How to Enjoy Booze and Still Stay in Shape
By: Chris Davidson
Tags: Life Hacking, Weight Loss, Beer, Fasting, Fitness

How to Enjoy Booze and Still Stay in Shape

We don’t need to live like monks to lose weight and stay fit and slim. We can still quaff our vino and down our pints, but we need to be smart too. Chris Davidson Follow Dec 9, 2020 · 7 min read

How to enjoy booze and still get in shape: Image from Pexels

Fancy a pint?

Let’s go out for a quick drink.

Ah c’mon we’ll only have a quick one while we catch up…

Such is life in Ireland (well pre-Covid anyway…).

For any of you who have ever visited Ireland, you probably know how important drinking booze and pubs are to daily life.

Even the smallest towns have at least one bar. It may also be the post office and hardware store, but you can get a pint there too. Genius.

The national stereotype we have as drinking machines is a little lazy and far-fetched these days, however having a pint or two with friends and family is still the glue that holds us together. The first sip of the first pint of Guinness is a truly wonderful thing. It is the nectar of the gods.

Despite running my own gym, training and coaching clients to get fitter and healthier, I would never in a million years tell a client to completely give up alcohol. I am certainly never giving it up.

This would be like telling a Frenchman to give up baguettes; an Italian to avoid pasta; an Indian to shun Chapatis…

I mean no offense to my French, Italian and Indian brethren with my tired cliches, but you get the idea — giving up something so central to your daily life just to get in shape is masochistic and unnecessary.

But No Alcoholics have 6-Packs

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

Sadly though, overdoing booze regularly will stand in your way of getting fitter and slimmer. It wrecks your energy levels to work out and messes with your body’s ability to burn fat.

We need to learn how to balance things, so that we can still indulge in the odd drink, or even a night out, and not wreck our big plans to have fit and healthy bodies.

Alcohol puts the brakes on fat-loss no matter how great your diet otherwise is, as the body prioritises burning the resultant acetate from alcohol as fuel rather than using body fat.

Just to toot my own horn a little here, as an expert in BOTH drinking booze (26 years experience thankyouverymuch) and keeping myself and others in shape (just the 12 years experience), I am particularly well qualified to hereby give you a roadmap for getting in shape while loving booze.

Our dietary approach will try to balance booze and maintaining body weight or even losing fat (if that’s your goal).

The Tastiest Poison in the World

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Clients always ask me “What booze can I drink if I’m trying to lose weight?”.

The UK’s National Health Service has some great info on this, but basically in purely calorific terms drinks such as spirits and sugar-free mixers are lowest (e.g. whisky and soda, vodka and diet coke, etc).

Beer and wine then come next, then the real troublemaker drinks (in more ways than one…) are fruity juicy cocktails which contain hundreds of calories, most of which are from sugar.

However, it’s not just calories we need to be aware of. Our bodies shut down any fat-loss once alcohol is in our system.

The body treats alcohol like a poison, to be expunged ASAP, broken down into acetate and burned off before everything else, whether that’s food in our stomachs or existing body fat.

The smart ones among you — all of you I’m sure <high 5> — will see that the more times the body needs to burn off alcohol, the fewer opportunities it has to burn off body fat.

You could be following some super-healthy diet of steamed vegetables, lean protein and quinoa every day, but if you’re drinking half a bottle of wine too, no fat loss for you buddy.