How Does Alcohol Affect Fat Loss? Science Simplified

Can you drink alcohol while still losing weight, building muscle, and getting in shape? When it comes to alcohol and losing weight, you may have heard before, you need to be in a calorie deficit in order to lose weight. So when it comes to calories and alcohol, there is a specific relationship. There are 3 main macronutrients: protein, carbs, and fats. For every 1 gram of protein, you have 4 calories. For every 1 gram of carbohydrate, you have 4 calories, and for every 1 gram of fat, you have 9 calories. But on top of that, you have alcohol is its own macronutrient. So for every 1 gram of alcohol, there is 7 calories that is attached to that alcohol. Now, some alcohols also have, you know, things that are higher in carbohydrates. For example, you may have seen like the low-carb or low-sugar drinks, that sort of stuff. But alcohol has calories. And so we have to first and foremost take that into consideration when we're talking about your calorie deficit. And let's just use a real-world situation. Let's say you're going to go out and you're going to have 3 drinks that come out to, let's just say, 600 calories. Let's then say your calorie deficit is you are trying to hit 1,600 calories per day. Simple math will show us That, that would mean you have 1,000 calories left for that day in order to still make sure that you hit your calorie deficit. Because remember, if you hit your calorie deficit, you can technically still drink alcohol and still be able to lose weight. You might already be thinking, wow, I only have 1,000 calories that I can actually eat in order to stick within my calorie deficit. That's what we're going to talk about right now. You may have heard before alcohol be referred to as something called empty calories. And let's talk about what that means in terms of you trying to stay within your calorie deficit. If you have 3 drinks at 600 calories, that's about 200 calories per drink, correct? That one drink at 200 calories does essentially nothing for you when you talk about your calorie deficit. Deficit. This alcohol is not going to keep you full. It's not going to keep you satisfied. It's not going to help, uh, crave— uh, help fight cravings. It's not going to help you have better workouts or have more energy or do these things. It essentially does nothing for you. It's also just not that much food volume in your stomach. You're not actually like filling your stomach up a lot. Whereas let's take for example 200 calories from Raspberries instead. If you're having 200 calories coming from raspberries, number one, that is a lot of food volume. This is less— this is way less than 200 calories from raspberries. But if you had 200 calories worth of raspberries, that would be a lot of food volume, which would help keep you full. Not to mention, raspberries are also very high in fiber. Fiber also is a nutrient that helps keep you full, helps give you sustained energy, helps with digestion. So these 200 calories would be put to much better use in terms of you trying to stick to your calorie deficit. This would make it a lot easier to stick to your calorie deficit. This would not make it much easier. For example, take 200 calories of chicken breast, very high in protein, which is going to help keep you full, keep you satisfied, help fight off cravings. Also, you can get a lot of food volume with a chicken breast for not that many calories. Again, you'll have much more food in your stomach stomach that will help keep you full, that will help you stay within your overall calories for the day. Because if you're less hungry and you have more food in your stomach, it's going to be easier to stick to your calorie deficit, correct? And also, it's just not about the actual alcohol calories. Yes, that is a part of it, but it's also the food calories that come along with alcohol. Because let's be honest with ourselves, You're not snacking on celery and carrots when you're drinking alcohol usually. What are you eating? You're eating pizza, you're eating nachos, you're eating these type of foods. Not to say those types of foods are bad because they're not, but what are they? They're usually higher in calories. So not only are you now having the alcohol calories come through, you're having the food calories come through as well, which again, if let's just say your goal is to stick to 1,600 calories, 600 is already coming from those drinks. You only have about 1,000 calories left over to be able to put towards food for the whole day, not just for like the dinner out, for example, but it's towards the entire day. And if you're eating very high-calorie foods along with the alcohol, you can see how this starts to add up and it starts to make things very difficult for you to actually see progress. And it's not just the day of food, it's also the day after. One of our coaching clients did a podcast with us. You can check out that podcast right here if you'd like to. And she talked about how she has somebody who's given up alcohol and she's seen a massive change in her physique, in her journey. She talked about on the podcast how it wasn't just the same day, it was the day after. She was hungover, she wasn't feeling as well, she was tired, she didn't feel like cooking, she would want some greasy food to try to get over the hangover. And again, now it's the day of. Now it's the day after, you know, now these things are starting to add up where it's making it much harder on you. And the last thing to mention would be your inhibition lowers. What does your inhibition mean? It just means your ability to stick to something. When you're drinking alcohol, that's why you can't drink and drive. Your inhibition's lower, your sense is lower. You're much less likely to make really good decisions when you're drinking alcohol. And so it's much easier just to say, fuck it, I'll have some of the chips. It's much easier to say, fuck it, I don't care about my diet right now. I'll just get back on track next Monday or whatever it is. So with all these things combined, it makes it much harder for you to lose weight and drink alcohol. Not impossible, but it does make it more mindful. We're going to talk about how you can do it a little bit later in this episode, but right now I want to dive into alcohol and your sleep. There's 2 main hormones in your body that are your main hunger hormones. Your leptin and your ghrelin. Your leptin hormone is the hormone that tells your body we're not hungry, we're satisfied, we don't need to eat more. The hormone ghrelin is the hormone that tells your body we are hungry, we do need to eat more. When you don't get adequate sleep, and adequate sleep is, you know, at least 7 hours of good quality sleep per night, what happens is your leptin decreases And your ghrelin increases. This makes it so that you have increased hunger and you have increased cravings. Okay, so when you drink alcohol, what happens to your sleep? Your sleep quality plummets, and you know this too. So now, because of the alcohol and because of the fact that this is going on right here, you are now automatically much hungrier, you have much more cravings, With what we already talked about with