How much of a difference does alcohol make (re: weight loss)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:None. I lost no weight during Dry January.

Me neither, but dry january is really just like any other month minus 3-4 drinks, total.

It is silly to believe that changing one thing about your diet--such as cutting out alcohol--is going to result in weight loss. It is about the totality of one's diet and lifestyle. If you cut alcohol while eating the standard American diet and being sedentary you are not going to lose weight. On the other hand, if you start exercising and eating whole foods but drink wine with dinner each night you will lose weight.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Of course giving up alcohol won't make you lose weight if you replace it with other calories. But in general, sugary drinks, including frappes, milkshakes, and alcohol, are empty calories. They offer nothing nutritionally. That being said, weight loss is a numbers game. If you need 1500 calories a day to lose 1 pound a week, then you can eat 1000 calories a day and drink 500 calories of booze.

TLDR you can drink and lose weight if you're dieting enough to still have CICO.

That is pure twitter-age-shortcut nonsense and not how body chemistry actually works. It is much more complicated. What goes in matters even more than how much goes in, and most important is how your individual body reacts to what you put in, which is not universal.

Hmmm. Speaking of twitter age nonsense, there has been almost no QUALITY data providing any solid evidence that calories in/calories out isn't the equation for weight loss.

That doesn't mean the quality of food being consumed is irrelevant to health, of course. But the people who argue a protein calories is different than a carb calorie for weight loss, don't have much evidence to back that up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Drinking alcohol makes you sleep worse - which makes you eat more the next day, it also stimulates appetite so you'll eat more the night before.

Given weight loss is about calorie control it's probably a good idea to cut back or stop drinking.

If alcohol stimulates eating more for a person, it can definitely be a problem.

I am a generally thin person but have a harder time with night time snacking and falling asleep if I don't have a glass of wine. For me, vigorous exercise is not really affected by one drink (two or more is a different story). So, I have a glass of wine, read a dumb thing on the internet or watch TV, and go to bed. Without the wine I often zip around my house snacking and worrying. Sounds like I'm not the norm but for me it's not much of a driver overall in weight.