Of note: this information is for people who are trying to balance alcohol with weight loss. It's not intended to address addiction and will be useless on that front.
Let's get into it
In this issue:
- The problem(s) alcohol brings to healthy weight living.
- My experience
- Three questions to ask yourself to unlock self-knowledge.
Navigating alcohol is a tricky business. It's social, highly normalized, and routine. Learning to interrupt that routine is how to reduce consumption.
One abundantly clear thing is that alcohol is a challenge to your healthy weight. The degree to which that's true is personal to you.
Alcohol is what I call a keystone habit–meaning it has an outsized effect on the whole of your life.
As I wrote about sugar:
Decades of calorie counting give the impression that you can skirt the effects of
sugaralcohol by keeping your calories low enough.
Same idea. Sugar creates metabolic reactions that drive hunger. Alcohol creates metabolic reactions that create stomach problems, trigger migraines, disrupt sleep, create fatigue, stimulate hunger, interfere with digestion, and encourage feelings of depression. The degree to which any of these happen to you is personal. I have all these problems, but I know people with one or two.
I suspect women in midlife are most susceptible to the effects of alcohol because, by now, our bodies have been fighting off these effects for decades and are worn down. That tidbit is my opinion and not rooted in something scientific I read, but it's held true in my years of working with women (and my own).
It's okay to admit that our bodies are older and need different care. Accepting this idea can be transformative. As I often tell my members, you don't need another diet; you need better care.
The rub is that I can't tell you exactly what to do. Adopting outside rules is a diet-based approach. The best I can do is help you think through what you're doing (which is way more helpful) and create the guardrails that work for you.
The first step is cataloging its effect on you and where you're most likely to consume mindlessly.
