Hmm. sounds like your experience is similar to mine, except I still drink twice as much as you do now. my numbers dropped to where they are quickly, and basically have stayed the same ever since the first month. Your results are better than mine but the effect seems to be the same, seems like I am drinking out of boredom or habit and not out of a need to feed the monkey on my back, except for social situations where AL does what it is mainly used for, loosening me up a bit. maybe I'm not fighting the cravings or aiming at goals like you are and that's the difference. I plan on keeping TSM up and maybe adding topa after a while if it doesn't drop again. keep us posted

Great results Nutella. It's amazing that you were able to see such a fast and rapid reduction in your units, starting at 80 units, and then to have such a consistently and sustained low weekly and daily unit count.

My question: how motivated were you at the early stages? It's humbling to see you go from 80 units to 40 (only once!), 30 and then 20 units per week right from the start -- a 50% - 75% drop right away -- followed quickly by an additional huge drop to about 14 units.

Merlot,

I think I was/am very motivated. For years I realized what's going on but when drinking started to interfere with my sex life and work, I knew that the time has come to do something about it. The initial drop wasn't as smooth as on averaged weekly graph but yes, getting down to four units per day proved to be more or less effortless. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I had none, zero side effects from Nal. Another possibility perhaps is that I really love doing experiments (that's how I earn my living anyway) and thus tend to approach TSM as an experiment that has to be well-planned and executed. For example, at this point I am perfectly content with the amount of drinking. Two units per day every day for the rest of my life would be entirely fine health and social life-wise. But I don't want to pop Nal daily. So I continue to hope that it is possible to get a bit more "cured" and drink more like most people do, only socially. If that won't happen for me, I know that at some point I will attempt to drink without Nal. If anything, in order to test the re-addiction aspect of it on humans instead of mice

I'd say the "cured" around here are 50/50 between people who became abstinent and people who felt comfortable (and therefore cured) drinking ~ 20 units or less a week.

Yeah, I am very lucky too in that I don't experience any noticeable side effects from NAL. The first time I tried it almost 10 years ago (according to non-TSM abstinence method which was unsuccessful for me) I felt a little spaced out the first time I tried it. However, that was only on the first occassion. This time around I experienced no side effects whatsoever.

I am impressed by your limited drinking approach of only 2 units per day on most occasions. However, I will probably adopt a different approach. I think I'd often -- not always -- rather not drink at all than limit myself to two drinks, especially if I'm just at home by myself rather than in a social situation. I'm aiming to become mostly an occassional, weekend type drinker --2 or 3 times a week max, with a 5 unit max on each occassion. I'd rather go AF more often and save up the units for a proper "drinking session" a couple of times a week.

i also find the no side effects interesting. it seems that when i started, (6/10) the conventional wisdom on the board was that having side effects at first was a probable indicator of future tsm success. i believe at that time houtx was a long time member who was having no success and was one of the few without any side effects from nal. it seems that merlot and nutella have dissproven the no side effects means lack of success theory.
more data is always better
path

Another eight weeks passed since my last update. Time for another one. For the most part, more of the same. Except for the one thing that I discuss below. Also adding two more graphs with different measures of progress:






So that's a single exponential fit to daily, weekly and average drinks per drinking day data, and a hyperbolic fit to the number of AF days per week. My weekly average remains approximately 14 units with an average 2.5 AF days per week and about 3 units per drinking day.

Of note, some bad things happened in the family right before Christmas. Very stressful. I couldn't resist and went back to the known and tried sedative. Hence the spike in drinking. Fortunately, it turned out that while on NAL I physically don't want to drink much more that 4-6 drinks a day. I mean I could if I needed to, but a bottle of wine a day was an absolute maximum that I actually desired during those days. Got me worried if and how I can drop it down to a more now habitual 2-3 a day. As the stress slowly went away, so did the drinking.

By any means, I still can't consider myself "cured". Main reason is the same as before: Thinking about drinking daily. Deciding not to drink is pretty easy but not thinking about it at all does not come natural (yet?). Somewhat encouragingly, I am finding that the idea of drinking now seems to be more appealing than the drinking itself. That is, the slight buzz is no longer particularly enjoyable. Just got enough NAL from Allchemist to last another year. For now, the plan is to stick with TSM for about 5 years total and then, assuming that nothing much changes, try either drinking without NAL (to find out what exactly happens) or going dry. Whatever is more appealing at this relatively distant future...

Amazing to be making plans in terms of "years" instead of month, weeks, or days (I'm still on the Days of My Life plan). It's weird for me, I still think about AL a lot-daily-but I have no prob w/ AF days. I look forward to seeing how your progress unfolds since you are one of the few "old timers" who still posts regularly.
And your graphs remind me how much my statistical skills have declined since dissertation (multivariate survey). Yikes!

This really spoke to me. I have all these expectations associated with drinking but when I drink now they are not fulfilled. I suppose this is what extinction is all about. It may take a long time to get to the point where we don't think about drinking. Thanks for posting your update. Cured or not you are managing this. At the levels you are drinking you are not a danger to yourself or anyone else so from the outside looking in it looks like success.

Hi Nutella - Thanks so much for posting. I'm not sure I truly understand your graphs, but I do understand the downward line.
When I started on 12/1 my goal was to be abstinent as soon as possible. Now I see that I can't quite plan how this will go. My goal is still to be abstinent, but if I can get to a few AF days a week with minimal drinking per session like you I would be very proud and very relieved. Keep up the great work.

HG