Last Call For Alcohol

I've got good new and I've got bad news. Everybody has heard about the infamous “beer belly.” The basic idea is that alcohol calories get turned to fat and goes right to your gut! Well, here's the good news, that simply is not true, nor does it get turned to fat a deposited anywhere else (at least not in substantial quantities). Only a very small percentage of the calories from alcoholic drinks are actually converted into that kind of fat! Great news, right? Well...not exactly.

While the calories aren't converted to fat, adult beverages have a really devastating affect on your body's ability to burn fat. Here's the geek-lite of what happens. Your body converts a tiny bit of the calories into fat. It pushes the rest of it on to the liver (cheers!) and the liver, using alcohol dehydrogenase (a very useful little enzyme), converts it into acetate (specifically into acetic acid, then acetate). What's acetate? Well, it's basically a fat and it gets delivered directly to your bloodstream.

At this point you may be saying, I thought you said alcohol mostly was converted into fat? But that's not what I said. I said it wasn't converted to the kind of fat that gets deposited on your belly or other places. It does get converted into acetate (a kind of fat) and delivered directly to the bloodstream. The acetate in your blood stream then becomes your body's main source of fuel. Not needing the stored fat for fuel, your body shuts down most of the system that handles that function (research suggest that fat metabolism can drop as much as 73%). The problem then is, it's not like a light switch, once it is off it takes it a while to get fired back up.

So, double damage. You loose a few hours of fat reduction while the alcohol is in your system and then you loose the hours it takes to get the system fired back up! Worse yet, try a few drinks after dinner, then just as the alcohol is working it's way out of your system, go to bed and become as physically dormant as you ever get. You could lose almost half a day's worth of fat burning!

And it's worse than that. Alcohol makes you hungry. A number of studies have show that people consuming alcohol are much more likely to increase their calorie intake. Worse yet, remember those fantastic fat burners? Some people call them muscles. Alcohol actually contributes to breaking them down. It increases a hormone called cortisol which is particularly good at taking out muscles and it decreases the production of testosterone which, of course, helps build muscles. Another double whammy!

So, am I saying we should all be on the wagon? No. Not at all. There is some evidence suggesting that a small amount of alcohol (and I mean small – like 150 calories total), will slightly increase your ability to lose weight. How much is 150? 1 beer - 5ish oz. of wine - and mixed drinks are all over the board. Something simple like a gin and tonic or a diet coke and whiskey, you can pretty much just count on one.

I'm looking for weight loss topics you'd like to know about. So, let me hear from you.

Keep at it – you can do this!