Alcohol and Weight Loss

Ive always heard that alcohol si fattening. I dont usually drink during the week but if a bbq comes up or whatever i will have a few jack and cokes or 3 or 4 beers and i dont usually see a difference in my weight loss. I think if you workout harder and have a few extra calories it kinda cancels the extra calories out, im not for sure but it makes sense to me I dont think a few drinks a week is bad when your trying to lose weight aslong as your still working out.

Alcohol can be part of a healthy diet. Studies have shown over and over again the benefits of a drink (or two if you are male) per day to our overall health. The trick is to not go overboard or drink your weekly allotment in one night, and to make sure that you have "room" in your diet for it.

And yes, if you go a little over one day, you can make up for part of it the next day. Your body does not close the books at midnight and start all over with just new calories. It's a constantly burning machine.

So lets examine how the body metabolizes alcohol vs normal calories, and leave aside the things it does to you mentally and the effects reducing inhibitions can have on your eating habits.

Normally when you consume calories, they travel, mostly unaltered, to the stomach, where it is broken down into smaller pieces, some of the sugars are immediately absorbed into the blood, but most of it is transported to the liver, and intestines and colon where the food is further broken down and delivered to the places it needs to go (this is a largely simplified explanation but is essentially what happens). This process takes anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes for some food, to many hours for other foods.
When we consume alcohol, the moment it hits your mouth, absorption begins, alcohol is absorbed all the way down the throat and in the stomach as well, entering the blood. So that is where the problems start. If you drink, then work out 2 hours later, you're already too late.

OK, so now we know the problem with trying to "work off those calories", but that can't be IT. It's not. The human body regards alcohol as a primary fuel source, supplanting other fuel in the order of which it is processed. So when you drink, a lot of the other partially digested or undigested food in your body is immediately put on the back burner (so to speak). And we know from the first section that there is usually a good amount of food still waiting to be processed. Since alcohol has a relatively high amount of calories per volume consumed, it takes over a lot of the energy needs in the body, which relegates the carbs in your body to the roll of fat storage. This is bad news, and can't be rationalized away by "I'm only having 2 or 3 drinks" or "I only drink 2 or 3 nights a week." Sorry guys, that's far to many drinks far to many times a week to be doing you any good.

Some say 1/2 a glass to 1 glass of wine a day with a meal is ok, and yeah, there are some good things in wine, like antioxidants and some vitamins and minerals, but not enough to justify drinking more then a glass 2 or 3 times a week, and NEVER enough to justify more then one glass (6oz) more then once every couple of weeks.
Throw in what drinking 3 times a week does to your liver (very bad stuff), and what reduced inhibition can do to your eating habits, and it's just not worth it. I'm not one to say "don't drink", heck I have my moments too, but drinking more than 1 drink more than 2 or 3 times a month, well, eventually it will catch up with you.