Due to being prescribed an antibiotic, I’ve considerably reduced my intake of hooch. The doctor did say a little alcohol was OK, for example a glass of wine with dinner, but for the past week I’ve just decided to skip it altogether. Perhaps over the weekend I might have a few glasses of wine, but that’s it. This is in contrast to my usual habit of having about two drinks a day, on average, every day of the week.
If I continue avoiding or at least limiting alcohol in my diet, shouldn’t I expect to see my midriff shrink? Not that I’m fat, but I do have a bit of excess fat that I’d really like to get rid of. And I work out vigorously, so it’s not like I’m fat over all, but due to millions of years of evolution, that little wattle of fat at my naval is absolutely the last thing to go. Working out, and hoping to increase my muscularity, means that I have to be careful what I give up foodwise, since most food, even fatty foods, also contains positive nutrional components. But alcohol is just calories. No protein, carbs, or fat. No vitamins.
So if I continue with this positive change, can I expect to shrink? Or will Mr. Metabolism simply slow down even further to make up for the lack of alcoholic calories?
Most people find that it isn’t really the alcohol in their diet that blows their diet, it’s all the high-carb, salt- and fat-laden junk food they eat while drinking beer that blows their diet. “Gee, I’m thirsty; I’ll have another beer. Hey, I’ve got another beer; I’ll have some more pizza.”
So, it’s good that you’re cutting back on the alcohol and not risking, like, death or hives or whatever else can happen if you combine it with your prescription, but what else are you eating that might be excessive?
The sugar in the alcohol can certainly contribute to the tummy bulge; however, depending on the rest of your diet, it may not make a huge difference cutting it out.
If you’re totally tuned in diet wise, with alcohol being your only “bad” food, eliminating it will help get rid of the belly bulge tho…
I’m actually not much of a beer drinker anymore; when I do drink I tend to have wine, whiskey, or gin (in the form of Martinis–and yes, I do know I have to count a Martini as approximately 2 drinks, not one). The point is, none of those types of alcohol, IMO, really encourages eating the way beer might.
I’m pretty good actually. I eat practically no sweets, and hardly ever allow nondiet soda to pass these lips of mine. I don’t even like nondiet soda, and will only drink it when I have to have something and nothing else is available. Breakfast and lunch are usually modest affairs.
(BTW “My doughy physique” is a reference to the TV show “Scrubs”).
Well, at 50kCal per 100mL of beer, four to six cans or bottles per day was a major contributor to my obesity (that’s 700 to over 1000 calories extra per day!)
Stopped drinking my precious homebrew (and the Blue) during the week, plus reduce my food intake (I already eat balanced; just a lot, it turns out) and the weight’s coming off fast – so far.
Two to three wines, though, is substantially different than a six-pack of beer.
If you eliminate the alcohol and substitute it with either nothing, or a drink with less calories (water or diet soda,) and you are currently in a state of calorie input = output, then yes, you will lose weight (assuming nothing else about your diet or exercise regiment changes.)
However, there is no way to guarentee that you will lose your midriff fat. There is no proven way, AFAIK, to spot reduce fat (aside from lipo.) That is to say, you can’t pick and choose what parts of the body you lose fat from. It may appear that your midriff is the only place with fat, but I’m willing to bet you have other fat deposits as well, just not so large as to be noticible (except possibly your ass, which is pretty notorious for being a fat deposit in many people.)
I think a lot depends on your age, too. I had a stomach you could bounce a quarter off of until just the past few years. I don’t think I could get back to that shape now unless I worked out 3 hours a day.
While an alcoholic drink contains a certain amount of calories, and while some people find that alcohol stimulates the appetite, there is a very common theory in favor among those concerned with nutrition which claims that the calories from alcohol in particular are especially likely to lead to the storage of calories from other foods as fat.
For me, I used to drink a minimum of 8 alcoholic drinks per day, and perhaps double or 1.5 that amount 3-4 days per week. It’s an enormous amount of calories to be consuming, especially when consumed quickly, and especially especially in addition to the “food” food one might normally eat at mealtimes, etc. I’ve lost 40 pounds in the past six months by doing quite literally nothing but ceasing to consume alcohol for weeks at a time, and by decreasing the total amount of alcohol consumed per day.
I think the point about alcohol going to fat was that it’s only two carbon molecules long, so there’s no way to get it through the Krebs cycle to make it into sugars. So it has to become part of fat molecules.
But I think we’re being really simplistic if we think “molecule of fat in equals molecule of fat in fat deposits”. Eating a molecule of alcohol does not equal storing a molecule of alcohol as fat. I think the plans for how the body deals with resources in, resources stored, resources used for immediate action or thought, resources used for longterm effort, has got to be one of the most evolutionarily conserved and survival-important strategies the genes can manage for us. With the discovery of leptin and ghrelin we realized that there was a huge hormonal component to what was previously thought of as mere physics. We know we sure don’t know enough about it… more hormones and hormonal control of fat deposits coming down the pipeline. May have something to do with why aging (with decrease of sex hormones and growth hormone) causes slow increase of fat, or decrease of rate of fat burning when dieting.
My old boss used to talk about this when he discussed obesity surgery. He used the example of hibernating animals - e.g. squirrels. The squirrel eats and eats in fall until, at some point, its fat deposits communicate with its hypothalamus to say “Enough to make it through the winter.” The hypothalamus communicates back to say “Are you sure?” Lots of messages probably go back and forth in the form of hormones and nerve impulses and other things we may not know about. The squirrel stops eating at that point, and we know the little squirrel brain isn’t thinking its way through that decision. My boss used to worry that there may be important things going on between the brain and the fat deposits that we don’t know enough about yet. He particularly noticed that his obese patients who got liposuction seemed to change their weight loss rates afterwards. He knew it was anecdotal, but he felt as if he had really got hold of something.
Personal note: When I diet, as I have too many times, I note my body seems to follow a set sequence of where the lipid deposits shrink. It’s like, waist area, then upper arms, then waist area again, then thighs, then waist again. The buttocks never shrink because mine are pert. Lucky genes, so there.
I think so. It will take some time though. Figure that you might lose about 1/2 pound of fat per week, and you probably won’t notice a change in the midriff until you lose about 5 or so pounds. Come back in 10 weeks and I bet you will have a noticeably smaller midriff. At least you will be 5 pounds lighter.
If you continue to work out vigorously, I doubt that will happen.