Warmer weather has finally showed its face. Happy Hour, Rooftop Parties, and Sunday Funday Boozy Brunches will soon begin. Not to forget your summertime favorite margaritas, champagne spritzers, mimosas, and Bloody Marys will all be in attendance. Remember that summer body you worked all winter to get, well there are some counter-productive measures your libations are doing to your body.
Below are some tough but true realities that just 1 glass does to you and gets you further from your fitness goals:
1. Alcohol supplies only empty calories and offers no nutritional benefits. Alcohol is made up of sugars and carbohydrates that are metabolized in the liver and burned off first by the body. The body considers alcohol to be a toxin.
2. Alcohol actually slows down the process by which your body burns fat because it converts it into acetate, which is burned before any other calories. As long as you have alcohol in your body, you will not metabolize proteins, carbohydrates, or fats. The more you drink, the more alcohol must be metabolized before other calories, therefore, all other calories will be stored as fat.
3.Alcohol stimulates your appetite and reduces your will power. Alcohol not only slows down your metabolism, it actually makes you want to eat more of the foods you would not be inclined to eat if you didn’t drink. Because alcohol relieves your inhibitions, you make increasingly poor choices that undermine your weight loss goals and endanger your health. Alcohol impairs your body’s ability to absorb nutrients from the foods you eat, so many people who drink too much, are malnourished. Alcohol also inhibits your body’s ability to make glucose and to maintain healthy levels within your bloodstream.
4. Alcohol suppresses lipid oxidation, with non-oxidized lipids being deposited into the abdominal region and stored as fat.
5.Alcohol slows down weight loss by suppressing the brain’s ability to know when to say enough is enough!
6.Alcohol also can cause poor sleep patterns, which by itself can cause weight gain in mature individuals. Sleep is imperative to good health. When you don’t sleep well, you make poor diet choices, you don’t exercise, and your metabolism slows down, too.