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Dry January is over, and we are sure that many of you are ready to crack open a bottle of wine for the weekend to celebrate. However, dry January shouldn’t just be for one month.

It might seem like a difficult task, but by reducing your alcohol intake by a large proportion or even quitting altogether, you will see a whole host of amazing benefits to your health. The idea of detoxing the body of these chemicals could be something you take into your future and implement into your lifestyle for good. We aren’t saying you need to seek out the nearest drug and alcohol treatment centers for the issue, but just take a minute to think about how your body would benefit from cutting the booze.

In The Short Term

You may have noticed if you did take part in dry January that you had many different benefits to your health during this time. These health benefits could include:

Sleeping Better

Drinking regularly can affect your ability to sleep because drinking disrupts your natural sleeping cycle. You will notice if you ever drink a glass of wine before bed, you fall asleep quicker and this is because alcohol is a relaxing drug. It will allow you to fall asleep quicker than you would naturally however in turn this can disturb your sleep cycle and cause you to wake up a lot during the night. By drinking less, you will notice a marked increase in your quality of sleep, and energy the next day.

Your Appearance

Not drinking can make your skin glow and also make you look much more awake during the day. The reason for this is that alcohol is a diuretic which dehydrates us and causes us to lose water from our bodies. This can make the skin look older and dull. By cutting out the drink, you will have more water retained on your skin cells, and therefore look better.

Long Term Health Benefits

Now that you know the short term benefits of drinking less or no alcohol, we can look the difference it could make to you if you quit for a long period of time.

Cancer Risk

Alcohol is known as a carcinogen, which is a substance that can cause several types of cancer. Alcohol specifically is linked to seven different types of cancer including mouth cancer, so cutting out this drink can reduce your risk significantly.

The Liver

We all know that alcohol is bad for our liver, but you may not realise just how bad it can be. Excessive intake of alcohol can damage the liver by disturbing the way our liver interacts with glucose. The function of the liver is to turn glucose into fat and send it around the body for storage. However alcohol stops this from happening and means the liver is stuffed with fat. This can cause liver failure and ultimately, death.

Lower Risk of Diseases

One of the great advantages of not drinking is that your risk of loads of difference diseases will go down. For example here are some of the diseases you will be less at risk with:

• Heart disease
• High blood pressure
• Sexual dysfunction
• Thrombosis
• Lung cancer
• Stroke

So, before you crack open the wine this weekend, having a think about keeping up your good habits for a while longer.