If you need to lose weight, avoiding alcohol is a wise decision. Not only is alcohol packed with empty calories and devoid of any nourishment, but its inhibiting of your fat-burning and fat-storing hormones provides a double and triple whammy against all your weight loss efforts. If that’s not bad enough, it lowers your inhibitions and changes your decision-making processes, causing you to make poor food choices. If you have questions about weight loss contact our team today.
Alcohol Lowers Blood Sugar
Making poor food choices is easy to do when your inhibitions are lowered by drinking. In addition, alcohol lowers your blood sugar levels, thereby making you feel hungrier and much more likely to consume excess calories. Add this to the calories from the alcohol, and you’ll quickly see how bad alcohol is for weight loss.
Significance
Even worse, when your body is attempting to metabolize alcohol and food that have been consumed together, it will use the energy from the alcohol first and store the food as fat. Because the body perceives alcohol as a poison and because it cannot store the energy from alcohol, its first priority is to eliminate it, while digesting and processing the food becomes secondary. That means your meal gets stored and synthesized as fat while the alcohol gets burned off.
Considerations
Because the food you’ve consumed is being stored and not properly metabolized, the nutrition from that food is not being absorbed by your body. The vitamins and minerals you need to be healthy are not utilized. Without adequate nutrition, your body is less healthy and more likely to store fat.
Warning
Drinking alcohol, even in moderation, can make you sluggish and negatively affect your performance at the gym, if you even make it to the gym, that is. Initially, alcohol does provide energy to the body, but it is a sedative and will slow you down, even the next day, because although it’s a sedative, it hinders and prevents restful sleep, making you tired and lethargic. Your workouts will suffer from alcohol, foiling your attempts at weight loss.