The Effects Of Alcohol On Weight
Before I get into the effects of alcohol on weight, let me preface by saying that I’m not saying that you have a drinking problem.
All I’m saying is that you might have a problem with drinking.
I mean, golly gee willikers at the amount of booze some of you drink!
How terrible are your relationships, rotten are your kids, and horrible your work life that you feel compelled to drown away your sorrows in bottle after bottle of beer, wine, what have you?!
While alcohol is making you find me even more devilishly handsome and less inhibited to slide into my direct messages on various social media platforms, it’s not doing anything for your figure.1To find me handsome, trust me that you don’t need liquor for that. As for becoming less inhibited, keep drinking, ladies!
See, at 7 calories per gram, alcohol has the highest energy content behind dietary fat.2Fat contains 9 calories per gram. However, unlike dietary fat and the other macronutrients, all seven of alcohol’s calories are empty and have no nutritional value.
…
Oh yeah, and alcohol is also toxic.3Yeah, toxic…like your family members…your family members who are the cause of your drinking in the first place!
Now, because alcohol is a toxic substance, it doesn’t get stored in the body like food calories. Instead of getting stored, alcohol metabolization takes immediate priority over that of fats and sugars, with it then getting eliminated from the body. What this means is that the metabolism goes from burning off the calories from your last meal to breaking down that “Two-Buck Chuck” you decided to treat yourself to.4Yeah, the cheap wine you’re drunk-crying about on your kitchen floor because you suddenly realized that the decision to buy it is going to place a serious financial strain on your broke ass!
Psst…it is.
On top of alcohol pushing the pause button on the body’s ability to burn fat, it also affects satiety and impairs self-control, which results in you not only consuming more calories but also eating fattening foods you know damn well you’re not supposed to.
What does all of this add up to?
Weight gain!
Duh!!!
Alcohol can contribute to weight gain, either by the substance itself or as a result of the garbage you eat when the drunk munchies hit.
Does that mean I have to give it up now?
Why the fuck would you think that?
Aren’t you already enough of a quitter?!
And you want to add something else to that list?!?!
Nah, homie!
While not drinking would help, turning your house into Prohibition-era America and becoming a teetotaler isn’t necessary, especially overnight.
The reason is that when people go cold turkey in ridding themselves of something that’s part of their normal day, what they’re doing is setting themselves up to fall off the wagon and binge on that forbidden item they begin jonesing for like crazy!
Oftentimes, the effects of that binge can be even worse than had the person just continued eating sweets, banging heroin, or doing what else they went cold turkey on.
So no, don’t cold turkey it!
On top of that, elimination of alcohol eliminates its health benefits.
Yes, there are health bennies!
Some of alcohol’s benefits include protection against cardiovascular disease by raising the level of good cholesterol (HDL); improving insulin sensitivity and reducing the incidence of type 2 diabetes; and lowering the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other cognitive impairments.
If you’re already a drinker, all of this is why you should aim for integration rather than deprivation.
That means finding a way to make alcohol fit into your life without it ruining it.5This, of course, is assuming that you shouldn’t already be in Alcoholics Anonymous, which you probably should.
The most obvious way to still drink alcohol without suffering the negatives is to practice moderation.
Drink in moderation to save yourself from getting sloppy drunk and waking up the next morning with a back alley tattoo of Kanji characters on your lower back that you’ll come to find out don’t mean what you thought they meant?
Nah, don’t be silly!
You should drink in moderation in order to save your waistline!!!
That’s what it’s all about, buddy!
So how do you practice moderation?
Well, you could remember to pour some Henny out for all your homies who aren’t here. That way, you only end up drinking about 97 percent of the liquor in the bottle instead of all of it.6Who knew the people in gangsta rap videos and hood movies from the early ’90s were so health conscious!
Another useful tip is to not drink alone but with a bunch of people who don’t chip in on the bottle but drink an amount not commensurate to what they contributed.
Yes, folks, these are tips that you’ll only find here!
But seriously, moderate alcohol use is defined as two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women.7Why the difference? It’s because men have more water in their bodies, higher concentrations of the digestive enzyme dehydrogenase, and carry less body fat. All of those factors result in men metabolizing alcohol better than women and being able to drink more.
Yes, it’s yet another example of male superiority, if I dare say so myself as a much superior man!
Exactly what constitutes a “drink” is:
• one 12-ounce bottle of beer
• one 5-ounce glass of wine
• 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits
Other than drinking less — who really wants to do that?!?! — another thing you might want to do is make better choices.
For example, avoid mixed drinks made with syrups, juice, soda, energy drinks, and tonic water, which are high in calories and sugar. Instead, be a fucking adult and drink your liquor straight up or with reduced calorie and low sugar mixers like club soda, seltzer water, frozen fruit, and other boring shit that you deserve for being too pussy to get your bourbon down without a chaser.
I know making better choices is something you haven’t displayed once in your life, but there’s a first time for everything!
Lastly, you can account for alcohol like you would anything else. To do so, you first need to find the total calories of the beverage on its label or via Google. Once you have that info, divide the total calories by 4 to count the alcohol as a carbohydrate.8For example: 12 oz of beer contains 154 total calories. Divided by 4, that equals 39 grams of carbs. To count alcohol as fat, divide the total calories by 9.9For example: 12 oz of beer contains 154 total calories. Divided by 9, that equals 17 grams of fat. To count alcohol as both, halve the total calories and then divide each half by the respective figure for each macronutrient.10For example: 12 oz of beer contains 154 total calories. Divided by 2, that equals 77 calories. 77 calories divided by 4 equals 19 grams of carbs. The remaining 77 calories divided by 9 equals 9 grams of fat.
NOTE: Because alcohol provides calories and energy but not nutrients, it isn’t necessary to sustain life like protein, fat, and carbs. So at 7 calories per gram, alcohol isn’t treated as its own separate macro. Instead, it falls somewhere in the middle of fat and carbs in its behavior and energy content. That’s why it can be accounted as either or both.
There you have it.
Alcohol can fuck up your figure directly and/or indirectly, but that doesn’t mean you have to ditch the booze!11Remember, the burning of what you’ve recently eaten takes a backseat to burning off alcohol, which results in a backlog of fatty acids that are eventually stored as fat. Also, alcohol lowers inhibitions and affects decision-making. As a result, when drinking, more questionable things will end up going inside your mouth than just the genitalia of someone you normally wouldn’t find attractive.
Nope.
There are ways to handle alcohol without it love-handling you.12See what I did there? You know, love-handling you. And love handles are the fat spilling over both sides of your pants. Sigh, it feels like all this literary genius is being wasted…
However, on the off chance that you’re wealthy and have a clone living in an isolated compound somewhere whose sole reason for living is so you can harvest their body, then yeah, just go ahead and have fun fucking up yours!
Glossary: calories, dietary fat, metabolism, moderation
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