“Don’t you drink alcohol?” – I get frequently asked this by people that have just met me in a social context where there’s alcohol involved. Sometimes it’s just “not now; ok”, but some other times people get intrigued by this choice and want to know more about it.

“Why aren’t you drinking? No wine? No beer? Did you ever drink? Is it a health issue? Is it a life choice? Is it because you don’t like the taste?” and it goes on and on.

The thing is that I love beer. Not ‘get-drunk-cheap’ beer, but good tasting beers, specially ales. I also like some wine, but I can only tell between ‘horrible wine’ and ‘not horrible wine’.

However, I have drunk next to no alcohol for the past year or so. I gradually started drinking less down to the point where I wasn’t drinking any. And from that point it was just on rare occasions.

The main reason was because of a series of lifestyle changes I had in the past couple of years to cut down on acid reflux symptoms. The lifestyle changes include:

• only sleeping after an hour or more after eating;
• eating more times per day in smaller portions;
• not drinking (anything) while eating;
• not eating spicy foods;
• eating more stuff which is supposedly good for my stomach, like apples and cabbage;
• not eating tomato (although tomatoes are fine for me if I remove the seeds and the juice);
• not drinking coffee or anything with lots of caffeine (like club-mate);
• not drinking Coca-Cola (as weird as it may sound, drinking Pepsi is perfectly fine for me); and
• not drinking alcohol.

Today during dinner I met a medical doctor that wanted to know why I wasn’t drinking. When I mentioned the acid reflux, he gave me a good overview of when and why it happens. I won’t try to explain what he told me, because I am not a medical doctor myself and I don’t want to put more incorrect medical information on the Internet than there already is =).

There is also the fact that after my nervous breakdown I had to take some medications that don’t mix well at all with alcohol, but these should be temporary. Being nervous also causes acid reflux symptoms. I was told the  medications that could help me relieve those symptoms are ranitidine and omeprazole.

So for the moment I am not drinking. This should change soon though. I have lots of good French wine and Belgian beer to taste on my way =)