Weight Gain - Lighting The Booze Fuze
After a long day it’s good to look forward to a drink, isn’t it? A cool beer goes down a treat. Contemplating the day sipping a glass of wine is very enjoyable. Alcohol has the effect of making us relax, and we all need time to think over the day and to have a time to wind down. Alcohol also changes our mood. Slowly we begin to feel better. The drama of the day starts to seem trivial and unimportant - at least until we begin to drink too much - things then become very different indeed. Reality has the habit of becoming even more real and our take on this new reality tends to be distorted. The unimportant gets a new lease of life and confusion reigns. Come the middle of the night, we wake to find all our troubles lined up in front of us each one bigger and more terrible than it was before. When we chose to drink alcohol and we should expect to suffer the consequences.
How do we make decisions? We consider the choices available to us and take a decision based on the information we have. The problem is that most of us take decisions on very little information. In fact we take decisions based on 5% of the available information, and that’s a big worry.
Are we well informed about alcohol? We know what it feels like to have too much or to be drunk. We know that it can be very enjoyable, but do we really know what its effects are? For example, does alcohol make you put on weight? Should you drink alcohol when you’re trying to lose weight?
Alcohol contains more calories per gram than protein and carbohydrate - they each have four. Fat has nine and alcohol has a whopping seven. Easy to understand why the belief is that alcohol makes you overweight.
The interesting thing about alcohol is that it contains no carbohydrate (apart from a few sweet drinks) which means that your body can’t store the energy it provides. Faced with this dilemma it converts this new energy into something called acetate.
The energy the alcohol provides isn’t wasted, in fact the body uses it first. It actually uses it in preference to the energy that has already been stored away as glucose and fat. So to say that alcohol makes you fat is not correct. What it does do is to prevent you from losing weight because it uses ‘acetate energy’ in preference to your stored energy which is a very different thing.
You may well have noticed that when you drink alcohol you feel hungry. This is because alcohol stimulates you appetite. It encourages to lose your inhibitions and to say ‘yes’ to another helping of your favourite ice cream. It can seriously harm your weight loss efforts.
If you can get into the habit of not drinking alcohol you will be doing your weight loss efforts a lot of good. If you want a positive outcome to your weight loss program, it’s worth the effort to either stop drinking alcohol or to reduce the amount you drink. You can be slim. All you have to do is make sure all your habits are good ones.