Here are some fascinating facts about alcohol and fat loss. As Surrey personal trainers, we advise that the common rules of weight loss are these:
Targeted cardiovascular exercise and strength training that raises your heart rate at least three times a week.
Eating a smaller portion of food at each meal to reduce your calorie intake.
Balance your blood sugar level to avoid easy fat storage.
Cut out refined sugar and processed foods from your diet.
If you are doing all of the above and yet still seem to be struggling to lose weight and more importantly body fat, have you ever considered your alcohol intake? If you partake in a tipple or two on a regular basis, the answer could in the wine glass! Starting with the basics, let’s clear up any confusion about how much is in a ‘unit’ of alcohol:
1 unit = 125ml @ 8% alcohol
The current government guidelines advise alcohol limits of 14 units per week for women and 21 units per week for men. Now consider that wine is usually around 12% alcohol and 125ml is a very small glass! If you drink on a regular basis, you can see that it doesn’t take long before the units and calories from alcohol start to add up.
However, drinking too much has a far more damaging effect than just increasing your units and calorie intake. Contrary to popular belief, excess calories from alcohol are not stored and converted into fat…it’s easy to blame the bulge on the ‘beer belly.’ It’s actually the other way around. Alcohol reduces the amount of fat that is available to burn for energy.
Let’s look at this in more detail. Your body draws from a number of different sources to make energy, i.e. quality forms of unprocessed fats, carbohydrate and protein…in the absence of alcohol. If you choose to have an alcoholic drink, your liver will convert it into a substance called acetate. When the acetate levels in your blood start to rise, this becomes the first available source of energy, i.e. you burn alcohol first and will NOT burn the other food groups. Therefore it becomes very easy to store and gain fat as everything else will not be used up.
So what does all of this mean? In simple terms, your body will burn energy from whatever you feed it. If you give it lots of alcohol, it will burn acetate (once converted) and turn everything excess into fat.
Your liver then converts most of the alcohol into acetate.
The acetate is then released into your bloodstream, and replaces fat as a source of fuel.
There’s more! Alcohol contains lots of sugar and will cause a quick spike in your blood sugar level followed by a quick drop. Whilst on this ‘blood sugar level rollercoaster’, you will be releasing insulin and stress hormones. Insulin is also a fat storage hormone. Stress hormones can break down muscle tissue which can slow your metabolism and leave more to be stored as fat.
If you are trying to lose weight and decrease your body fat, avoiding alcohol is by far one of the best things to do. The occasional glass will certainly not do much harm, but long-term and continual alcohol consumption will almost certainly raise your body fat.
In real life…if you have two 175ml glasses of red wine at 12% alcohol with your evening meal, this calculates to 4.2 units. Multiply that by seven nights a week = 29.4 units a week (and that’s before you’ve taken into account a little extra at the weekend). Something to be aware of, before you even consider exercise and your nutrition!
