The honest audit
The 7-question test, the units, what your drinking is actually doing. The number you've been rounding down for years.
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§ Journey
The 7-question test, the units, what your drinking is actually doing. The number you've been rounding down for years.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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