Got H2O?

At my friend's wedding last year, I took my last drink of alcohol. Actually, I had quite a few drinks and made a particularly awkward speech as I recall. In any case, I'd been planning to quit drinking for a while. Most people don't really understand this. I wasn't an alcoholic or anything. It just wasn't for me anymore. That was June 13th, 2009.

I should rewind a little bit though. A few years earlier, I'd started having stomach problems of unknown origin. For example, I ate a bowl of oatmeal before work one day and passed out on the assembly line a couple hours later. I thought it might be some kind of grain thing or an allergic reaction, but after a lot of trial and error, I determined the problem to be milk. I didn't really drink that much milk since I started living on my own, and when I did have it, my guts just couldn't handle it anymore. This was a shame because chocolate milk is among the greatest things in life. A little later, I lived in Japan, where no one drinks milk, for about a year. This just made the problem that much worse.

I came back to Canada in 2009, having already given up milk for good. I wasn't a big fan of pop or fruit juice, and I don't drink coffee. I started thinking about how virtually every animal drinks only water, and how our ancient relatives would have done the same. That's what we evolved to consume, after all. It didn't take long before I was committed to a water-only diet (still food though, of course). I had to make a few arbitrary rules in order for it to work. I still have soup, pudding, and the occasional frozen treat. Other than that, however, it's been 14 months now with the whole water thing. I feel fine. My bones haven't imploded or anything. As an added benefit, I've probably saved a minimum of several hundred dollars on unnecessary beverages.

Obviously this isn't for everyone. What started as a strange curiosity has basically become a way of life for me. I consider it a long term science project. We'll see how healthy I am in a few decades.