It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog, not going to lie to everyone I’ve been busy drinking my life away. Luckily in that time I’ve also experimented with a few other things that have effected my hangover and here I am to share with you how to avoid a hangover so you don’t have to experience multiple scares of dieing like I have.
Today’s how to avoid a hangover field report blog is probably something everyone has heard before but not really paid too much attention to. When you’re drinking a specific kind of alcohol try your best to stick with that for the whole night. Be loyal to whatever kind of liquor you start with no matter how tempting the other spirits may be. If you start with vodka, keep with vodka, if you start with rum, keep with rum. It’s a pretty straight forward rule but it will save your life the morning after.
The absolute worst thing (I’ve found from personal experience) is mixing a lot of beer with a lot of hard liquors. I’ve noticed that sure mixing hard liquor with hard liquor will be a little bit worse then straight shooting one kind of alcohol but who doesn’t pregame with vodka then do tequila shots at the bar? It’s definitely not too bad doing that but with beer you have yourself a situation. Another thing you have to watch out for are those “girly” shots that are pretty much 10% alcohol full of sourpuss and grenadine or should I say straight sugar. They may taste girly and delicious then but I can assure you they give one hell of a hangover the next day. Another thing in the same category is coolers, they may taste like kool aid then but I can assure you it’s a trap. Those are definitely some of the most under estimated rules on how to avoid a hangover. Alcohol already does enough when it comes to screwing up your whole bodies sugar levels and pounding back and loading up on sugar while drinking is definitely going to assist in the destruction and make you feel 10x worse in the morning.
Another thing that is closely related is the differences in each poison. Some kinds of alcohol will naturally give more severe hangovers than others due to the amount of “congeners” in them (a minor toxin that contributes to hangovers). Darker alcohols such as dark rum, whiskey and red wine will have more than the lighter alcohols such as vodka, gin and white rum. Honestly it works out perfectly for me as I’m a vodka man myself but if your someone who doesn’t really care that get’s bad hangovers I would try and stick with the lights.
I should be writing regularly again pretty soon, I predict many hangover in my future in October especially with Halloween the best time of the year. I will continue to suffer extreme hangovers in order to give you adequate advice to save yourselves on how to avoid a hangover.
Seeing as how I’ve spent the last few blog posts telling you what’s going to make you feel worse I felt I should at least give you insight on something that is guaranteed to make you feel better.. After all, the blog is called “how to avoid a hangover” not how to make one worse. Even if you’ve heard it a thousand times before I’m here to tell you again to convince you to try it if you haven’t already – Fruit Smoothies. Of course it’s common knowledge that alcohol will drain you of lots of your vitamins, hell, it seems lots of your life for the next day but one thing that got me through my, what seemed like a never ending binge last year was frozen fruit smoothies. It was a morning ritual when I woke up at 9am feeling like crap the next day on no sleep to throw myself out of bed and in a drunken haze make a fruit smoothie; usually consisted of banana, strawberry, mixed berries, and an orange. After chugging it down I’d go back to sleep but when I woke up the second time at around noon, life would feel a little bit better.
Not only did the fruits replenish lots of the vitamins I had lost there’s also lots of antioxidants in all the fruits to break down the left over alcohol in the pit of death that is your body. Having this right in the morning also put something (that wasn’t crap) into my stomach and helped to dilute the pool of vodka that had been left behind. Now I’m sure it’s pretty obvious that fruit is going to make a difference but you’d be surprised at how much of a difference it can actually make, it was honestly one of the factors that allowed me to drink on 10 day binges last summer… and last summer is when I probably needed the info on how to avoid a hangover most.
If you want to make the ultimate breakfast a long with the fruit smoothie a few eggs and some toast work pretty well. Eggs contain something in it called “cysteine” which actually helps break down the acetaldehyde (toxins from alcohol) in the liver which can help extremely in the how to avoid a hangover game. It’s essentially a back up force to help rid of all the leftover toxins that your body hasn’t broken down which is one of the main causes of a hangover.
