Hi! Can some of you that have taken longer to be on the cured list please give me some encouragement? I've been doing this for 11 months now, and I've been doing much better. However, I'm still not where I want to be. Over Christmas, I was very stressed out and had a major slip up. This really shocked and discouraged me. Help anyone?

I wasn't a slow responder, but I would like to ask you to clarify one point -- was the "major slip-up" just higher numbers, or did you not take the nal? If the latter, have there been other slip-ups like that? Because sometimes taking it and sometimes not is actually worse than never taking it; it's called intermittent reinforcement and actually makes behavior harder to extinguish later.

Also, Christmas barely even counts wrt lowering drinking or diets or anything like that. It's just a crazy time.

I took it, but I drank Way too much! I'm very discouraged right now, because I actually went on binge again. That hasn't happened in months.

Again, I wasn't a slow responder, but "doing much better" punctuated by two binges doesn't sound that bad to me.

Maybe do a few AF days, for contrast?

Mamak,

I'm not on the cured list, but I feel like I am turning the corner! I've been at this for a little over eight months and have had some periods where I was discouraged. One of those periods was just recently. I have also binged a bit over the holidays, but I am attributing that to the time of the year and being a temporary bachelor. I also wasn't a strict adherent to the golden rule until fairly recent. That didn't help my cause, so I am even more encouraged now that I am a strictly following the protocol. I don't know what your pre-TSM numbers were like, and this is just an observation and far from scientific, but it appears to me that it takes longer to get cured for people that were drinking higher quantities prior to starting TSM. I have also had two distinct periods where my levels fell and then climbed back up a bit before settling back down.

When you were on the binge did you notice a difference in how alcohol affected you? Keep the faith. Good luck and please keep us posted.

About 16 months for me and still not where I want to be. But cutting back from over 100 units per week to about 30 is progress. However, I can still have a 20 unit plus day anytime, difference being is that it is always slower than I used to drink, so I rarely have black outs any more. Still got a long way to go. So hang in there.

I don't know what "cured" means. I drink less than 20 units a month now, when it used to be about 250. Nothing was immediate, but it did eventually work.