Drinking and Your Weight

     This is a subject that I live with every day, both as a barman and as a person that lives on a "Weight Watchers" diet.     I still enjoy my rums, but these days I'm either drinking straight rum with a couple of cubes of ice, or rum mix
ed with diet tonic and lime.   Both of these cocktails are only two points on my old style "Weight Watchers" program.   Though I'm on a maintenance portion of the program after losing some 50 pounds three years ago.    Watching what I drink and eat at the bar is a huge portion of the program.

   I read an article by Karen Ansel, R.D. for Fox News yesterday that really put a lot of this into perspective.     " Here's what we know: Your average drink-beer, wine, martini, pick your poison-is usually a combination of carbs, sugar and ethanol (pure alcohol). When it goes down the hatch, it makes a pit stop at your stomach, where some of the alcohol is absorbed through the lining and into your bloodstream, giving you that initial buzz. The carbs and sugar go the traditional digestive route, while ethanol, a toxin, is diverted to the liver.

 

This is when that innocent little drink starts messing with your internal fat incinerator. Ethanol has no nutritional value, so your body burns it off first. That means any remaining calories in your stomach-whether they're from the margarita or the chips and guacamole you had with it-will likely be stored as fat.

 

It seems that people who drink moderately on a regular basis will be less likely to gain weight from the "useless calories" that are being taken in from the alcohol.  It was also noted that moderate drinkers tend to eat more healthy than heavy drinkers do.   Keeping to a steady moderate amount of alcohol and a healthy diet, you can actually loose weight if you done dive into the french-fries and chips at the same time. 

 

    I found this to be an interesting article, http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/14/drinking-alcohol-to-shrink/  combined with my own experiences of loosing the weight and maintaining it in the past three years while living in the drinking capitol of the world.   It is truly a combination of eating properly and drinking "unsweetened cocktails" in moderation without munching the weight back on.  ;o)