The Science Behind Why Alcohol Stops Fat Loss

What if I told you there's something that one out of three people do that's killing their ability to lose weight? And it isn't junk food or skipping the gym. And it's what most women consider a reward after a hard week. It's alcohol. Now, this doesn't mean you have to give up alcohol forever. But knowledge is power. And I want to give you the power of knowing exactly what alcohol does to your body. So after losing 110 pounds, I wanted to make this video to share with you the seven ways that alcohol f***s up your fat loss coming from someone who let alcohol f*** up their fat loss. Which brings me to point one. Your fat burning shuts off. The second alcohol enters your body, your body stops burning fat. Not just slows down, it stops. Because alcohol is literally a toxin. And your body can't store it. And it needs to get rid of it right now. So it drops everything that it's doing to get rid of it. And that includes your fat loss. I used to drink a lot. And then I would eat a lot. And I'd work hard all week. And then Friday, Saturday would roll around. And I'd have a couple of glasses of wine because, well, I earned it. Monday would roll around. And when I got on the scale, wonder why I wasn't making any progress. About two years ago, roughly, I started a series of no alcohol, no ice cream, no protein bars, and no energy drinks until blah blah blah. For various reasons for each of them. But for alcohol, it was because I started to realize all of the ways it was keeping me stuck. From extra calories, to shitty sleeps, to using it to try to feel more accepted. Or to disassociate from reality. When I cut the alcohol out, suddenly I could sleep better. I could think clearer. My skin was nicer. And the weight loss was a pleasant bonus on top of that. I finally realized how much better I liked myself and my results without alcohol in my life consistently. Your body cannot store alcohol. So the moment you drink it, your body drops everything to shift its focus on getting rid of it. Which turns off your fat being metabolized. Alcohol reduces fat oxidization by up to 73% while being processed. The fat you were trying to burn sits untouched while your body works on getting rid of that alcohol and whatever else you ate with it. Which was usually a bad choice. It takes your body about one hour to process it per standard drink. So two glasses of wine is two hours your body is not burning fat. And if you multiply that across every day of the week for a month, you can see how many fat-burning hours you're giving up. And if my math maths, there's about 30 days in a month times two drinks a day is 60. That's 60 hours that your body isn't working at getting rid of the fat. That's a week and a half of a full-time job. Which brings me to point two. You're hungrier the next day. Have you ever woke up the next day after drinking feeling hungrier than usual? And it takes more to feel satisfied. And it's not because your willpower went out the window with your inhibitions the night before. We saw you dancing on the bar. It's actually hormonal. Your hormones get all discombobulated and it takes a while for them to figure themselves out again. You know that feeling when you wake up. It's like the normal Greek yogurt bowl. The eggs and toast isn't going to cut it. You want the egg McMuffin. You want the Big Mac. You want the banana bread and the frappolappa ding-dong. And you get it all and eat it all and somehow you still feel unsatisfied. It's 10 a.m. and you're already thinking about what you're going to eat next. And for the longest time, I used to kind of wear that as a badge of honor. It's like, haha, it's hungover. Let's go to Costco and get pizza. You know, pizza and the hot dog. It's like you get a hot dog for like $1.75. Hot dog and a pop. Then you can do your shopping for your meal prep while you're there. You buy a bunch of vegetables with good intentions and then just go into the crisper and turn to brown soup. Just me? Okay. Anywho, I didn't understand what was actually happening inside my body. I just thought that was the way it is. But alcohol actually raises your ghrelin, which is your hunger signal. And if you want to remember that one, I think of gremlin, like a hungry little gremlin, you know? And it lowers your leptin, which is your signal for fullness. So you wake up hungrier than normal and it takes more to feel satisfied. And that doesn't just stop the next day when the alcohol is gone. Research shows that that can persist the whole entire following day, which can lead to 300 to 500 to a thousand extra calories consumed without even feeling like you overate. The damage from one wine and wings with the girls on Friday night is not just isolated to Friday night. It's the hidden calories in the drinks. It's the hours of no fat burning. And then it's the extra calories you consumed the day after. Everything compounds and it really turns into a shitstorm that is not in your favor. Which brings me to point three, the invisible calories. I like to call alcohol the sneaky fourth macro. Because you have your protein, you have your carbs, and you have your fat like everybody knows. But nobody thinks about alcohol and the calories it contains. And it actually has more calories per gram than protein or carbs. It has seven calories per gram. And the problem is a lot of people don't take into account liquid calories in general, let alone alcohol. I had a client one time who genuinely thought that vodka didn't have calories. She was drinking a few drinks daily and we couldn't figure out