Can you drink alcohol and lose weight?
If you’re a wine drinker like me (meaning I rarely have dinner without wine) or at least like to have a glass of wine with your dinner than I suggest you read this article:
Can You Drink Alcohol and Still Lose Weight?
When you’re on a diet, you know you should probably pass up the dessert menu, but what about the cocktail menu?
It’s a question researchers and dieters alike have grappled with for years, usually while clinging to a bottle of booze. In the end, the answer isn’t all that different from any other solid weight-loss tip out there: Everything in moderation.
That’s because, while overdoing it on alcohol is a surefire way to pack on the pounds, research published in The Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that responsible drinkers are thinner, on average, than people who lay off alcohol altogether.
The Downside of Your Drink
As anyone who has tried to drink a few glasses of wine with that salad can attest, alcohol makes you want to eat everything. But that’s not just because alcohol throws inhibition out of the window. Alcohol also reduces your body’s levels of leptin, a hormone responsible for telling your body “we’re full.” Just three glasses slash levels by 30 percent, according to research published in Alcohol & Alcoholism. That’s more than enough to make you feel ravenous and follow up your salad with a burger and some ice cream.
That may be why a recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that men consume an extra 168 calories from food on the days they drink. They also eat more fat and fewer fruits and veggies on drinking days, says lead researcher Rosalind Breslow, an epidemiologist with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research.
To add insult to button-popping injury, alcohol doesn’t allow your body to burn those calories as it should. That’s because when you drink alcohol, your body goes on alert to break down the toxin immediately, ignoring calories from sugar, fat and whipped cream until after all of the alcohol is cleared from your system, explains Dr. Randy Wexler, a family medicine physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. So rather than being burned for energy, those calories are stored around your middle as fat…
Read on at this link
