If you're trying to lose weight, the unfortunate fact about drinking alcohol is that it will be severely detrimental to your weight loss efforts.
Alcohol, especially beer and wine, are a source of empty carbohydrates and calories.
Beer and wine provide almost no nutritional value in the form of vitamins and minerals, but possess a large amount of calories - about 100 in a glass of wine and 200 in some non-light beers.
Even light beers usually have about 100 calories per 12oz serving.
If you only drink one or two bottles of beer or glasses or wine a day, the caloric intake might not be too bad for your waistline, but alcohol has several effects in the body that can hamper weight loss efforts, such as reducing your body's muscle growth and reducing your body's likelihood of burning fat for energy, both of which will prevent you from losing the amount of weight that you want to.
Alcoholic beverages can greatly inhibit the production of muscle tissue, especially in men.
Alcohol suppresses the body's production of testosterone, which is important for building muscle mass.
In addition, it also has negative effects on the quality of your sleep.
Since you gain most of your muscle mass in your sleep as your body repairs muscle tissue broken down during strength training workouts in the day, poor sleep quality can lead to you not seeing the results you want from your strength training.
Drinking alcoholic beverages on an exercise day can almost entirely wipe out the results you would see from your sessions.
Building muscle is an important part of weight loss, since each pound of muscle you put on causes your body to burn about 50 extra calories each day in supporting it; muscle is much more metabolically expensive to support than fat.
Even though 50 calories may not seem like much, if you put on ten pounds of muscle you will burn a total of 500 calories each day, equivalent to an hour of intense exercise.
The best part is that the calorie-burning properties of muscle don't require you to exercise, and if you do exercise then the calories burned by muscle stack with the results of your exercise, resulting in a greater calorie expenditure per day.
Drinking alcoholic beverages can cause your body to almost entirely halt the process of lipolysis.
Lipolysis is the process in which your body converts fat to energy; in other words, it's the process responsible for burning fat.
When you drink alcohol, the rate of lipolysis can be decreased by up to 75%.
If you drink alcoholic beverages, your body is more likely to retain fat instead of burning it for fuel.
Obviously, this is terrible if you want to burn fat and lose weight.
It's recommended that if you want to lose weight that you should abstain from drinking alcohol completely, as even though the caloric intake of one or two light beers is negligible, the effect if has on your body's fat burning functions will hamper your efforts to lose weight.