The honest audit

I lied to my GP about how much I drank for nine years. Not by much. Five drinks a week became three. Two bottles of red on a weekend became "a couple of glasses". I wasn't trying to deceive him. I was answering the question I wished he'd asked, with the number I wished were true. He nodded, ticked the box, and we moved on to my cholesterol.

The day I actually wrote down what I drank, in a notes app, for fourteen days straight, the number was almost double what I'd been telling him. Same drinking. New honesty.

This module is the audit. Not a confession, not a moral inventory. A measurement. Once you have the real number, the rest of the protocol has something to push against.

What an Australian standard drink actually is

A standard drink in Australia is 10 grams of pure alcohol. That sounds neat. In practice, almost nothing you pour into a glass at home is one standard drink.

The real numbers, the ones nobody ever quotes back at you:

• A 150ml restaurant pour of red wine (13.5% ABV) is 1.6 standard drinks.
• A "wine" in your hand at home, the one you pour after dinner, is usually 200-250ml. That is 2.1 to 2.6 standard drinks per glass.
• A 375ml mid-strength beer (3.5%) is 1 standard drink. A 375ml full-strength (4.8%) is 1.4. A craft IPA at 6.5% in a 500ml can is 2.6.
• A 30ml nip of spirits at 40% is 1 standard drink. Almost nobody at home pours 30ml. A "small whisky" is more like 45-60ml, which is 1.4 to 1.9.
• A bottle of red wine is between 7 and 8 standard drinks, not "a couple of glasses".

If you've been counting "drinks" rather than standard drinks, your real intake is probably 50-80% higher than your reported intake. That is not a moral failure. It is a measurement error you've been living inside.

The 7-question test

This is AUDIT-C, the screening tool every GP uses, scaled up to 7 questions so it actually tells you something useful. Score each on 0-4. Be honest. The whole exercise is worthless if you fudge it.

1. How often do you have a drink containing alcohol? Never (0) / Monthly or less (1) / 2-4 times a month (2) / 2-3 times a week (3) / 4 or more times a week (4).

2. How many standard drinks on a typical day when you are drinking? 1-2 (0) / 3-4 (1) / 5-6 (2) / 7-9 (3) / 10 or more (4).

3. How often do you have 5 or more standard drinks on one occasion? Never (0) / Less than monthly (1) / Monthly (2) / Weekly (3) / Daily or almost daily (4).

4. How often in the last year have you found you couldn't stop once you started? Same scale.

5. How often in the last year have you needed a drink in the morning to get yourself going? Same scale.

6. How often in the last year have you felt guilt or remorse after drinking? Same scale.

7. How often in the last year have you been unable to remember what happened the night before? Same scale.

Add the numbers. The cut-offs:

• 0-3: Low risk. The audit isn't really about you.
• 4-7: Hazardous. You are over the line where alcohol is statistically doing measurable damage to your sleep, mood and body composition. Not dependent. Course-correctable with a 90-day reset.
• 8-14: Harmful. Drinking is doing visible damage to your life or your health. The 90-day protocol still works, but tell your GP you're trying it. Withdrawal is unlikely to be dangerous in this band, but worth a conversation.
• 15+: Possible dependence. Don't do this alone. Call your GP before day one. Withdrawal at this level can be medically serious. This is a small group, but if you're in it, you matter.

What the drinking is actually doing

The visible cost of two-and-a-half bottles of wine a week is about 2,000 kilojoules a day, $80 in the bottle shop, and a Saturday morning that starts at 10am. That's the bill you've been paying.

The invisible cost is the one this module exists for:

• Sleep architecture. Alcohol gets you to sleep faster and wrecks the second half of the night. REM is suppressed. Deep sleep collapses. You wake at 3am with your heart racing because your body is processing acetaldehyde. You think you're sleeping seven hours. You're getting four hours of useful sleep and three hours of pharmacological unconsciousness.
• Blood pressure. Three-plus standard drinks a day raises systolic blood pressure measurably within weeks. Most men in their forties carrying "borderline" BP are carrying a drinking problem the GP hasn't named.
• Body composition. Alcohol metabolises before fat does. While the drink is in your system, your body parks every gram of fat it would otherwise burn. Two glasses of wine at dinner blocks fat oxidation for 8-12 hours. That is why you can't shift the gut.
• Mood baseline. Alcohol is a depressant that rebounds with anxiety. The 4pm Sunday gloom you've been calling "the Sunday scaries" is often just yesterday's wine running out. Take it away for two weeks and the baseline lifts. You think you're a moody man. You may just be a hungover one.
• Testosterone. Heavy drinking suppresses it. Not catastrophically, not permanently, but enough to feel in the gym, in the bedroom, and in the mirror.

The number you've been rounding down

Open a notes app. Title it "Drinks log". For fourteen days, every drink, the size in ml, the strength in percent. Not in retrospect. As you pour it. No commentary.

At day 15, do the maths. Multiply ml by ABV, divide by 1000, divide by 12.7. That is your standard drink count. Add the fortnight. Halve it. That is your weekly average.

I will bet you a small amount of money it's higher than the figure you would have given me on day one.

The audit is not the cure. It is the photograph. You can't course-correct a number you've been hiding from yourself for a decade.

Measure it. Name it. Then start the reset.