why she wasn't making any progress. Everything else looked great. But she was drinking roughly 300 calories from vodka every day. If you're already in a loose calorie deficit of about 500, but you're not 100% tracking accurately, then you're adding in 300-ish calories from alcohol on the daily. That drastically reduces the calorie deficit you're in in the week. So instead of being in a 500 calorie deficit daily, which would equal to about a pound of fat loss a week, you've essentially put yourself pretty close to maintenance. And then it's pretty easy to get frustrated when you're not making progress. The thing to understand is how the alcohol factors in. With seven calories per gram, that's more than protein and carbs and just a little less than fat. And everyone knows to watch their fat and carbs, but nobody knows to watch their alcohol in the same way. And then, depending what you're drinking it with, three drinks on a Friday night can easily be 500 to 1,000 calories. And that's without even touching a single bite of food. That can be upwards of a third of a woman's daily calorie budget. Gone in under a couple hours, but then continuing through the next day like we just talked about. And now here's the thing. If you eat 500 to 1,000 extra calories of food, your body is getting some protein and some fiber, some vitamins and nutrients. When you drink those calories in alcohol, your body is literally getting a toxin. Nothing good, no nutrition, no satiety. Your body processes it like a toxin because it is. That brings me to point four, the social pressure. Peer pressure, peer pressure, peer pressure, peer pressure. Most women know on some level that alcohol isn't working with them in their health goals. But they drink anyway. Not because they don't know it's not good for them, but because drinking just is easier somehow than saying no in the moment. Back in the day, in my people-pleasing days, I was someone that needed to feel loved and accepted by others because I didn't love myself or accept myself. So I would do whatever my friends were doing. Adapting to the room instead of influencing it. And sometimes I ended up in the wrong room, compromising on what I actually wanted just to feel accepted by people that I didn't really fit in with. I had a client one time that gave up alcohol for 30 days. Halfway in, she told me she had never felt more like herself than she did without alcohol. And that she usually drinks to feel or be social because she considers herself an introvert. I looked her dead in the eyes and I said, maybe you're in the wrong rooms. I watched that land for her in a way that nothing else ever had and in a way that it did for me when I finally realized it about myself. Alcohol is built into almost every social situation. Dinner, work events, family gatherings, and saying no is often met with, why not? Oh, just one. Are you pregnant? It always requires an explanation for some reason. Most women drink because it's easier than the conversation you have to have that comes with not drinking. Humans will behave in a way that supports what they want most. So before you walk into the room or the event, think about it to yourself. What do I actually want most? My health and fitness goals? Or to feel accepted by people when I bend to fit what they want me to be? It's a pretty easy decision when you look at it that way. And you know what? A glass of sparkling water with ice and a squeeze of lime on the side can pass for a vodka seven. And then if you're not ready to have the conversation, nobody needs to ask why you're not drinking. The discomfort of saying no to one round of drinks is less than the frustration of watching all of your effort and not seeing the scale move all year. Which brings me to point five. It fucks with your sleep. Even if you get an eight hours of sleep, the alcohol still affects the quality of your sleep. And bad sleep makes everything that we talked about in point one and two even worse. It stacks more cortisol and more hunger on top of what the alcohol already did to your hormones. There's a convincing little lie that a glass of wine helps you sleep. You feel kind of drowsy, you fall asleep faster, you think you sleep great. And then you're wide awake at 3am, or even if you sleep all night, you still wake up feeling like hot trash. You're probably already not sleeping enough. And now, the sleep that you are getting is not actually doing its job. Alcohol blocks your REM sleep, which is the stage of your sleep where your body does most of its repairing and your hormone regulation. Eight hours of sleep after drinking is not the same as eight hours of sleep after a good workout and just a good night's sleep. You don't get the recovery. Poor sleep from alcohol consumption also raises your cortisol, which compounds with the elevated ghrelin and the lowered leptin. And then this creates a hormonal shitstorm for you to deal with all day long. You're welcome. Not only does consistently poor sleep lower your metabolism and increase your cravings, but when you're doing it hungover, you're dragging ass all day and you're probably not going to get to the gym, but you will get to McDonald's drive-thru, maybe twice. That brings me to point six. Alcohol destroys your muscle recovery. If you're lifting during the week and drinking on the weekend, the alcohol is still undoing the work that you did during the week. Picture your typical week. You train hard Monday to Friday, you're in your calorie deficit, you're prioritizing your protein, you're drinking your water, trying to get the sleep in. You're