“Excessive alcohol consumption can cause nerve damage and irreversible forms of dementia,” Dr. Sengupta warns. Your gut microbiome is a hotbed of bacteria that help keep your digestive system happy and healthy. The trillions of microbes in your colon and large and small intestines are critical to proper digestion. They also help fend off inflammation and support healthy metabolism. But when you ingest too much alcohol for your liver to process in a timely manner, a buildup of toxic substances begins to take a toll on your liver.
Avoid Eating Greasy and High-Calorie Foods
I recently experienced a pretty tough life with my ex-husband & then we went through a divorce. Reading this article is a complete eye opener to why I gained a ton of weight. I can’t thank you enough for writing this article and for putting down facts that will actually help people. This refers to the amount of alcohol it takes for your inhibitions to be does alcohol make u gain weight significantly lowered such that your energy intake substantially increases over the following 48 hours. Otherwise, keep reading as we look at the three ways alcohol can lead to higher body weight, waistline, and health problems in the long term. If you’re eating junk food, those carbohydrates will also hold onto water, making you gain even more weight.
Indirect effect: poor sleep quality
As for why the calories in alcohol don’t seem to quickly add up to a lot of extra weight, it’s a little bit of a mystery. “It’s nuanced and it’s complex, because we don’t live in an environment where you just take each food item and inject it and it has no impact on anything else that happened,” says Rimm. Drinking can raise your heart rate and speed up your metabolism, Rimm explains, offsetting some of the calories consumed in the drink.
- If you do plan to drink, there are ways to reduce your intake of calories and stay healthy.
- So yes, it’s possible to gain weight from alcohol, but it’s not inevitable.
- You can also mix them with soda water or another mixer if it doesn’t have any calories.
- The important thing is that you factor those calories in along with what you eat, she says.
- Furthermore, it’s been shown that people don’t always compensate for the calories they consume from alcohol by eating less of other foods instead (5, 6).
- So doctors are hesitant to recommend drinking alcohol at all for this reason.
Does Drinking Alcohol Prevent You From Losing Weight?
High-calorie, high carb, and high sugar foods, when consumed with alcohol, will cause weight gain and a beer belly. The calories from alcohol won’t make you feel full leading you to eat more and more. The next most significant tip is keeping healthy habits and making sure you don’t eat bad foods with alcohol intake. Most of us like eating pizza, hamburgers, and pasta when drinking alcohol, but these are the worst choices. If you’re looking to lose weight, you may not need to cut out alcohol completely. But cutting back on your alcohol intake can have plenty of health benefits either way.
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- Sleep deprivation increases hormones that increase appetite and fullness.
- Some studies have also shown that drinking alcohol can increase your appetite in the short term, causing you to eat more than you otherwise would (4).
- Men are also much more likely to have an android fat distribution, meaning they store fat around the belly when they gain weight (23, 24).
- Despite containing a lot of energy, alcohol also doesn’t have the same satiating effect as solid food.
Still, the researchers noted that more research is needed to understand how eliminating or limiting alcohol intake affects weight loss. When you drink alcohol, it’s broken down into acetate (basically vinegar), which the body will burn before any other calorie you’ve consumed or stored, including fat or even sugar. Other types of alcohol like spirits and wine have fewer calories per standard drink than beer. This means they may be less likely to cause weight gain and belly fat. Red wine is generally a wise choice if you’re trying to lose weight. Many like having a glass or two of red wine at night to wind down, and you can still drop pounds as long as you’re eating the right foods at the correct times.
