January is the perfect time to ‘kickstart’ your ‘wellness journey’. Or is it? The last time I participated in Dry January, I celebrated the long-awaited arrival of February by drinking a 700ml bottle of vodka, dramatically collapsing on a staircase, and being carried out of a party by paramedics. After all, I earned it.
For most people, however, Dry January provides a much-needed respite from the ongoing dangers of living in a society obsessed with alcohol – as well as an opportunity to reevaluate their relationships with booze. The challenge was created by Alcohol Change UK, a brilliant charity that focuses on reducing alcohol harm, shifting cultural norms surrounding alcohol consumption, and campaigning for treatment services to receive proper funding.
Still, since my ill-fated attempt at Dry January, the challenge hasn't sat quite right with me. And it may have something to do with the fact that I'm not just a retired binge drinker; I'm a recovering chronic dieter. When I decided to treat myself to alcohol poisoning as a reward for not drinking for 31 days, I was inadvertently applying the ‘all-or-nothing’ mindset that powered me through late-night binges after a ‘successful’ day of calorie-counting. How else had this diet mentality impacted my ability to participate in Dry January?
In 2024, a whopping 215,000 people signed up to participate in the 31-day challenge. With even more expected to get involved in 2025, it feels like the right time to explore diet culture's presence surrounding the initiative, from the language used, e.g., “resets”, “cleanses”, “detoxes”, to the fact that weight loss is so often cited as one of the benefits of sobriety, to provide a way to get the most out of Dry January without inadvertently falling down a diet culture rabbit hole.
To examine how diet culture influences our decisions to stop drinking, it's first necessary to understand how the alcohol industry can thrive within this culture.
Does alcohol have a protected status within diet culture?
Just as we've been taught to revere alcohol, we've also been socialised to adhere to the beauty ideals dictated by diet culture. And naturally, there's an overlap.
Christy Harrison, a registered anti-diet dietician and author of Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating, identified four pillars of diet culture, describing it as a system of beliefs that…
- Worship thinness, equating it to health and moral virtue;
- Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status (including health status, moral status, and social status);
- Demonises some foods while elevating others, creating a dichotomy between foods that are good/bad, clean/dirty, and healthy/unhealthy;
- Oppresses people who don't match a supposed picture of health and wellbeing.
The foundations of diet culture are recognisable but hard to pinpoint. Amid an overdue backlash to the diet industry, corporations with a vested interest in making people feel inadequate have turned to the all-encompassing realm of wellness to rehabilitate – not repurpose – their brands.
The cultural obsession with alcohol has largely survived diet culture's pivot from weight loss to wellness. Despite the fact that alcohol is a causal factor in more than 60 medical conditions and is the biggest risk factor for death, ill health and disability among 15-49-year-olds in the UK (via GOV.UK), our consumption of this substance is still considered compatible with the pursuit of health and wellbeing.
“Did you know wine can actually help you lose weight on your birthday? With a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, you can't pick up any cake,” reads a greetings card in a Post Office in North London. The gimmicky text is accompanied by an illustration of a thin woman looking absolutely delighted as she pours herself a glass of red wine. The colour of the wine is important – numerous studies have pointed to correlations between drinking red wine and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, improved gut health, and weight loss. These studies often reach the public consciousness through reductive articles and news segments, rushing to inform consumers that yes, drinking can ~actually~ be good for you.
The greetings card is only a small example of the cultural messaging about wellness and drinking alcohol that we're constantly exposed to. As Millie Gooch writes in The Sober Girl Society Handbook, “The booze industry […] has responded to demand from those attempting to live a more conscious lifestyle by making a big push with products such as organic beer and bio-dynamic wine.”
She adds, “Yoga is no longer just happy baby, and tree poses; it’s Vino & Vinyasa, or Yin & Gin […] Wellness websites are flooded with recipes for vitamin-packed cocktails to boost our immune system…”
While the alcohol industry contorts itself to appeal to an increasingly wellness-oriented market, individual decisions to explore ‘mindful drinking’ or ‘sober curiosity’ are heavily influenced – and limited by – the diet wellness industry itself.
“I realised the strength I needed to socialise sober was a muscle that required training.”
How does Dry January intersect with diet culture?
1 January always has extreme Monday energy. The diet may start next week, but the new you drops early 2025.
New Year's resolutions help us visualise all the areas of our lives we want to improve, which – following a month associated with excessive food and alcohol consumption – centre around health and wellness-related outcomes, e.g., weight loss and sobriety.
January creates the perfect conditions for diet culture to thrive, whether it's a 31-day ‘fitness challenge’, a ‘full-body detox’, or any other neatly marketed way of saying ‘weight loss.’ By taking place in the first month of the year, Dry January reaches people who are already thinking about self-improvement and encourages them to rethink their alcohol consumption – no bad thing. As Danielle Houliston, Director of Fundraising and Engagement at Alcohol Change UK, told GLAMOUR, "Dry January helps you remember that you don’t need alcohol to have fun, relax, celebrate, unwind or anything else. It puts you back in control of your drinking.”
And yet, the decision to partake in Dry January can be overshadowed by diet-centric motives and language. Alcohol Change UK describes the initiative as “a break and a total reset for the body and mind.” This word “reset” pops up in nearly every article I read about Dry January (see here, here, and here), despite the fact that it's medically impossible for your body to reset to a natural state of wellness, which I assume is the aspiration here.
Usually, the word “reset” – along with its pal's detox, cleanse, etc. – is a red flag that you have stumbled across a fad diet and that you should probably run. But when it comes to Dry January (and other sobriety-orientated challenges), this word is allowed to creep back into our consciousness – as Christy Harrison said in conversation with GLAMOUR, diet culture is a “slippery thing.” If we're using diet-coded language to describe our attempts at sobriety, who's to say we aren't legitimising the culture these words represent?
