After 40, your body processes alcohol slower, keeping it in your bloodstream longer. This wrecks deep sleep, disrupts hormones, tanks muscle recovery, and those calories stick around as metabolism slows. The speaker quit drinking entirely.
Now look, that's my personal story, but the science absolutely backs this up too. After 40, your body metabolizes alcohol slower, so it lingers in your system for longer. It also wrecks your deep sleep, and because deep sleep is already harder as you get— sorry, it's already harder to get as you age, you notice it even more. It also interferes with hormones and recovery, and this makes it harder to build or maintain muscle. Of course, something that's already harder to do as you get older. And ultimately, it's just empty calories. And those extra calories are much harder to burn off once your metabolism slows down, which it does as you age. So the bottom line is that every single drink has a bigger cost once you're over 40. And at some point, you have to ask yourself if that cost is worth paying. Now, for me, the answer was to cut it out completely.
