Alcohol and Diet

Many of you may not realize that there is a very easy way to make big progress in your health and fitness—eliminate alcoholic beverages from your diet. Some of you may already know that alcohol is full of empty calories, and by “empty calories”, I mean calories that aren’t useful for the functions of the body but still have to be worked off just like useful calories.

Here is some less widely known information about alcoholic drinks: A shot of alcohol contains about 100 calories. So, lets put a night of drinking into perspective. If you have 6 shots of alcohol during a night of drinking that is 600 calories. Margaritas have significantly more calories than shots. A typical margarita has 300 calories. If you have 6 margaritas, that is 1800 calories! A woman that weighs about 130 pounds and exercises 5 times per week burns about 1700 calories over the course of a day. Depending on the drink you choose to imbibe during a night of drinking, you will have consumed between 30%-105% of your daily needed calories by the end of the night.

The following is a list of the other effects of a night of drinking:

1. In addition to having ingested many extra calories, since the drinks were consumed right before going to bed, very few of the calories will be used as fuel in the near future and instead will be stored as fat.
2. The next effect of consuming alcohol at night is the disruption of your normal sleep cycles. Since you don’t sleep well after a night of drinking, your body doesn’t repair itself as well as a normal night’s sleep.
3. Drinking alcohol dehydrates your body as well as depletes your body of vitamins and minerals that it needs to function. Until your body is rehydrated and supplied with the needed vitamins and minerals, it will not process food correctly. The process of rehydrating and replenishing your body with the needed vitamins and minerals takes a day or more.
4. Drinking alcohol slows your metabolism. The more you drink, the worse the effects are.
5. Many studies have shown that consuming more than three drinks in one sitting will halt all muscle repair for many days. This means that the muscles that you worked out earlier in the day will not repair themselves well, resulting in little strength and muscle gains from the day’s workout.

All of these side effects of a night of drinking add up to halt any weight loss for a number of days and possibly lead to weight gain. My suggestion to those that do drink is to cut down on the number of drinks you take in during one sitting and stick with drinks that are sugar free so that the calorie content is lower. Some people only drink one or two drinks at night to “ease the tension” and those people probably are wondering if all of these effects apply to them as well—the answer is YES. Obviously the effects aren’t as sever, but they are still there slowing/stopping your fitness progress. The moral of this story is, enjoy the company of your friends and your surroundings without drinking alcohol so that you can reach your goal of a healthier, sexier body.

Robert