You may have heard it plenty of times before but by pulling off this ultimate breakfast you’re definitely going to feel like less of a dead body the next day. In this case study on how to avoid a hangover we reviewed something that will actually have major effects on replenishing the nutrients and taking out the toxins. Throw in some water in combination and you have yourself a recovery just in time to hit the liquor store and start drinking before lunch.
Don’t do it. I could honestly stop the whole blog with that one statement I don’t even know where this came from even a little bit but I swear I saw it around one time so I figured I’d share my knowledge with everyone. It was a Saturday morning, hungover as per usual and thinking about an easy accessible “hangover cure” that I could get my hands on. As I’m thinking of what crazy thing I could try this time I realized I was hungry.. I swear somewhere I had read that a good greasy fast food meal would just absorb all the alcohol up in the stomach and the two bad’s would cancel each other out. I can assure you, this wasn’t the case.
I don’t know about you but even earlier today (this hangover adventure was a few days ago) I had a big mac and I swear to god I experienced a hangover just from the fast food.. Now, eating fast food definitely didn’t rid me of my hangover, in fact it gave me two. Have you ever experienced two hangovers at once? I didn’t think it was possible either but the immense pain I felt was pretty extreme. All I could picture in my mind on the way home was to get the hell in my bed and lay and focus on staying alive and breathing. Thank god it only lasted an hour or two and I distracted myself with some good old fashion two and a half men but it was not pleasant to say the least.
Little side story here, it may have been one of the worst hangovers of my life after eating it and feeling like my body was shutting down but there was one worse time. A few years ago hungover I felt like I was in a desert I was so dehydrated, it was a super hot day and I had a fantastic idea, let’s go get a Slurpee. Me and a few friends figured this was the greatest idea ever thought of by another human being and we went on our journey. Filling up those clear cups with delicious icy goodness, this was going to be amazing. It was the greatest tasting thing ever and we all finished in about 10 minutes, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves in to. 20 minutes after this Slurpee I literally had a feeling of pretty much how a fever works, instant to your body you just feel super sick. I shook in my bed for a good 3 hours just trying to get through (this is now I know due to the fact alcohol already completely screws with your blood sugar and when you put in a full Slurpee full of sugar all at once it’s quite the sugar shock and it completely dominates your boday). I can’t even explain the feeling, I literally tried to tell everyone I knew about the story just so they didn’t go through what I did.
Moral of the post, fast food does not work during a hangover.. Though I will mention that during drinking it will give something to soak up and absorb some of the alcohol in your stomach for more of a balance in the morning, but after don’t do it. Stick to nutritious foods. Even more so than not eat fast food… Don’t drink a Slurpee, if you take one thing from this entire blog it’s that.. Just don’t do it, hurts so bad… Run.
After researching every one of the claimed hangover tricks in the books we stumbled upon one with some decent reviews – prickly pear. Honestly at this point we were trying and willing to try anything as it had become a personal challenge now to find the real way on how to avoid a hangover. This had been a little more tricky then we thought, we literally went to about 30 grocery, exotic food and health food stores to find it, yet came out with nothing. After a long day out on the search we decided it probably wouldn’t work anyways and we hit the liquor store up and preceded to drink excessively anyways to end off our journey.
About a week later we were watching the show “manswers” on spike getting educated about the things they should really be teaching you in school and that’s when we saw it, the question every man and especially us needed the answer to, “how to avoid a hangover”. We waited in anticipation as they went through their wrong answers until finally to our surprise – prickly pear was claimed as the real deal. I was shocked, we were just going to try it the other week. Well it was time to find it so I went to the net, oddly enough there was some farm dedicated just to prickly pear down in Cali or something and I bought a small jar of the juice to try out.
The directions are to drink a tablespoon about 5 hours before you drink (which I will say is one of the flaws of this method – I don’t usually know I’m drinking until I take my first shot) so we planned out a drinking night to test it and 5 of us took the tablespoon. We set the clocks for a 5 hour countdown anticipating and getting ready for the drinking to begin. I was personally more excited to wake up the next day and see if this bad boy worked in our how to avoid a hangover game. Finally the longest 5 hours of our life passed and we started at it, we decided to go full force just to test this thing to the limits. The result – one of the weirdest drinking nights of our career.
