Obesity And Alcohol - It’s All About Consequenses

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.

We make choices based on our likes and dislikes. We choose to do something because we have facts that influence our decision, but we sometimes make some bizarre choices and stupid decisions. In fact, it’s said that most of us take decisions based on 5% of the available information. No wonder we get ourselves into a mess.

Let?s take alcohol. We all think we know all about alcohol, after all we know what it feels like to enjoy it and what it means to have too much, but do we know what it does to our body? Do we really know if it makes us fat? It is a common belief that it does, but is it true?

The most important thing to realize with alcohol is that it contains a lot of calories ? which is probably why people believe it makes you fat. Alcohol is a nutrient like, protein, fat and carbohydrate, and as such it provides us with energy, lots of it. It contains nearly the same number of calories per gram as fat. Fat has 9 and alcohol has 7. Protein and carbohydrate have 4.

The body has a problem with alcohol. It?s not a carbohydrate and so it can?t store the energy it gets from alcohol as fat or as glucose. What it does is that it changes the energy into acetate.

The body uses acetate as a source of energy as it would the stored glucose and fat in your body - but here’s the rub. It uses the ‘acetate energy’ before and in preference to your stored glucose and fat.

Another fact to remember about alcohol is that it stimulates your appetite. This is not something that you welcome when you are trying your very best to lose weight. You will also have noticed that it also reduces your resolve. Can you stop yourself from having another slice of apple pie and cream? Alcohol makes it more difficult to say ?no?. Drinking alcohol can become a habit.

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.