consistent. And then you wake up with your cortisol elevated, your ghrelin elevated, your leptin suppressed, you feel tired, you're going to McDonald's, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. You did the consistent hard part during the week, but the recovery, the part that actually turns that work into results, that got compromised in a 12-hour window on Friday night. Alcohol suppresses your protein synthesis by up to 37%. If you lift on Friday and drink on Friday night, your body runs at roughly two-thirds of its normal muscle building capacity while you're sleeping. So the workout happened, but the recovery, eh, it didn't. And alcohol spikes your cortisol, which breaks down muscle and promotes belly fat storage. Less muscle means a slower metabolism because a pound of muscle on your body burns 10 calories. It literally takes energy to exist. So you lose muscle, you have a slower metabolism, and then a slower metabolism means that fat loss gets harder every week that this pattern continues. Now, one night does not ruin everything, but consistent weekend drinking consistently suppresses recovery, consistently spikes cortisol, and consistently slows the progress that you're trying to make working your ass off in the gym. Which brings me to the final point, the identity shift. Willpower is finite. It's not infinite. It only lasts so long. Similar to motivation. Very fleeting. And it's why most women fail at cutting back or even sticking to a calorie deficit. The willpower runs out. What actually creates lasting change is not trying to say no all weekend. It's changing what you actually believe about yourself to be true and changing who you believe you actually are so the decision is made before you even walk through the door. I went through a phase of a lot of drinking and a lot of eating because I was very unhappy with my life. It was a way for me to disassociate, to alter my reality so I didn't have to sit with what my life actually looked like at that point. If I didn't have to look at it, I didn't have to change it either. And I'm not saying that to shame anyone that's currently doing that. I understand. Did it for a long time. But for me, it was compounding the exact problem that I was using alcohol to escape. Now here's something that actually cracks me up a little bit about myself. Sometimes I have a pretty terrible money mindset around spending money on things that are unnecessary and I genuinely cannot justify spending 15 to 20 dollars on a glass of wine or a drink. And I don't even know if that's the current price for a glass of wine or a drink. But that financial hang-up for me has actually become one of the best reasons that I don't drink. I've mostly improved the other areas of my money mindset but I left that one alone. Just because in this case, that one's working for me. What I'm trying to say is the reasons to keep you from drinking don't have to be noble. They just have to work. Willpower says, I'm not drinking tonight. I'm gonna try not to drink. Identity says, I'm someone who doesn't drink. One is a battle every weekend and the other is a decision that's already made. I don't have the exact research and I think the story is actually about a smoker but I'm gonna say a drinker in this case. You've got two people who drink and they're both trying to quit. If you ask one of them, Hey, do you wanna drink? And they're like, No thanks, I'm trying to quit. Versus if you ask the other one, Hey, do you wanna drink? And they say, No, I don't drink. The person who identifies as someone who doesn't drink has less of a chance of drinking than the person who is trying to quit. If you don't believe me, just ask Google. Start with the question of who do I want to be? What do I want to believe to be true about myself? And your decisions are always casting votes for yourself either for future self or for current self maybe even for old self. So each time you begin with the end in mind or you think, what do I want the outcome to be? What do I believe to be true about myself? And you make a decision from there you're casting votes into future self. So every time you cast a vote for water or sparkling water with lime you're casting a vote for your future self and what you actually want most. And over time, all of those votes those small, seemingly insignificant votes in the moment because there's no immediate consequence those votes add up. Little by little, a little becomes a lot. And so you don't need to be perfect and there's times you're going to say yes when you actually wanted to say no. As long as you're more consistently putting those votes into future self and what you actually want you're going to move in that direction and it's going to help you build that identity of what you believe to be true about yourself. The goal is not to drink less. The goal is to become someone who drinking less or not at all is just part of who they are. For me, that was a tough pill to swallow because I had to learn to actually love myself. At first I had to admit to myself that maybe I didn't. The behavior follows the identity and the results follow the behavior. And if you're ready to stop trying to figure this out all alone the link to work with us is in the description. We help women over 35 lose 20 pounds in 12 weeks sustainably and keep it off. There's a bunch of testimonials on our website that's in the description too. You should go check that out. And if you're not ready for that yet that's cool. We're here when you are. And if you want to get so fit it looks like you're on a zempic watch this video next.