that over time the drug retrains your brain, the euphoric reward stops and so the craving for it stops, the noise stops, and you no longer feel like automatically reaching for a drink. It takes the willpower out of it.
I’m about a month in and I have noticed a powerful difference. They say the average time for it to complete its work is about six months. For some people it’s as short as three months, for others it can be longer - up to a couple of years. For me it’s been so far, so good.
I looked at myself in that photo this morning: overweight, unhappy, drinking too much and it was a useful reminder about how quickly things can change for the better with the right commitment. A year on and I’m now a healthy weight, I’m fit, I go to the gym nearly every day, I do this walk every morning, and I’m now rapidly reducing my alcohol consumption. All of that puts me in the best position possible to navigate this next phase of trying to build a new career and realise my ambitions.
Last night I spent some time looking back over the project, looking back over some sources of inspiration, and I know exactly what I’m going to be doing once I return from this walk; I’m already thinking, with enthusiasm, about the first sequence that I’m going to tackle during this morning’s edit, and making this film as strong as I can.