I’m picky when it comes to my alcohol. I’m not a big drinker, but I have my favorites.
If I’m drinking beer, then I’m drinking Guinness; unless it’s crazy hot out, and then I’m drinking Banks.
If I’m not drinking beer, then I’m drinking scotch or rum.
(I’m a fun combination of Scottish-Irish-Canadian and Bajan roots.)
I appreciate these drinks, but I’m not going to kid myself – I know that they don’t help with my fat loss goals.
A lot of people talk about alcohol and whether or not it gets turned into fat, which is kind of missing the point…
Here is the simple truth, your body has a priority system when dealing with fuel sources, and near the top of the list is alcohol.
If you have alcohol in your body, it will be burned first*.
(*Technically it gets transformed to acetate and then burned, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call this burning alcohol.)
Also, if you have a big night of drinking and then you go to sleep, your nighttime Growth Hormone levels will be significantly lower than if you had not been drinking.
Why? Because GH is primarily responsible for releasing fat from your body fat stores. This is a big part of how you lose fat at night.
Typically, when you go to sleep, your GH increases. You release fat, then you burn fat. It’s a beautiful system. You truly are burning fat while doing nothing.
But when you go to sleep drunk, your body has other priorities. It needs to oxidize (burn) the alcohol in your body. And because it already has alcohol to burn it doesn’t release GH, because it doesn’t need fat to be released (it already has a fuel source).
The bottom line is you sober up while you sleep by burning alcohol as a fuel source, instead of fat.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t have the occasional drink while you are trying to lose weight, just remember that the alcohol you take in (about 10-15 grams per drink) must be dealt with, and it will get dealt with as a priority.
Keep it moderate while trying to lose weight, and sadly no drinking booze while you are fasting… 😉
BP