We weren’t sure exactly what was in it or how this prickly pear worked but it seemed like it lowered our tolerance a pretty extreme amount. We were all hammered and blacked out in 2 hours which would be normal, but we drank half the amount we all usually did. Definitely a surprise when we all woke up the next day and saw how much we drank. I don’t remember exactly if it did anything other then make us blackout messes (as it was a while ago) but that can’t say much if I don’t remember any real improvement the next day.
Final conclusion: prickly pear may have earned it’s spot in the manswers hangover hall of fame but in the how to avoid a hangover game it didn’t score too high. It sounds like it could be another one of those hangover cures that work if you’re drinking 3 beers over the course of the night but for extreme drinkers you might as well not waste your time and stick to the basics of water for now.
Two days later and I just sobered up and regained my motor skills enough to finally type. Drunk camping can do that to you, I’m not even sure why it’s not just called extreme blacking out, it’s literally just going out to a random field and drinking all day and night without stopping for days at a time. A hangover is the last thing you want to be dealing with in the wilderness with only the ground to sleep on and no sinks for water in sight. There’s a simple way on how to avoid a hangover while drunk camping – don’t stop drinking. But that’s a given and every extreme drinker follows that rule but I can guarantee you that drinking for days at a time only eating and drinking shots is going to catch up to you when you finally stop to travel home. This is the real reason I’m writing this post. Extreme drinking and in my case blacking out for a whole day is going to lead to extreme hangovers. It’s now the second day since I’ve been back and I like to hit what I call a second day hangover, where really so much alcohol was consumed for so much time that your hangover lasts multiple days. Especially when you’re on a multi day binge it’s fairly common just for the fact that you’re completely drained of all nutrition, sleep and dignity. Luckily don’t fear I have a few tips on how to avoid a hangover in these extreme drunk camping situations.
Drunk camping – You somehow wake up with shots for breakfast & beer bongs for dinner, but no matter with that, one thing you should remember is to make sure you have a side of actual food with your shots. Though you may not feel the need and cooking some food sounds like hard work compared to the other your body will thank you both during your drinking binge but even more so your hangover. By taking in as much food as possible during your binge (not to mention food when drunk seems to be magical) you not only keep your body with constant nutrients to help it break down the alcohol but you also keep your stomach full of substance so it’s not irritated with simply straight alcohol. I’m sure it’s one of the most common things you’ll be told to make sure to eat but take it from me an experienced hangover’er that it’s one of the best things you can actually do for yourself.
Another thing that goes without saying is bring bottled water or a big jug. Trust me on this and you’ll thank me.. We managed to forget and only took 6 water bottles that were fought over and gone in a day (drank by the few people who barely drink to add to it – pretty sure me and the others on the vodka diet could have used it a lot more). So when drunk camping make sure you bring a flat, it’s pretty cheap and worth every penny, and with that try and have vodka waters or at least a few water bottles a day, just chug it as you would a beer every once in a while and it’ll save your life later.
I know these things sound pretty obvious and they are but you would be surprised how much difference just these two things can make on the how to avoid a hangover game we all seem to play all too often.
Drunk Camping Protips:
- If given the choice always try and take the campsites on the corner or most secluded areas, even if they’re a little smaller avoiding noise complaints and other guests is going to keep you on that campsite at least a few days longer before being warned or kicked out.
- Bring more rather than less, the last thing you want to do is run out of liquor or food with no way to civilization to restock. You can always bring the extras back.
- Set up tent and get everything ready before moving to the hard liquor, you don’t know how hard it is and how many injuries occur from setting up a tent drunk. It’s one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do.
Remember, enjoy yourself. You’re out there to get away from everything, besides it’s not every activity that it’s acceptable to drink for days at a time.