alcohol and the calories and the calories that come from food, your inhibition being lower, do you think this makes it easier or harder for you to stick to your calorie deficit and be able to lose body fat? You would be correct. I have faith in you. You're smart. You would be correct. It makes it exponentially harder. Which bleeds into the next part. We're going to talk about alcohol and just your workouts and your overall activity. We're first going to start with something called your NEAT, which is your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Which is a very fancy term for like how much movement you're getting in your day that is not dedicated exercise. Like for example, me doing all these crazy hand gestures, that is technically considered NEAT. But the way I like to kind of talk about NEAT is just your daily step count. How many steps are you getting throughout the day? And this is really important because your NEAT takes up roughly about 15% of how many calories your body burns on a daily basis. basis. And think about it, if we're talking about weight loss, for example, don't you think you want your calorie burn to be higher? Don't you think you want your metabolism to be higher? Because that's going to help you lose weight. When you start to piece these things together, the next day after you drink alcohol, what normally happens? You're, you're tired, you're hungover, you're laying in bed a bit longer, you're sleeping in a bit longer. You don't necessarily want to go out and get the extra walk and go out to the mailbox and do this with your kids. You're more just like— You want to be a sloth, for lack of better terms. So now your NEAT, your overall activity, your overall calorie burn is decreasing while your calories consumed from both alcohol and both food are now increasing. That is not a good equation if you are trying to be in a calorie deficit and promote fat loss. And the next part of this is something called your MPS, your muscle protein synthesis. Just think of this as like the thing, the, the cool kid in school, the thing that you need in order to build muscle, recover from your workouts, and do all those great things that you want to do. When alcohol is in your body, your muscle protein synthesis decreases, and if your alcohol is high enough, your muscle protein synthesis stops. Now, I don't want to lie to you. Yes, Technically speaking, alcohol is a toxin, and so this muscle protein synthesis is not going to go on until that toxin is out of your body. That doesn't mean you can't build muscle if you drink alcohol, because that would be a lie to you. I'm trying to be very unbiased here. But what that does mean is when alcohol is in your system, the muscle protein synthesis will come to a halt, and it's going to have to pick back up at some point later on. This isn't necessarily the best thing if you're looking to get stronger and build muscle and recover properly from your workouts. It leaves you very under-recovered. If you ever had like on a Saturday morning, you had like a super hard workout, for example, but then like at nighttime you went out and had like a lot of drinks and so on and so forth, you probably woke up sore as fuck the next day. Am I correct? You might've thought it was because you killed that workout. It's really because the alcohol Killed your recovery process, and that's why you actually haven't recovered from that workout quite just yet, which is not a good thing. Total side note, this is why being sore isn't necessarily always the best indicator of progress. This would happen to me a lot in high school, and I wasn't allowed to drink alcohol then, but what do high schoolers do, right? I would like have a super hard workout, and then at night I would like go with my friends and drink and so on and so forth, and That was actually one of the main reasons why I stopped drinking was because like I knew it was impairing my workouts and I didn't want that to happen, but I would be sore as fuck the next day. And again, I thought I was like, oh, I was doing a great job, had a great workout. No, I found out it was because I wasn't actually recovering from my workouts. So makes it much harder to build muscle. And last but not least, your workout performance as a whole decreases. You're not able to lift as much weight. You're not able to do as many reps. You're not able to push yourself as close to failure. You're dehydrated, which that can actually go back into the previous points. If you're dehydrated, your workouts are going to suffer, but then you're also probably going to try to make up for that dehydration via eating foods that are greasier, higher in sugar, those sorts of things, which again doesn't necessarily lead to you being in a calorie deficit the best. But if we're sticking to our workout performance, if you're not able to push as hard, push as— yourself as close to failure. Well, number one, your results are going to decrease. Why? If you can't push yourself as hard, you can't lift as heavy, you can't do as many reps, you're not going to build as much muscle. You're not going to build as much strength. You're not going to see the progress you want to see. And then number two, on top of that, because you're not building as much muscle, because you're not pushing yourself as close to failure, like, you know, those workouts where like some, some workouts you're like, you're really into it, pushing yourself. And some workouts you're just kind of like, I'm just happy to survive and that's it. If you have less of the workouts where like you're into it, pushing yourself because you had bad sleep, your muscle protein synthesis is down, you know, you're dehydrated, you've maybe had some food that make you not feel so good, you're more exhausted. All this performance is going to decrease in the gym and it's going to have you burn less calories overall because you have to burn more calories the harder you push in the gym, the heavier you lift, the put— Harder you push close to failure. If you're not doing that, calorie burn decreases as well, which we already talked about. That's not the most optimal thing if you're looking to see progress with your physique. I think the answer to can you drink and get in shape is technically the answer is yes. If you're in a calorie deficit, if you're still getting your workouts in, technically you can, but it is going to make it substantially harder. And as you probably already know, it's hard enough as it is. And so my recommendation for you and what I tell everybody who joins up inside of my clubhouse, which is just my online coaching program, and it has worked for a lot of people thus far, is if you are going to decide to drink alcohol, I would try to— if you're very serious about seeing progress and getting to your goals, I would try to stick to 1 to 3 alcoholic drinks per week. And I would encourage you to click the links below in the description and check out my podcast I've done with our members and our clients who talked about their journey with alcohol and weight loss and muscle building and how it's impacted them. This video helped. If it did, give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and we'll chat soon.