Alcohol

This seems like a good time to bring this up since we have all recently celebrated New Year's. I will preface what I am getting ready to say by letting you know that I am a beer drinker. I love beer. LOVE IT. Now that said, here is what I know about drinking and weight loss.

The only diet that really "Ok's" drinking is Weight Watchers as they have you treat it like any other thing with calories you are getting ready to put in your mouth. So, if you are one of those people that likes to come home from work and have a drink or two every night you are thinking that you will just build it into your daily points and move on. You can't do that for a couple of reasons.

Your body burns alcohol before it will burn food. So, when you are sitting down to your dinner with a glass of wine, that wine will get in line before the food and your body will burn that first, so that the food has a greater chance of being stored as fat.

Alcohol will make you retain water. If you save your drinking for your one splurge night (which is what I do) then the scale WILL go up the next morning. Don't freak out, just drink A LOT of water the next day and it will return to where it was the following day.

So, save your booze for your one splurge night (splurging does not mean binge drinking). I should probably not even be doing that one night a week, but if I can't have one night away from my regimen, I won't hang in as long with it, so it works for me.

Another note about drinking is that it WILL kick you harder and faster if you have been dieting all week. If you are prone to hangovers you will feel worse the next day than you usually do. I call this a "weight watchers hangover." I will have a few drinks which I normally wouldn't feel the next day and will feel awful. It will make you think harder about it the next time around.