No, I haven’t given up the crusade to persuade the world that wine can be part of a healthy lifestyle. I believe it can, when approached with care, and it’s never felt more important to share that message than right now.

We’re bombarded with ‘influencers’ telling us how booze wrecked their productivity, sleep and goodness knows what else, alongside official bodies saying there’s no such thing as a safe level of alcohol. My concern is the confusion between any alcohol and excess alcohol.

I’m not a medical professional but I do have over 25 years of working in the industry and I’ve never felt better. I’m not giving up wine, and I know I’m not alone. Hello, my community!

Wine can be part of a healthy lifestyle – but the clue’s in the ‘healthy’ bit. Add too much booze on top of an already unhealthy way of living – a bad diet, excess weight, insufficient activity, poor sleep – and it’s not going to help, is it?

This feels like the perfect moment to share a quick reminder of some of the principles in The Drinking Woman’s Diet and 7-Weeks to a Liver Friendly Lifestyle. If you don’t have seven weeks, here are seven principles from the book and the course to get you started.

1 Little and often beats a binge

Knowledge is power – find out what the recommended units are, and how many are in your beverage of choice. The body is very good at processing alcohol out of the system, if we don’t overload it. One unit is roughly the amount the average adult body processes in an hour – about 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol. This means that within an hour there’s little or no alcohol left in the blood of an adult, although this varies from person to person. Women are at a disadvantage: we tend to absorb alcohol more quickly and eliminate it more slowly. There are plenty of online calculators to work out how many units are in your drink – use them until you become familiar. 

2. Make it count and timing

If we’re drinking moderately and paying attention to units, let’s make every unit count. Only drink something you really enjoy, don’t waste your units. If you’re not enjoying what’s in your glass, don’t feel obliged to finish it. 

Little and often works better than a lot. Your liver builds its ability to produce the enzymes responsible for detoxing alcohol. After a long abstinence it kind of forgets how to process the booze. That being said, it will appreciate at least a couple of days off a week. 

If sleep is a concern, try leaving a couple of alcohol-free hours before bed. Small adjustments, big difference.

3. Drink wine with food 

Wine tastes better with food, and food tastes better with wine but there’s a practical reason too. Drinking on a full stomach slows down alcohol absorption. This allows our liver more precious time to process it out of the system.

4. Drink plenty of water

One downside of booze consumption is dehydration – drinking water to compensate isn’t rocket science. A glass of water for each glass of wine really helps. I recommend drinking a glass of water first. If you’re thirsty that first glass will slip down without you even noticing.

5. Don’t overload your liver 

Your liver isn’t only processing alcohol, it’s removing all sorts of toxins, from food additives to medication to sugar. Cut your liver some slack by reducing processed snacks and added sugar when you’re drinking. In fact go easy on these all the time.

6. Eat your veg 

That’s the healthy diet bit – your body, and especially your liver and gut, need minerals, vitamins, fibre and antioxidants to help them detox. A range and diversity of colourful fruit and veg will really help.  

7. Keep moving 

Movement keeps blood and lymph circulating. It helps every organ, including the digestive system, work better. The lymph is the body’s waste-removal system, and it flows when you move helping it to remove toxins from the body. An added bonus: movement also makes you look better, giving you a healthy glow.

This sounds like wellness – what’s changed?

I’m changing my language to wellbeing, something that often gets forgotten in wellness talk. It’s where I think wine has a genuine advantage: complex aromas and flavours that engage the brain as you taste, the stories behind each bottle, its ability to make food taste better, and it comes in a bottle that’s the perfect size to share with friends over dinner.

Community and human connection are recognised pillars of wellbeing and sharing a meal and a glass of wine is very convivial. Living in the moment reduces stress, taking time over a meal and a glass of wine is the epitome of just that. Pausing to notice aromas, flavours and mouthfeel is a lovely way of being present. And it’s a moment you can share. Scent is deeply tied to memory, so a familiar wine can transport you somewhere or to someone in an instant, a small, sensory kind of wellbeing all of its own. The pleasure principle.

Lifelong learning, is another pillar of wellbeing, and wine offers that too. A glass might awaken your curiosity about the story behind it, lead you to explore a place, discover a person or a process and develop a healthy passion for wine. 

So yes – wine and wellbeing can work.

Not because wine itself is a health food, but because, enjoyed carefully and in moderation, it needn’t get in the way of being part of your healthy lifestyle.

Christmas in July!

I explore all this and more in the online course 7-Weeks to a Liver Friendly Lifestyle, in The Drinking Woman’s Diet, and IRL on wine and wellbeing retreats. Join me.
Summer is the perfect time for a reset and the course is an easy way to put good intentions into practice. Use the voucher code Christmas when you sign up for a £20 discount. Let me know how it goes.

Find out more on the Insider Tasting with Wendy Narby website, follow me on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook or join the wellbeing chat on WhatsApp. If you’ve If you know someone who’d benefit from this, please feel free to share.

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