Drinking Alcohol: A Weight Loss Downer

The most obvious reason not to pour that glass of wine at dinner when you’re trying to lose weight is for the amount of calories you’re adding to your meal that have no nutritional value.

A five-ounce glass of wine – red or white – has about 100 calories. So if you drink a small glass of wine at every dinner, you will rack up 3,500 calories – which equals a pound of fat – in five weeks. That’s 10 pounds in a year. Yikes!

But there’s something else to drinking alcohol that sabotages your best diet intentions.

Be careful what you eat with that pint of amber ale. Your body is going to automatically burn the calories from alcohol before it considers any other foods you eat with it. That means your turkey burger on whole wheat with avocado will likely turn into fat.

How does this happen? According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a study found that alcohol is mostly converted into acetate. Acetate goes into the bloodstream and replaces fat as a source of fuel. Research participants saw their acetate levels increase as much as 2.5 times while their ability to burn fat dropped 73 percent.

It gets worse.

Now that you’ve had a drink, your willpower to say no to those Girl Scout cookies in your pantry just walked over to open that box of Thin Mints. Will you eat just one?

It’s very easy to give in to temptations when you drink because it impairs your ability to make healthy eating choices.

For those who’ve heard that red wine is good for your heart, look to the American Heart Association. It does not recommend drinking alcohol at all. In fact, authorities there believe any health benefits to drinking red wine can be achieved by losing weight, exercising regularly, eating well and following a doctor’s advice to lower blood pressure and cholesterol.

Sources: Journal of Clinical Nutrition; American Heart Association

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Alice Warchol is a fitness instructor and freelance health writer.