Weight Loss: How Alcohol Affects your Weight Loss Plan

If you’re in the habit of regularly tying one on, you may be sabotaging your weight loss plans. Alcohol undermines your fitness plans in almost every way imaginable. It adds calories, makes you hungry, changes the way you burn the fat that you are already carrying, and encourages you to carry more fat.

When watching their calories, many people forget to calculate the liquid calories they ingest. If you’re trying to follow a sensible diet & nutrition program, it’s worth knowing that alcohol contains 7 calories per gram; that’s about 100 calories for a glass of wine and about 150 calories for a beer (depending on its alcohol content)! If you’re having a mixed drink, you’re going to take in over 200 to 300 calories. And all these calories provide you with little to no nutritional benefit.

Alcohol also makes you hungry. Who can’t think of a post-bar trip to a late night greasy spoon after a night of revelling? And since your inhibitions and your reasoning are inhibited (and alcohol has stimulated your appetite), you’re likely to eat more as well as to eat things that you wouldn’t otherwise choose to eat.

Alcohol Undermines Your Weight Loss, Diet and Fitness Plans in Almost Every Way Imaginable

Alcohol Undermines Your Weight Loss, Diet and Fitness Plans in Almost Every Way Imaginable

Alcohol also changes the rate at which you burn fat. Calories consumed as alcohol don’t get stored as fat. They get converted to a substance called “acetate.” Acetate is burned quickly by the body and is therefore burned off before the fat stores you are working hard at eliminating.

Finally, alcohol increases your insulin levels by promoting the release of extra insulin from the pancreas. This extra insulin causes your blood sugar to dip more than it should and makes you hungrier. It also causes you to make more fat and to direct that fat toward the fat cells located around the center of your body.

Not only is this extra weight less proportionately distributed and therefore more obvious to the eye, carrying your weight around the belly as opposed to distributed over the entire body is also a predictor of heart disease.

It’s perfectly fine to have a glass of wine with dinner every now and again (just remember to take those extra calories into account), but if you are consuming alcohol regularly or are binge-drinking, you are undermining all the weight loss efforts you’re putting in during the rest of your day or week.

When you are trying to Get Fit Fast, it only makes sense to limit the consumption of something that provides empty calories, makes you hungrier, converts more of the calories you take in to fat, stores more of your weight around the center of your body, and reduces your ability to make clear decisions about the foods you eat.

Try giving up alcohol for a few weeks and see if you don’t notice the scale move down a little quicker.