Is Alcohol preventing you from losing weight?

Drinking too much on a regular basis, doesn’t just lead to weight gain, it can also massively interfere with your attempts to lose that extra weight too.

Alcohol contains empty calories and has no nutritional value. Your body can’t store alcohol, so it must metabolise it right away. Metabolising alcohol, however, can have a detrimental effect on other metabolic processes.

Here’s what you should know about alcohol and your metabolism.

Alcohol and Nutrition

• Alcohol contains only empty calories and has no nutritional value.
• It often contributes to malnutrition because of the high levels of calories in most alcoholic drinks account for a large percentage of your daily energy requirements.
• Your body can’t store alcohol, so it must metabolise it right away.
• When you drink alcohol, your body makes metabolising it a priority over all other metabolic processes.
• Alcohol irritates your gastrointestinal tract, and can damage your body’s ability to absorb nutrients, vitamins and minerals from the food you eat.

Alcohol and Your Liver

• Alcohol is toxic to your liver, and if you drink heavily for a long time you can experience cirrhosis of the liver and death.
• Heavy drinking over the long term can also impair your liver’s ability to activate vitamins, which contributes to the malnutrition often suffered by long term alcoholics.

Alcohol and Blood Sugar

• Maintaining adequate blood sugar levels is one of the key functions of your metabolism, but when you drink alcohol, maintaining healthy blood sugar levels is one of the first elements of metabolism to fail in your body’s rush to excrete the toxins as efficiently as possible.
• Alcohol inhibits your body’s ability to make glucose and to maintain healthy levels of blood sugar in the blood.
• Over time heavy drinkers develop glucose intolerance and can even become diabetic.
• Even occasional alcohol consumption can cause dangerous drops in blood sugar levels, especially when consumed on an empty stomach.
• That’s why drinking alcohol can be very dangerous for diabetics and hypoglycaemics.

Alcohol and Weight Gain

• Because your body can’t store alcohol and must metabolise it right away, other metabolic processes suffer.
• Your body won’t metabolise sugars and fats as efficiently during the metabolism of alcohol, and drinking heavily can cause your metabolism to slow.
• This can contribute to weight gain, as can the empty calories found in alcohol.
• When you keep track of the calories you consume and your nutrition, include alcohol so it doesn’t hinder your weight loss plans or put you at risk of malnutrition.

There is more than one way to drink responsibly!
References:
https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-facts/health-effects-of-alcohol/effects-on-the-body/alcohol-and-sugar/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2837522/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_weight