TAKING TIME TO SMELL THE ROSES (By Tahlia Puddey)

I am only one week into my HSM stint and the motivation it is giving me to stop and re-evaluate where my life is heading is great. This week I have been thinking about how fast life goes by, and also how repetitive it can get. Normally my week starts of a little foggy on a Monday morning because more than likely I’ve been at a Sunday session at the pub farewelling my already foggy and memory blanked weekend with another foggy and memory blanked night. Waking up for work on a Monday morning with hardly and sleep and hungover is not fun! Then the week consists of sitting in peak hour driving to work, working for 9 hours and then sitting in peak hour again for the drive home, have some dinner, watch some T.V then go to bed. This process is repeated every day, all the while I’m wishing for the weekend to come faster so I can go out and get drunk on the weekend. Why? I have no idea why I’m wishing away my week days so I can go out and get smashed on the weekend, probably embarrass myself somehow and then wake up the next day feeling sick and not remembering a lot. When I put that down in words it sounds so ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong I have had some awesome nights out drinking with my friends where I can wake up the next day and be so happy that the hangover is probably worth it, but these nights are far and few in between. This is what I mean about repetition, if I’m doing it every weekend it doesn’t become fun anymore, it just becomes a way of life and that’s not what I want my life to be.

So this week I have cleared all the junk I don’t need out of my life. I have gone through all my party dresses and culled a lot of them, selling them on Ebay to try and make a few dollars. Some I have only worn the once even though I’ve spent $100 or so on them, so stupid! My friend and I are also going to a swap meet this Sunday to try and earn some extra cash for our junk! Have to be up super early which will be fine as I’ll be waking up Sunday morning fresh as a daisy. I have also bought myself a bike so that I can start getting fit and healthy, and it is also something to do after work that’s different to my usual pattern. I’m getting out and seeing the world around me, appreciating life!

That brings me to another thing about drinking, how unhealthy it is. We are poisoning our bodies every time we go out and throw back 10 or more drinks in a night. A lot of us actually don’t think about the calorie content we consume in a night out drinking. People trying to loose weight make the changes to their diet and exercise but continue to binge drink on the weekends and they don’t see any changes. One night out binge drinking can cost you around the vicinity of 2500 calories. One Jim Beam and Coke is around 250 calories, 10 of those and bam that’s your 2500 calories. The average active female needs around 1400 calories a day. So a night out drinking is equivalent to eating about 5 Big Macs in one sitting for dinner. No one does that, not anyone I know anyway. I hope putting it out there in words like that make people think about the amount of alcohol they consume and how it can affect the way the look. It’s definitely making me think about what I’m putting in my mouth and how it can affect me.

Life is so precious and can be so short and the amount of lives lost to the stupid actions of some individuals whilst drunk is tragic. It affects everyone around them, drinking can be such a selfish action when done to excess. I’m so looking forward to see how my attitude to alcohol and the amount I consume will change at the end of 3 months, because drinking can be fun, it can be done without people getting hurt and it will always have a place in the life of the majority of people. We all need to just stop and smell the roses and take some time to think about things in our lives and how alcohol plays a role. I know I definitely am.

Let me know your thoughts… xoxo

NEW HSM Blogger – Tahlia Puddey (Perth)

Hi there =)

My name is Tahlia, and this is my first ever blog about anything! To be honest I have wanted to blog about something for ages but never had the right subject matter that was interesting enough for me. HSM is that challenge I have been looking for.

First up a bit about myself. I’m 22 years old, currently residing in Perth and I work in a design, marketing and advertising agency. I work the typical 9-5 office hours Monday to Friday so I absolutely live for my weekends, which consist of drinking and partying most of the time, in fact at work I am known to be the office party girl!

Growing up I always remember my parents having BBQ’s and drinking with their friends which was something I wanted to be a part of at a young age, it made me feel grown up when Dad would let me have a sip of his scotch and coke or even my own glass with a drop in it. This in turn led me to be the instigator one night at a sleep over with 3 of my girlfriends, when we were 13, to suggest we have a few drinks. So we ended up finding a stash of Sambuca and totally writing ourselves of at a park in the middle of the night. It was so fun and rebellious, almost a rite of passage entering our teens and proving we could do whatever we wanted.

Fast forward 10 years and the majority of my weekends have probably been spent like this, the only difference is once turning 18 I have progressed from drinking in parks to drinking in pubs and clubs. So now at the tender age of 22 I am tired of doing the same thing every weekend, sick of not achieving goals I have set for myself because I am basically drinking my salary every week, and pretty much over the hangovers, memory loss and embarrassing morning afters when you get a recap of the drunken mess you were the night before from your friends. I know we have all had those moments where you ask yourself the next day what the hell was I thinking!

So here I am pledging 3 months of sobriety to discover a new way of socialising, find out who I really am without the ‘liquid confidence’ of alcohol, and becoming a healthier and better person. I look forward to sharing my experiences with you over the next few months.

It’s going to be sooooo hard, but I’m determined.

Watch this space…. xo