Moreover, the benefits of participating in Dry January or any short-term sobriety challenges often veer into weight loss land, which isn't inherently problematic. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on.
“Did you know a standard glass of wine can contain up to 158 calories, and some pints of stronger lager can contain up to 222 calories?” reads the opening sentence on an NHS “alcohol advice” webpage. “So, if you're trying to lose weight you need to think about what you are drinking as well as what you are eating.”
While it's useful for some people to understand the caloric content of different alcoholic drinks, I wonder whether it could lead to an unhelpful conflation between food, which we need to consume to survive, and substances like alcohol, which we really don't need to survive. This blurred understanding of food and alcohol can lead to disordered eating and problematic drinking, as Harrison sometimes sees in her clients:
"People will end up "drinking their calories" where they'll decide to drink wine or drink whatever beverage instead of eating […] They'll skip meals to try to save up their calories for alcohol."
As Harrison points out, this is rarely sustainable: "People's inhibitions are lowered as they go through a night of drinking, and hunger builds up because they're not actually getting their needs met through alcohol […] And so at the end of the night, they'll end up having a food binge because of all those factors and then I've seen people say, “Well, I have to stop drinking because it's making me eat. It's making me break my diet.”
I previously spoke to Holly Whitaker – author of the bestselling How To Quit Like A Woman – about the “wellness lens” through which sobriety is often viewed. She points out that Dry January itself gives “people who might not otherwise examine how alcohol shows up in their lives the space to do so. It allows them to do this within a community.” Given that we still live in a society hell-bent on forcing alcohol down our throats – literally – Whitaker also notes that Dry January “creates an excuse” for people to quit drinking without having to go to uncomfortable lengths to justify their decision.
When I ask about the potential parallels between Dry January and diet culture, Whitaker explains how “a beautiful thing that allows people to reexamine their relationship with a drug” can become “commodified” if it's fed into a cultural system that “drives us to believe that our worth is only established by attaining certain ideals that are really impossible.” In this way, some attempts at sobriety can be turned into “another thing that we have to do perfectly and beat ourselves up at, if we fail at” and viewed as a “restriction” rather than a “freedom.”
“There's almost no element that alcohol doesn't impact in terms of endometriosis”
How can we reevaluate our relationship with alcohol without falling prey to diet culture?
Evaluate your intentions
“Always start with why are you doing this in the first place?” recommends Whitaker. “Are you doing this because you heard you get better sleep, better skin, better sex? Are you doing this because there's actually some needling thing within you that feels like something is off here?”
It can be tempting to lump our goals about our own alcohol consumption under catch-all, cultural ideas about wellness. But in the grander scheme of things, this thinking limits our receptiveness to how sobriety can more powerfully change our lives. “I don't view my sobriety as wellness, and I don't view my recovery as wellness,” Whitaker tells me.
For Whitaker, when she quit drinking alcohol in 2012, it was a “radical act” and, essentially, a “sacrifice.” She explains, “In that sacrifice, I wasn't trying to be a better woman in the sense of what was socially accepted. It cost me everything that made me – at that time in our culture and society (prior to movements like sober curiosity and mindful drinking that have brought awareness to drinking culture) – an acceptable woman: one who can drink moderately, who can still do all the things that [women were] supposed to do."
Choosing to quit drinking can have life-affirming benefits beyond a more socially acceptable body. As Whitaker tells me, by making this choice, you can “reclaim your power from where you've given it away” and “develop awareness around compulsory womanhood in the things that we're supposed to be and do.”
Keep your goals about food and substances separate
Before I spoke to Christy Harrison for this article, it had simply never occurred to me that alcohol and food are entirely different substances, which should be treated as such. In the past, when I've successfully weaned myself off alcohol and reaped the benefits, I've thought, “Great! Now, let's do the same with sugar!” Cue the unwelcome return of nighttime fridge-gazing binges.
Harrison explains how this overlap is also present in 12-step programs, such as Overeater's Anonymous, which effectively applies the program of support for substance use issues to those around binge eating. “That becomes really problematic in terms of people's relationships with food because it turns out that food and substances are just very different things. And what applies to substances in terms of sobriety and an abstinence-based approach really doesn't apply to food.”
While Harrison doesn't recommend doing anything labelled a “reset” relating to food at any time of year, she notes that, “If you're considering trying Dry January, I would say maybe don't try a diet or a detox or reset of food at the same time. Just try limiting it specifically to alcohol.”
If you've got the resources, work with a therapist
If you think that participating in Dry January is going to trigger unwelcome feelings about food and restriction for you, Harrison recommends working with a therapist to “create a container for experimenting in your relationship with alcohol that isn't going to exacerbate the challenges in your relationship with food.”
Remember, you've got a choice
I asked Houliston from Alcohol Change UK what advice she'd give to people planning to participate in Dry January to lose weight. She notes that while “Dry January offers the opportunity for a total reset and a chance to see some amazing benefits like sleeping better, feeling more energetic, improving your mental health, and losing weight," there's much more to it than that:
"It’s about learning that you don’t need alcohol so that for the rest of the year, you’ve got a real choice. So, think of it as a bootcamp to creating a happier, healthier you year-round.”
If you are addicted to alcohol, do not try to stop without medical supervision, as this can be fatal. It's recommended to book an appointment with your GP and visit Alcohol Change UK for more information.
If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s health, you can contact Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity, 365 days a year on 0808 801 0677 or beateatingdisorders.org.uk.
You don't see the Internet coming for Gerard Butler.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
