Don't Drink and Loose Weight

I have good news and bad news. First, the good news: less than 5% of the calories you consume in alcoholic drinks are turned into fat (let the wild rumpus begin!...just don't do it drinking – you haven't heard the bad news). The bad news is this: it's not the calories in the drink that make you fat – it's the alcohol (let the wild juicing parties begin?).

How does alcohol make you fat if so little of it is converted to fat? Let's review. From a past post entitled, Last Call For Alcohol:

“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, it both stops you from burning stored fat AND it shuts down metabolism (and your metabolism starts up slowly). If you are drinking most nights, you are fighting a vicious and ultimately losing weight loss battle. By the time you finally 1) burn off the acetate floating around in your body and 2) finally get your metabolism turned back on, you are reloading the system.

Time to get all science-geeky on why alcohol has this affect. Your liver actually has priority levels in determining where it puts its energy. Job #1: process alcohol and turn it into acetate. While it is busy doing this, the metabolic process (specifically the processing of fats) takes a back seat and your metabolic rate slows to a crawl. Worse yet, now that all that wonderful acetate is coursing through your veins, your liver can take a break, even after it has processed the alcohol, because right now your body has a ready energy source. That means, for quite a while after you drink, you are not only not burning stored fats...you are also storing more fats! (the circle just gets more and more viscous...but we are not even done yet).

There is one last thing that we need to talk about – Fatty Liver (seriously? My LIVER can be fat...good grief, that just doesn't seem fair). The heavy use of alcohol (considered to be more than 6 servings at once or more than 4 or so servings a week) on a consistent bases is one of the causes of a fatty liver. Another cause is being obese (the ultimate 'you're fat because you are fat' slap in the face).

Here's the problem with a fatty liver – once it heads that way, it likes it. Rather than being a fat burning and pumping station, it starts being a fat storing station. In doing so, it starts slowing down metabolism. The result, particularly in middle-age (30-60), is a liver roll around your mid-section (some call it a beer belly or love handles).

The condition can be reverse and you can start losing weight again. The difficult news is that depending how severe the condition is, it can take three to twelve months to get it back to a fully functioning fat burning and pumping station.

In future posts, we'll be looking at just how to do that...but a good place to start is in limiting your alcohol intake.