More 'Make The Connection'

Finally finished "Make The Connection" by Bob Green and Oprah Winfrey.

This weight loss book is a little more than that. It's also a guide to get readers to look at their eating habits.

One of Bob's 10 rules for success is to avoid or eliminate alcohol from one's diet. Okay, fine. Alcohol has tons of empty calories, it slows the body's metabolism, it demotivates the drinker, etc. Yeah, it's a bad thing if you're trying to lose weight.

Well, sprinkled throughout the book are little bits of knowledge from Oprah on how she applied each of Bob's 10 steps. The chapter on alcohol consumption was interesting - for several reasons.

This chapter was of Oprah's personal experience while in Italy. She was travelling with the food and wine critic from GQ, so they were eating and drinking at the finest restaurants in Italy which are, of course, probably some of the finest on earth. Oprah tells the tale how she drank wine at dinner one night, then could barely drag herself through her workout the next morning - a seven mile run across an Italian valley.

This leads the reader to ask, "Dang, girl! How much did you drink?!" Oprah answered, "Not much, just enough to be social. Three, maybe four glasses of wine, tops."

Three or four glasses equals social drinking? Folks, you are reading the words of me, a good old boy from the mid-west, a former occupant of a fraternity house and someone who probably likes to drink and eat as much as Madame Winfrey. I've gotta tell ya, if I ever drink four glasses of wine - that's moved past the realm of social drinking. No?

According to the popular rule of thumb, a 750 ml bottle of wine contains five servings. Servings of wine in Italy are probably bigger than in America (let's face it-if ya got good wine, ya drink good wine!), so it's my assumption Oprah had the vast majority of one bottle of wine.

Social drinking, to me, equals one, maybe two drinks. Maybe, if the event is especially long, three. Four? Sure - but then it's no longer (as Oprah put it) "just enough to be social." If I get four drinks in me, you can bet that was the entire point - it's no longer social.

I don't know... what do you think? Does "just enough to be social" equal three or four drinks?