In a purely non-religious sense, I believe in atoning for one’s sins. That’s why I always follow a night of drunken gluttony with an intense workout to punish myself for mistreating my body.

I generally don’t like to blog about getting drunk because it runs counter to my advocacy of living healthy. I also worry that my life insurance agent may read this and call bullshit on a certain number I put on a certain form.

Nevertheless, booze does occasionally make for a good story. In my case, rarely do the circumstances surrounding drinking make for much of a tale because I’m generally a boring guy. I usually drink at home with close friends and family. I’m not out cavorting, whoring or fighting. At most, I’m jumping over fences.

My most recent piss up was after 14 hours of driving with my wife and two kids in our new minivan. Surely you’ll concede that I deserved a few drinks after such a traumatic experience. To mitigate the horror we’d left at midnight and the kids slept a fair amount, and they had all sorts of electronic devices to keep them from eviscerating each other while awake, but the drive was still a chore.

We arrived safely and I unloaded several hundred pounds of luggage from the trunk into the summer place while the kids terrorized the local fauna. With that done I popped my first beer. Then my parents came over and opened some wine. For the rest of the evening I either had a glass of wine or beer in my hand. Sometimes both.

Before bed I did my usual drunken ritual: the sport drink.

I should amend that I never drink something like Gatorade® during an activity because the research shows that it is essentially useless. However, it is a miracle fluid for preventing hangovers. I seem to get hung over exceptionally easily, and can expect to have a brutal headache after only four beers. Drinking water isn’t a very viable solution because I need to drink about five or six large glasses of it to do the work of one glass of Gatorade, and then I’m getting up to pee every 90 minutes so my sleep sucks and I still wake up feeling like shit. Because Gatorade has sodium in it I generally make it through the night without having to get up.

The problem with Gatorade is the calories. That, and I can’t stand the sugary taste. A bottle of the stuff has as many calories as a pint of beer, and after a night of drinking and feasting I don’t want to add to my caloric surplus, but I don’t have much of a choice. If I don’t drink it the next day is going to be a write-off. I DETEST being hung over. My wife doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for it either. She’ll put up with me tying one on every once in a while as long as I don’t spend the next day as a worthless bag of shit. She doesn’t have much sympathy for me wanting to lie on the couching and ignore my familial duties. If I can make it seem like I didn’t drink at all the night before then her tolerance for my imbibing goes up. See, she’s not much of a drinker. She used to get hammered in university with semi-regularity, but then there was the whole trying to get pregnant / being pregnant / breastfeeding period factored by two that really killed her taste for the stuff.

Every time I have a beer I feel like I’m being judged, but that’s not what this post is about.

So, yeah, I’ve got this love-hate relationship with Gatorade because of all the calories and the too sweet taste vs. its hangover prevention qualities. In picking up groceries while heading to the cabin I saw that there was a product called POWERADE® Zero. Now regular POWERADE works just as well as Gatorade does as a hangover prevention tool, so I decided to take a chance and see if the zero calorie (it has Sucralose in it) stuff would do the trick. I figured it would, but was concerned that I was taking an awful risk.

I’ll explain why.

When I get drunk my caloric intake for the day is fucked. Not only do I take in a ridiculous amount of alcohol calories, but I eat a bunch of crap too. I can go two or three thousand calories over in one single day. That’s bad. So, the next day I always make sure to get to work on burning that shit off. I also do it to teach myself a lesson. Every night of drinking is followed by at minimum a 10km run. If this POWERADE Zero didn’t work then I was going to be too messed up to run or essentially function like a normal human being on my first full day of vacation. In case you haven’t being paying attention, that would suck.

So, I got drunk, and right before bed I drank the Strawberry-flavored POWERADE Zero. My first impression was wholly positive. I actually don’t mind the taste of artificial stuff like Sucralose for the very reason that it isn’t that sweet. This stuff didn’t have that overly sweet high-calorie taste to it and it went down real easy. What’s more, it didn’t seem to sit like a sugary blob in my already tortured stomach. The real test, however, was still to come.

I slept through the night, which was also a good thing, and, lo and behold, I was headache and hangover free. It worked just as well its high-calorie brethren. I’m sold on this stuff now as my new method of preventing a hangover, and if you count calories and don’t like being hung to shit, then you should too.

I ran 12km before the wife and kids even woke up, made breakfast for everyone, and then we all went to the lake where I spent a fair amount of time playing with the kids in the water. In other words, I was a functional human being because of POWERADE Zero. I also felt like I had atoned for the sins of the previous evening.

Now where is my endorsement check?