I’ve been all over the web and I can’t get a real solid answer for this question.
Like many people I find that I weigh a pound or two less when I get up in the morning than I did when I went to bed.
But something I’ve noticed is, when I’ve drank a bit more than my share before bed, I find in the morning I weigh as much as 5 or even 6 pounds less in the morning than I did at bed time.
Since last october I’ve been keeping a log and this has been consistant.
A good example is this last week:
Monday: Bed time 11:30p.m. 238pounds no alcohol consumed
Tuesday: Awake 7:30a.m. 236lbs. Bed at 12:30a.m. 238lbs. No alcohol
Wednesday: Awake 7:40a.m. 237lbs. Bed 1:15a.m. 238lbs No alcohol
Thursday: Awake 7:30a.m. 236lbs. Bed at 12:55a.m. 238lbs. 7 cans of PBR
Friday: Awake 9:30a.m. 234lbs. Bed at 230a.m. 234lbs. 7 cans of PBR.
Saturday: Awake 10:30a.m. 232lbs.
My diet has not been changed (meat & potatos, italian pastas), no extra physical activity was participated in, and the beer was consumed at a rate of about 1 1/2 cans an hour through the course of the evening. Assuming the beer contains at least 150 calories per can, that’s an additional caloric intake of per day of 1050.
Yet I now weigh 6 pounds less than I did not even a week ago. I want to repeat that I haven’t been physically active, eaten any less, changed the fat/calorie content of what I do eat. So? WTF?
My log shows that I lose more weight overnight when I’ve drank a lot than when I haven’t drank anything at all. I tend to only imbibe when I don’t have to get up for work the next day, which means I sleep in later in the morning. Is it the extra sleep that’s doing it, or is it possible to drink oneself thin?
Oh, and I want to add that the same scale is used during every weigh in, and is calibrated each time. Last weeks log put me at a total weekly loss at 6 pounds.
But during a weekend in November I had drank 8 cans of Icehouse light (:rolleyes: yeah, yeah, I know. But it was on sale!) Which has 126 calories per, and 5% alcohol. I went to bed at 236 and awoke to weigh 229! How is that possible? Is it the sleep or the alcohol that contributes to a 7 pound loss in less than 8 hours?
But wouldn’t the extra 1000+ calories cancel this out? Losing water does cause some weight lose. But 1000 extra calories in one day (2 days straight this week) is pretty high.
:smack: A major factor I forgot to add is, this is only occuring with beer. When I’ve drank too much wine or bourbon, the extra morning weight loss doesn’t occur. Why? Beer is full of carbs. Shouldn’t the opposite happen?
The temporary “weight loss” caused by dehydration has nothing to do with calories. It has to do with the weight of the fluids that you excrete. A pint of fluid weighs about a pound. If you wake up five pounds lighter after drinking alcoholic beverages, it is likely that you urinated and sweated away five pints of water. It is not fat loss, and it is not good for you. Dehydration can lead to serious health effects.
If my post above sounded preachy or bossy, I apologize.
I have to battle dehydration constantly, since I have had my colon removed, and I get up on my soapbox when people mistake fluid loss for genuine body-fat loss.
But I don’t seem to urinate much more than normal.
7 beers, spread over 5 hours isn’t even enough to intoxicate me. I sure don’t feel dehydrated or hung over the next day. I also don’t detect any sweating.
What I’m wondering is, if it’s not dehydration, could it be that the body burns alcohol off in a catabolic manner? That is, it takes more calories to digest it than the alcohol adds? I had tried a catabolic diet once where I lost 33 pounds in just over a month eating certain foods. Could there be a happy medium (less than 7 drinks a day, of course) where alcohol consumption actually aided weight loss without causing excess dehydration?
You pee more with beer than with liquor or wine (at least I do, anecdotally). It’s just that you lose a lot more water weight than the calories could put on. I’ve heard that a hangover is largely dehydration in general.
For someone who weighs roughly 235 lbs., a 6 lb. weight loss represents about a 2% fluctuation, which is entirely consistent with what you expect from fluid loss.
Alcohol contains about 7 cal/g and doesn’t take anywhere near that amount of energy to digest. In fact, there are no known negative calorie foods, so I’d be very curious to hear the details on this “catabolic” diet.
And I put catabolic in quotes up there because it refers to any metabolic process that takes one molecule and splits it up–it’s nothing specific to weight loss.
The only explanation I could come up with is that you drink beer instead of other forms of alcohol. The relative advantage of beer is that its carbonated. If I recall correctly, that slightly expands your intestines and temporarily decreases your fluids uptake efficiency. That in turn means that you take up relatively less calories from beer including alcohol (which the liver turns into fat incredibly efficiently). If you normally drink other alcohol, the calories from that are part of what keeps you at a certain weight, and by drinking beer you could be consuming lesser amounts of calories as a result.
Anyway, that’s the best explanation I can come up with for any weight loss that lasts more than several days, outside of dehydration.
Btw, the headache part of a hangover is more specifically caused by dehydration of the area between your brain and your skull. You can probably imagine what kind of effect dehydration there has … (people who have headaches regularly sometimes simply don’t drink enough water, also makes you feel tired. )
Beer is an osmotic diuretic. You did pee more whether you were aware or not. The diuretic effect isn’t dependent on you’re state of drunkenness.
The chart you linked to is inaccurate. In fact, it doesn’t even agree with itself. Feeling intoxicated is a poor indicator of BA.
Some people will begin slurring with a BA of less than 0.04, others may seem to stay completely sober (especially to themselves, funny too.)
Alcohol is indeed metabolized differently, than other foods. The calories in straight alcohol are poorly utilized, so , there could be a slight increase in weight loss. But, beer isn’t all alcohol, its 5%, 10% 20% or 3.2% (this is nearly same as 5 %, because one is measured by volume the other by weight.)
The other compounds are water and carbohydrates.
Using ETOH as a weight loss aid isn’t much different than using an exacto knife to pick your teeth. It may work, but the consequences are worse than being overweight. An individual who drinks every day runs a huge risk of serious health issues. Heart, kidney and liver disease are all linked to chronic drinking.
I’m not talking about a falling down undershirted low life. Anyone who drinks frequently is at risk. Check outthesethreesites about liver disease.
My brother was in a serious car accident several years ago. He was a weekend drinker, maybe 2 six pack over every weekend, maybe one or two beers after work one other day .
The accident injured his liver, so he had emergency surgery. The surgeon told me he (my brother, not the surgeon) had 30% liver fibrosis. (A polite term for cirrhosis) He was definately not your typical alcoholic, but there it was…
You really think you somehow burned 5+ pounds of fat in one night? You think that 7 beers is enough to burn 17,500 calories worth of fat - and no one has ever noticed but you? You actually think that’s more likely than dehydration caused by alcohol’s well-known diuretic effects?
When I was young: I drank lots of beer and woke up skinny and dehydrated.
Now: I wake up a bit bloated and heavy from any significant alcohol intake.
Doesn’t stop me. It’s just sobering. I’ve found, on balance, that the same diet that will maintain my weight steady will lead to 7-10 pounds a month weight loss if coupled with abstention from most alochol (including even the allegedly “carb-free” liquor and wine options – which seem to keep me bloated up too).
My conclusion is that drinking in any non-gutter-bound fashion is weight-additive (albeit the true gutter drunks often are miraculously slim), abstaining, weight-subtractive.
I’m not sure that I agree with that statement. What osmole enters the urine as a result of drinking beer?
Alcohol’s diuretic effect is due to its ability to inhibit antidiuretic hormone (ADH) secretion by the pituitary. This is very much the opposite of an osmotic diuresis.
