A couple drinks on the weekend and or on special ocassions probably
won't have any major impact on your fat loss results (although
I would encourage you to consider the mindset that EVERYTHING
you do either helps or hurts).
A drink or two on ocassion is a part of enjoying life for
many people, and it's important to find lifestyle balance for
the sake of your long term happiness and success.
However, I do not recommend drinking every day.
"A couple every day" adds a LOT of extra calories to your daily diet.
If you're talking about two 150-calorie beers, thats 300 calories
extra a day or 2100 extra calories a week.
Multiply that out for a year and you have 109,200 extra calories!
WOW! That's potentially 31.2 pounds of fat in a year.
If you DO account for the calories in those drinks, then you have
another conundrum - the alcohol calories displace good valuable
food calories...
Drinking gives you empty alcohol calories with virtually no
nutritional value (and some negative value in more way than one),
while pushing out important vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals
essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, fiber and other
good stuff.
Alcohol also inhibits fat burning. While your liver is busy
metabolizing alcohol, it puts your fat metabolism on hold. That's
why I do NOT recommend any drinking when you are on a fat loss
program (at least if you are serious about it).
When you are on a regular, year-round lifestyle/maintenance program
I recommend that if you drink, you do so in moderation, keep
it to special occasions or weekends and remember to factor in
those calories to your daily intake.
By the way, there's a major risk to drinking every day - even just
one or two - that most people don't even think about:
Daily drinking is habit forming. Anything you do every day easily
becomes a habit that is difficult to break later.
On the other hand, if you could establish the habit of eating 5-9
servings of fruits and vegetables and getting some exercise every
single day, those would be habits worth forming! :-)
let me know how else I can help. This question comes up often, so
I did cover alcohol and fat loss in much greater detail in chapter 13
of the Burn the Fat book: www.burnthefat.com
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer, certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle. Tom has written hundreds of articles and has been featured in IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide. Tom is also the founder and creator of the Internet's premiere fat loss support community, the: Burn The Fat Inner Circle. To subscribe to Tom's free monthly newsletter, visit www.TomVenuto.com.
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