It’s great to socialize with coworkers over a drink at your favorite place in Mt. Airy or relax with a drink or two at dinner, but there are consequences. Too much alcohol can lead to weight gain and sabotage weight loss. Even if a glass of wine may have heart-healthy benefits, it also has extra calories. Alcohol also affects your body in other ways that can cause weight gain or impede weight loss.
Alcohol contains empty calories.
If you’re trying to lose weight, you want every calorie to count toward your nutrition. While some alcoholic beverages may provide a few benefits, you’ll get fewer calories and more nutrition from consuming other food. Eating grapes provides the same health benefits as a glass of wine and doesn’t have any negative effects. Alcoholic beverages are often higher in calories, especially fancy umbrella drinks. Your body focuses on burning the alcohol first, so the calories in the drink are stored as fat. Females with lower estrogen levels store it as belly fat.
A few drinks before dinner add extra calories and make you hungrier.
If the extra calories in drinks aren’t enough, alcohol affects your appetite. It increases hunger. Scientists are exactly certain why that’s true. One study surmised it triggered a reaction that put the body in starvation mode. Alcohol also increases cortisol levels. Cortisol is linked to the accumulation of belly fat. It also lowers testosterone levels which helps build muscle. Muscle tissue burns more calories and boosts your metabolism.
Alcohol can slow the fat-burning process.
Drinking alcohol not only slows metabolism but the calories are handled differently by the liver. It burns alcohol first, slowing the process of other digestion. That’s because the body sees alcohol as a toxin and it wants to eliminate it immediately. That shifts the focus from burning stored calories to removing the waste. It disrupts the endocrine system and hormones, including affecting how glucagon works. That drives down blood sugar levels, leaving you tired and hungry.
- Too much alcohol affects your health. It increases the risk of diabetes and liver disease. It diminishes both mental and physical performance. One drink or less a day for women and two drinks a day or less for men is moderate alcohol consumption.
- Alcohol consumption can cause insulin spikes. The more frequent insulin spikes, the more prone you are to insulin resistance, a precursor of diabetes that also causes belly fat.
- Consuming alcohol slows other processes in the body. Even one drink can pause those processes for as much as an hour.
- One gram of alcohol has seven calories. Unlike fat, which contains slightly more calories, it doesn’t fill you or provide satisfaction. It’s even worse if you drink mixed drinks that are more like dessert than a beverage.
For more information, contact us today at Urban Athlete