[Someone1234]

One impacts your lifestyle in a negative way and the other does not.

Someone can be consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol by the WHO's standards which will cause things like weight gain and shorter lifespan, without being a alcoholic.

However conversely someone could drink, on average, below the recommended daily amount but have short periods of dangerously heavy drinking and thus be defined as an alcoholic over the longer term (e.g. some people with unmedicated bipolar disorders).

As I said at the start it really depends how much drinking impacts your life. If it doesn't in a negative way then you likely aren't an alcoholic (but yet still might want to look at your weight and fitness due to overconsumption).

[tluyben2]

But WHO's standards (2-3 drinks/day) won't make you gain weight if you live a healthy life otherwise (if you didn't, you'll gain that weight anyway, so hard to say if that was the alcohol doing that; sure if you drink 10 pints/night yes, but 2 normal sized drinks...) and that shorter lifespan is doubtful, but that's anecdotal from my side (the statistics WHO uses are not very convincing though; they just note everyone who drinks and has ailments and when they run their matlab algo's over it, they attribute all these which are known to be affected by alcohol to alcohol (ab)use, at least in the ones I read).

Btw. I think the WHO recommends no more than 2(3 for men) drinks per day and no more than 6-7 per week, so that would account for the periods of heavy drinking. You cannot really drink heavy and stay below that.

[mga226]

I wasn't really asking a question about my health. I was more interested the methodological differences that result in very similar numbers of drinks per day (2 vs 3) being considered healthy (not just acceptable but desirable) or dangerously high, respectively.