Less Alcohol - FEBRUARY 2021 - One Day At A Time

globalhiker wrote: »

I found a decent de-alcoholized wine!!!!
Rondel Zero from Spain. It's a Cava and tastes quite like prosecco.
I picked it because it listed 2/3rd less sugar/carbs compared to the Fre brand I hated. It's got excellent effervescence and a pear flavor.
40 calories.
I'd say the sweetness is still a wee bit too much for me. I added a splash of Pellegrino to it for minerality and to reduce the sweetness a bit.

Found it at Total Wine in the U.S., about $10 but this will work for days like Superbowl, Valentine's, and the occasional weekend my grown kids come over and we have dinners.

chocolate_owl wrote: »

Ok guys, scientific misinformation anywhere drives me bonkers, and I'm seeing a game of telephone happening in this thread where "Your body processes alcohol first" starting to warp into "If you drink alcohol your calorie deficit doesn't matter, your day is ruined." That's not how this works.

THIS IS SUPER OVERSIMPLIFIED: Let's say you have a hearty dinner that's 700 calories, about 33% of each macronutrient. The dietary fat will be split between meeting immediate fatty acid needs and being stored in fat cells to be used up later. The carbs are going to be used as immediate energy and will fill empty glycogen stores. Protein is going to get broken down to amino acids and redistributed where your body needs it, including synthesis for muscle growth. Over the next several hours, you'll burn 700 calories by existing, prioritizing using glucose in the bloodstream, then glycogen stores, then fat stores*.

Now let's say you take in 100 calories of alcohol and 600 calories of food. Your body immediately starts to metabolize alcohol. Dietary fat stills goes to be stored as fat. Carbs still go into glycogen storage, and if there are extras, they start to be stored as fat. Protein is trickier, because it's an inefficient process to store protein as fat. Also, digesting proteins is a slower process than breaking down carbs, and it starts much later in the digestive process. So if you keep your alcohol to moderate amounts, your body can deal with it quickly enough to do its normal thing with protein. And over the next several hours, you burn 700 calories by existing. Alcohol first, glycogen stores next, and then those fat stores*. 700 calories is still (approximately) 700 calories.

Also, it should be noted that alcohol has a very high thermic effect of food (TEF). Even though alcohol has 7.1 calories per gram, it only has 5.6 USABLE calories per gram. There have been studies where people at maintenance replaced X number of carb calories with X number of alcohol calories and began to LOSE weight because whereas they may have been absorbing 100 calories of carbs, they were only able to extract ~80 burnable calories of alcohol. The rest is waste.

That's not to say there aren't negative effects; alcohol messes with your hormone signaling and has very low satiety, which can trigger you to eat more than you were planning. It interferes with your ability to build muscle - it most definitely WILL negate some gains from a session of lifting if you then go out and do a bunch of shots with your buddies afterwards. Plus there's all the other things we talk about in here. But if you're eating an appropriate amount of calories for your goals, having a drink that fits in your calorie budget is not going to turn off the lights at the metabolism factory, it's just going to change the work order.

*Like I said, the above is really oversimplified, but I don't want to give the impression that you only burn your fat stores when there's nothing else to burn. Your body is going to pull from fat stores in varying ratios all the time. A lot less during more strenuous activity, more when it's doing normal "maintenance" for your body. Metabolism is really complex.