No More Alcohol
Two posts ago I mentioned that although I weighed more than I would like I was simply going to exercise more and not worry so much about my diet. Well, it’s been about 6 weeks since I started my exercise regiment. I averaged six gym visits a week. Each time I would spend 30-60 minutes on either the treadmill or the elliptical and then I would do a variety of muscle building exercises. My goal was not only to burn off calories, but also to increase my muscle mass because muscles use more energy than fat, even if all you’re doing is sitting around typing on the computer.
At the beginning of my winter break I weighed in at 140 lbs. After 6 weeks of intense physical activity I now weigh…140 lbs. It’s incredibly frustrating.
So, the next step is to change my diet.
There are really only two things in my diet that I’m unhappy about. The first is my love of salt and vinegar Kettle Brand chips. My goodness those things are delicious. I tried cutting back last month and saving them as a special splurge, but the fact is, I felt like I deserved them every time I got home from the gym. As I wrote in that previous post, “If you have trouble with moderation when it comes to processed food either go cold turkey or remind yourself to check the nutrition information each time you eat it.” I know that a bag of chips is close to 1000 calories. It’s time to go cold turkey.
The other thing I don’t like about my diet is the fact that I drink my calories. I’ve never been a soda person, but I do like a glass of wine or a pint of beer. Or, if it’s football Sunday, I like half a dozen pints of beer. This is bad in several different ways. The first is the sheer number of calories in alcohol.
Alcohol contains 7 calories per gram, this is less than fat (9kcal/gram) but more than protein or carbs (4 kcal/gram). Add this to the fact that mindless eating frequently accompanies drinking and you have a big empty calorie problem. Consider the even more interesting fact that alcohol effects your metabolism in intriguing ways and the problem just gets bigger.
As my nutrition professor (a researcher at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University if you want some credentials) explained to us in my general nutrition class, “alcohol acts like a VIP in the body.” Basically, if you are drinking and you have calories in your system from other sources, the alcohol jumps ahead of the queue when it comes to being broken down and stored.
Some people argue that the calories in alcohol don’t have nutritional value: basically the body can’t use them and so they don’t get stored as fat. This is untrue, but this weird method of metabolization might be where that idea comes from. Because alcohol has no nutrients and other foods and drinks do, alcohol takes priority over everything else in order to be metabolized. In short, when you drink alcohol all of the other processes that should be taking place are being interrupted. Other nutrients need to be broken up prior to being absorbed, whereas alcohol is absorbed as is.
This results in two negative things: overall lower absorption of nutrients from foods (generally only an issue in alcoholics), and increased fat storage from all the other calories that are sitting around and not getting used while you metabolize the alcohol you’ve drunk. This means that rather than a simple equation of [calories eaten] - [calories burned] you in fact have a more complex equation involving the length of time it takes before your body can metabolize the calories you’ve eaten. This explains the mystery of the beer-belly that appears in drinkers even if they restrict their overall caloric intake.
So, I’m cutting out all alcohol for the moment as well. I started on the 1st of February and so far it’s going well. At our weekly poker game I had a clean win and walked away with lunch money for the month, so clearly staying sober has its benefits. Hopefully another of those benefits will be my dress pants fitting.
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