This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. I'm so happy to have you here.

In today's guest, I'm really excited to have. This is Andrew Shanahan. He's the founder of Man Be Fat

and Andrew just reached out to me a few months ago with his own journey, which he's going to share

today. So I'm so excited. Thanks, Andrew, for joining. You're more than welcome. Thank you very much.

And thank you for this naked mind. It's just going to sound like a blatant commercial.

You're going to have people saying that you just paid me to appear.

This naked mind has been a massive part of me stopping drinking. So thank you.

Oh, that's brilliant. So why don't we start with that? Why don't you back up and kind of

go back to the first drink the early days and just sort of tell us your story?

My story is relatively normal, I would say, for a British UK background.

In the, we all start, or certainly in the area that I'm from, we start drinking relatively early.

So I was probably about 13 when I first started drinking. And it was really just a case of our school

was, you know, had a culture of drinking at weekends. And, you know, the the era that I grew up in

was not particularly in lightened era, I don't think in the kind of the late 80s, early 90s when I

became a teenager where there were a lot of publications at the time that were very, very pro,

heavy drinking and pro binge drinking. And you look back at them now and even, you know,

a couple of decades on, they just seem absurdly

and promotional for that way of life. And I think that, but I just grew up, you know, with that as

the norm around me. And so I didn't think it was really anything to be concerned about. I didn't

think it was anything unusual. And so for me, weekends would be drinking heavily. And then during

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