Do you know how alcohol can affect your metabolism?
As a naturopath who lives in party central on the Gold Coast, I’m surrounded by exotic cocktails, boutique gin distilleries and fantastic wineries. However, I also help women balance hormones, shed fat and boost their metabolism, and I know how alcohol can affect your metabolism.
So, I want to explain how alcohol impairs many biochemical processes and lets you decide for yourself when you should indulge and if it’s worth it.
Everyone knows how alcohol can affect your mood, judgment, and energy levels. However, we don’t discuss how it can affect your nervous system, hormones or metabolism.
About Metabolism
First, let’s look at how basic biology influences our metabolism. Like an engine in a car, our metabolism is our body’s mechanism that helps keep us alive. Our metabolism is a complicated, intricate system that changes the food we eat into energy for our body. Everything we eat or drink is turned into substances that fuel the systems in your body – including your heart beating, lungs pumping, and muscles moving to think. Did you know that every cell in your body plays a role in your metabolism?
Numerous chemical reactions simultaneously occur at a cellular level, which is regulated by the body to keep cells working and happy. Our body requires specific proteins to control these chemical reactions, which are then coordinated with other body systems. Some hormones help to control the rate and influence the direction of the metabolism too!
How Alcohol Affects Our Metabolism
Alcohol has no nutritional value and is a neurotoxin. Our body views it as a threat and is unable to store it, and immediately starts work to remove it from the body. After we drink alcohol, it is quickly absorbed via our small intestines, ending in our bloodstream. Ingesting alcohol causes our body’s metabolism and digestion to go on high alert, and it then goes directly to our liver so it can begin to eliminate this deemed threat.
Although our livers play a significant role in helping us process alcohol, other organs such as our stomachs, pancreas and brains are also involved in this process. In addition, drinking alcohol stops every digestive cycle on hold, which can build up fat in the liver and stall metabolism, digestion and fat burning.
When you drink alcohol, you are taking in plenty of fluids. However, you’ll typically find yourself urinating more frequently as your kidneys work overtime to flush the alcohol out of your body. This leads to dehydration, which depletes your energy level as an overabundance of vital minerals and nutrients is lost.
Surprisingly, it’s also worth recognising that alcohol reduces the level of melatonin in your body. This element is critical in regulating the sleep-wake cycle, which is your circadian rhythm. When disrupted and you cannot get adequate rest, your stamina, endurance and ability to remove alcohol neurotoxins will decrease if your body cannot recharge adequately, inhibiting any fat burning and zapping your energy overall.
How Alcohol Affects Fat Loss
After just one drink, your blood sugar levels rise. To distribute the glucose to your cells, insulin is released into your bloodstream. This circulating insulin then promotes fat storage. Your blood sugar level then rapidly decreases from this corrective measure. This can make you tired and yearn for another pick-me-up like a drink or something to snack on. This can be a double-edged sword. Firstly, it promotes fat storage and then halts fat burning. Secondly, it has you searching for more things to ingest to get back to feeling “normal”.
This biochemical response is essential to understand if you are attempting to lose fat, balance your hormones or boost your metabolism. But unfortunately, as your body’s natural biology deals with removing the alcohol just ingested, all other digestive processes are halted to deal with this perceived emergency. So the fat loss is stopped in its tracks.
Did you know drinking alcohol, even if it’s just one drink, can affect your metabolism and halt fat loss for up to three days, depending on how you metabolise it?
Additionally, fat storage in the body is encouraged because insulin (the fat-storage hormone) is released.
How to Drink Responsibly and still achieve your Weight Loss Goals
- Eat before (and during) drinking sessions – as alcohol irritates your digestive system. Eating on empty stomach results in more rapid absorption of alcohol. Eat high-protein foods (cheese, meats, nuts, etc.) before and when drinking, and you’ll avoid getting too drunk.
- When consuming alcohol, drink plenty of water to help your body eliminate the harmful substance and prevent over-drinking. Slow your intake with alcohol-free drinks.
- When drinking, choose organic or biodynamic spirits and wine. As there’s a substantial difference in what’s found in conventional versus organic, biodynamic and natural alcohol options. Traditional wines, like conventional food grown, generally contain pesticides, fungicides, insecticides or herbicides. And unfortunately, spirits often contain artificial colours, sweeteners, flavourings and preservatives like sulphur dioxide and synthetic chemicals used to clean the wine-making equipment. Ewww!
- Consume alcohol in moderation. Skip the drinking games and shots. Drinking moderation is recommended for overall health and is even more critical if your goal is fat loss. If you think having one glass of wine every night is Ok, it may be helpful to know this will put your metabolism (and hence fat-burning ability) on hold for up to 3 days, depending on how well you metabolise it. Plus, you may notice that over time, your ability to metabolise alcohol has decreased, affecting your level of intoxication, night sweats, sleep, etc.
- Understand how much alcohol you have and how much you should have by planning your social activities and how much you will drink. Set limits for yourself and stick to them. By engaging your prefrontal cortex in the decision-making process, you don’t rely on your primitive reptilian brain that is focused on acquiring more dopamine and probably more alcohol.
In Summary
Alcohol plays a huge part in our culture and how we celebrate in Australia. I’m just skimming the surface here regarding how it can affect your hormones, metabolism and weight loss goals.
We also haven’t addressed the psychological, emotional or social alcohol aspects. It is also worth noting that a recent analysis of hundreds of research studies about alcohol and its effect on health concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe or healthy.
I honestly prefer not to drink very often because my liver can’t metabolise well, and I like feeling energised when I wake up instead of trash when I drink even one glass of organic wine.
It’s totally up to you if you would like to stop drinking alcohol altogether. (Unless, of course, you would like to, and that’s cool too!).
Much love!
Natalie x
To find out more about how Metabolic Balance can help YOU achieve YOUR weight loss goals, review here.
