If you were ever in doubt as to if alcohol makes you gain weight, well you shouldn’t doubt anymore because the fact is that it actually does. Whether directly, or relatively, alcohol consumption make you gain much more weight than you thought possible.
You’re more likely to put on weight if you drink alcoholic beverages. In fact, drinking alcohol is double wahala. Not only is booze high in calories, but it also evidently leads to increased appetite. In a study, researchers alternated giving alcoholic and nonalcoholic aperitifs (an alcoholic drink taken before a meal to stimulate the appetite) to a group of men and women lunchers over a 7- day period. On the days when the group drank, they ate faster, ate more, ate for a longer time, became “full” later, and kept on eating even after they had reached satiety.
Certainly, the alcohol prompted the people in the study to eat more and eat faster. Perhaps it also made them throw caution to the wind.
How About A Drink?
What about an evening cocktail or a glass of wine with dinner?
Well, awareness comes first when you’re making this choice. The first thing to be aware of is that some recent studies have suggested that alcohol may actually increase appetite. What is almost certain is that it decreases resistance and can tend to muddle the decision making process.
Since your food choices are they key to your weight loss, if alcohol tends to put you in an I-don’t-care mood, that’s something you ought to recognize. If you find that a bowl of peanuts at the bar disappears in the blink of an eye when you’re meeting the gang for some bottles of beer, you may want to regulate drinking.
Tips:
- Start with a glass or two of water, ask for lime or lemon in it.
- Do this before taking a glass of wine.
- Order a bottle water to the table when the wine is ordered.
- Alternate your glasses. Water and wine. This paces your drinking.