I am not a person who typically does well with tracking. During my 3rd year of college, I took a Fall semester off (after going to school full time all summer) and came home and worked retail. I found out that I was a top seller for an entire region including the Mall of America, and I didn’t even know that I was being measured against a goal. The next month, I bombed. My natural abilities & motivation to help customers was no match for my crippling perfectionism and fear of failure.

I’ve realized I’m far better at tracking in hindsight than laying out a whole plan in front of me to execute on. When the New Year comes around, I create vision boards, not resolutions, and at the end of the year, it’s crazy to see what came to fruition. So in tracking my alcohol intake, I use an app called Try Dry. There are many other apps out there, and there is functionality I would like with Try Dry and other things I don’t use, like $ calorie savings. However I do enjoy having a place to keep record of days I don’t drink.

Yesterday was my 100th day tracking, and all of my drinking days (16) were “planned”. I had an average of 1.3 drinks on the days that I did drink. Overall, I feel pretty accomplished! I have a good balance that I’m not looking to change at this point in time, but will absolutely change if I feel it’s right for me in the future. Given that we’re coming upon the holiday season, I keep a separate Google Sheet of events coming up that I plan on having a drink at so that I have a rough idea of which events I’d like to drink at and which ones I’ll go NA for.

To celebrate, my husband and I went to a bar and got Italian carry-out from a restaurant next door. I had a Casamara Club Como, which was dry and herbaceous and just the right bitter to quench my thirst, as well as a Paradiso, a craft mocktail made with Orgeat, Grapefruit and Guava juice.

Wherever you’re at in your journey, if you are here, it’s likely because you are looking to cut back or have completely. So as they say in my Italian family, “Salute!”, here is to your good health!