This is a topic that we’re sure many of you are going to want to read about and that is “Alcohol” and weight loss. Do these two go together? Does alcohol help or hinder? Well we’ll answer these and more so make sure you have a pen and paper handy to take notes whilst you read.
On more than one occasion client will come to us in the Personal Training setting and ask us why their weight just won’t disappear. We start asking questions within our scope of practice but soon find out that alcohol plays a role in their nutrition so now we’ve seen the first red flag we start to look a little deeper. “How many are you having a week?” “Is it a nightly routine or do you only drink on weekends and special occasions?” These are the follow up questions and based on that we can start to see a picture forming and our ability to pass on the required information to the individual is made that little bit easier.
Why does it matter if we have alcohol on a regular basis? Well, generally it really isn’t a huge deal as long as it isn’t drinking to excess or a requirement but when you’re trying to lose weight, you’ll find that it becomes your biggest enemy!
In an earlier chapter we spoke about the body as an oven, and a freakin smart one at that! It’s able to adapt to all kinds of scenarios that we create for it and it’s able to do so quite quickly! So when we start consuming alcohol, the body tends to adapt by putting its full focus on getting rid of the alcohol from the system. At this point you’re probably thinking, GREAT! That’s exactly what we want right? Well yes, it is, but it comes at the expense of the body’s ability to burn fat.
Whatever energy we consume, be it carbs, sugar or even protein, if we consume more than our body requires we start storing it as fat. This means when we start drinking alcohol, the body places all of its attention on burning the alcohol and anything else that we have consumed is transported and stored in fat tissue.
We’ve found that a bottle of beer or glass of wine is the equivalent of a 45min workout. This may shock you but if you’ve taken on board the information above, you’ll see how this works.
Consume Alcohol = Body focusses on burning alcohol and forgetting about fat burn Body burns alcohol = Starts burning the excess calorie intake = equivalent to a 45min workout
This is by far one of the easier chapters to understand and we’ve kept it as simple as possible so there is no confusion but to answer the question “Can I lose weight whilst drinking alcohol?” the answer is Yes you can buuuuuuut nowhere near as quickly and you’ll have to put in quite a lot of work to do so depending on how many you have per week.
Justin Beard Pn1
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