Bloated and looking old beyond my years, I finally quit alcohol at 45. Only then did I realise what drinking a bottle of wine a night for two decades had done to me...

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Kate Taylor didn't go to rehab. She wasn't caught drink driving. She was never hauled before a magistrate.

And she didn't come home one day to find her family sat around the table holding an American-style 'intervention'.

Her rock bottom was a blurry 50-second video she had filmed herself one December night in 2021, after drinking her usual bottle of her favourite red wine, Saint-Émilion.

She was slurring, barely coherent, talking to the camera, glassy eyed. Drunk.

'Alcohol is f**king up my head,' she wept.

'It's making me someone I'm not. It's stunting who I am. I'm worth more than this. Watch this, Kate, watch this and remember… it's a drug that's making you like this, it's not you.'

The video was saved on her phone for months before Kate, 49, gathered the courage to watch herself sobbing those words. It was that video that saved her life.

'That was the moment I knew I didn't want to be that woman anymore,' Kate says. 

Kate Taylor drank at least a bottle of wine a night for 20 years

Kate says that once she started drinking, she found it hard to stop

'That was drunk me begging sober me to stop. You can always convince yourself what you want to believe, but to actually hear and see it? It was undeniable. I was broken, a mess. The party was over.'

Mother-of-two Kate, from Shropshire, England, broke down in tears when she finally saw herself begging for help. But through her tears came strength.

'I said "I love you" to my reflection in the mirror. That was really hard. I hadn't said that to myself in more than a decade.

'Something shifted inside me. I was angry that alcohol is such a dangerous drug, yet so widely accepted. Angry because I knew I had a huge battle on my hands. I visually put myself in armour that day, and I haven't taken it off since.'

Kate, a writer, hasn't got your typical 'alcoholic' story – in fact, no one in her life knew she had a drinking problem. 

'I don't even like that word "alcoholic" – I never went to AA, and I don't believe in labels. It's not useful. You don't need to be drinking first thing in the morning to have a problem with alcohol.'

And besides, Kate never fit the stereotype. While she started drinking at the age of 14, there was no trauma, no pain, no sad story she had to numb.

'I just liked the feeling,' she says.

'People say I've got a glow now, that I look happy. My dead eyes now shine,' says Kate, who is now four years sober

Kate says her first year of sobriety was 'brutal' but now she is grateful for the drunken video that got her on the right path 

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'Everything lightened up. I felt relaxed. But once I started, I found it hard to stop.'

But what started as rebellious teenage fun became dangerous blur in her twenties. She was hit by a car while drunk and admits 'the doctor told me if I hadn't been drunk, I would have broken both my arms and legs'.

She fell through a glass shower door, spent a few hours in a police cell after telling an officer to 'f**k off' and ended up in a heroin den after what was supposed to be a casual drink.

'But no one pulled me aside, no one said anything. I was fun, crazy party girl Kate. People liked it. Society glamorises it.'

Then came marriage and two children, and Kate's lifestyle changed. The wild nights out turned into quiet nights in, but the drinking didn't stop. It just became more solitary.

'I wasn't getting smashed at nightclubs anymore. I was sipping red wine while folding laundry or making dinner. One bottle, sometimes two. I'd pass out on the sofa still in my clothes and wake up hating myself, checking my phone to see what messages I'd sent while drunk.'

And here's the most worrying thing: it didn't look like a problem from the outside.

'I wasn't slurring at the school gates. I wasn't missing work or falling over.'

To the outside world, Kate was thriving. Married with kids, a successful career, a nice house. No one suspected a thing.

'My kids wouldn't say I was a mess, I was still making breakfasts, packing lunches, sending emails. But that's the danger – you can drink a bottle of wine every night and still be functioning, still be funny, still be successful. That doesn't mean you're okay.'

At 5'10 (177cm) and over 89kg (14st), Kate felt puffy, had low energy and no motivation and was bloated. The spark in her eyes had gone.

'I craved sugar and salt, my diet was unhealthy, but it wasn't just the weight - I looked ten years older and my eyes were dark and dead, like the eyes of a shark.'

Alcohol was part of Kate's identity. It dulled the chaos in her frantic mind. But it was the internal voice that scared her the most. 

'"You're pathetic, you're embarrassing…" The shame was constant,' says Kate.

'It's hard to love yourself when you wake up from another blackout and feel ashamed and embarrassed every single day.'

The night she filmed herself –  December 21, 2021 – she had polished off a few bottles of wine and yet still, in her drunken stupor, drunk Kate wanted to get a desperate message to sober Kate.

'Something snapped,' she says.

'The video was drunk me begging sober me to save us both.'

The next day, Kate stopped drinking. At 45, she was done. She didn't go to rehab, nor did she feel she needed a detox. She just didn't pick up alcohol again.

'If booze is negatively affecting your life, that's enough. You don't need to be drinking vodka at 8am to be quitting.'

Her first year of sobriety was brutal as she realised what years of heavy drinking had done to her.

No, she didn't have liver cirrhosis or 'wet brain'. She hadn't suffered any permanent injuries. But she realised she had virtually no other interests besides drinking.

Alcohol had taken over her entire personality. It was a confronting realisation.

'I was a hermit [after quitting]. I stopped going out, and friends stopped asking. I realised I didn't have any hobbies either. I wrote "hobbies" in a notebook and stared at the blank page. It was awful, I had nothing to write,' she tells me.

'I had to rebuild everything.'

So she rebuilt her life. Kate signed up for evening art classes and started to learn who she was as a woman. She walked, kept a journal and cut toxic people out of her life.

'It was very lonely but I needed it. I thought the only thing that would need to change would be what was in my glass but I had to change my whole life,' she adds.

The transformation was undeniable. Now she is almost four years sober and her children tell her they are proud of her. She gets compliments about her appearance and bubbly personality. 

'People say I've got a glow now, that I look happy. My dead eyes now shine. My drinking was making me uglier, heavier, sadder. Now I buy nice skincare, I sleep in silk pyjamas. I look after myself.'

Kate was also dropped two dress sizes, from a 14/16 to a 12, and says she has never felt better.

'I live a completely different life now. I smile at myself all the time instead of looking around my bedroom for clues of what happened the night before,' she says.

Kate isn't interested in being an influencer or sobriety coach, but she just does share her sobriety story on Instagram in the hope of helping others. 

Her message to anyone struggling with booze is this: 'I can't believe the difference cutting alcohol out has made to my life, my relationships, my body, my face and my motivation. This is your story, you get to decide how it goes. You don't owe alcohol anything, but you owe yourself everything.' 

As for that video, she has only watched it about three times in three years. 'I don't wallow in it, I don't need to.' But it's still on her phone, a reminder of how far she has come.

'I am thankful drunk Kate made that video and I always thank her. Because without it, I may not even be here.'