Everything in life is better on drugs.
Seriously. For every possible situation, from sex to studying for your finals, there’s a drug that will improve the experience. When it comes to nightlife, alcohol is the drug of choice because it’s legal, socially acceptable and easily available.
In fact, alcohol is practically required on a night out. Alcohol doesn’t enhance parties, it creates them. All the messed up stuff that goes on at the average party is not for the sober of mind. You can ask any bouncer and expect them to agree. I’ve yet to meet a bouncer who hasn’t lost his faith in humanity. So, if you want friends (women) and sex (men), alcohol is your love potion.
But it’s a toxic love potion. Now, this isn’t the type of article to recommend moderation. Screw moderation. You want to get hammered without ruining your physique. I totally understand.
Even if you think your drinking style falls under the ‘moderate drinking’ category, you’re probably wrong. In science, moderate drinking is often defined as 2 drinks per day as a man or just 1 as a woman. Anything over that, especially in a time span of only a few hours, is binge drinking. Your body has a completely different reaction to 14 drinks in one evening than it does to 2 drinks every day.
The good news is that you can lose fat while binge drinking, and you can minimize the damage to your training. To achieve this, we need to understand alcohol’s pharmacology. By the way, did you know that the ancient Greek word ‘pharmakon’ originally meant poison? In Modern Greek it means drug.
Let’s look at how to fit alcohol into your macros.
How to lose fat while drinking: The anti-beer belly diet
When you drink alcohol, it is absorbed through your stomach and intestines.
It then passes through your liver on its way to the blood. When it’s in your circulation, it keeps passing through your liver and during every passing your liver breaks down some of the alcohol into acetate.
Acetate is what makes alcohol toxic. When acetate enters your blood, it inhibits fat burning throughout the body, not just in your liver [1]. As a result, most of the fatty acids in your blood are stored. This is why alcohol has such a high potential to make you fat.
The upshot is that acetate is very hard to convert into fat itself, and your liver is too busy breaking down the toxic acetate to contribute to the creation of new fat (known in science as de novo lipogenesis). As a result, your liver stores less than 5% of alcohol as fat [1]. On top of that, alcohol itself has no fats and very few carbs (alcohol is a separate macronutrient). This means we can avoid the fat storing effect of alcohol by minimizing the amount of fatty acids in circulation.
We can avoid the fat storing effect of alcohol by minimizing the amount of fatty acids in circulation.
Scientific binge drinking tip #1: Minimize fat intake on the day you go drinking.
How alcohol is metabolized.
But wait, can’t the body simply convert carbs or protein to fat?
No, it actually can’t do this effectively unless you are in energy surplus [2]. Protein and especially carbs only considerably increase fat storage indirectly. They mainly increase the rate at which the fat you consume is stored instead of used as fuel. But since you’re not consuming much fat, there’s nothing to store.
The carbs and protein are either used as fuel or stored. If they’re burned, good. Unfortunately, the protein is unlikely to be stored as muscle. Recent research shows that alcohol directly decreases muscle protein synthesis and anabolic gene expression [3]. Previous research had only demonstrated alcohol’s anti-anabolic effect in animals and alcoholics, but it has now been confirmed in strength training men. Only wishful thinkers would not have expected this, but still, it confirms that you want to keep your drinking and your training sessions separate.
Since many people drink at night, and the best time to work out for these people is often in the evening, it’s a good idea to train earlier on drinking days. If you always go out on a certain day of the week, like Saturday, try to make that a rest day in your program. It’s probably even better to train when hung over than before drinking, because recovery is more important than absolute performance for muscle hypertrophy.
It’s probably even better to train when hung over than before drinking, because recovery is more important than absolute performance for muscle hypertrophy.
Scientific binge drinking tip #2: Maximize the time between weight training and drinking alcohol.
Ok, when there is alcohol in your system, fat gets stored and protein gets burned. What about carbs?
You may have heard that alcohol improves your insulin sensitivity. Sure, when you drink less than 3 drinks per day. Any more and alcohol spikes insulin, disrupts glucose homeostasis, induces insulin resistance, and over time greatly increases the chance that you’ll develop metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes [4-7].
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Since carbs can’t be converted to fat efficiently without overfeeding, carbs are ok to consume with alcohol. The key point here is to avoid being in an energy surplus. There is no point in bulking on alcohol anyway, because alcohol limits muscle protein synthesis and recovery from training.
If you know it will be impossible to avoid an energy surplus because you’re going to drink a gallon or you have a festive dinner beforehand, it helps if you deplete glycogen stores beforehand. You’ll deplete liver glycogen and some muscle glycogen by 3 days with low-carb dieting, or 2 days of severe caloric restriction. This will increase insulin sensitivity and stimulate your body to store carbs as glycogen instead of fat. [8]
If you know it will be impossible to avoid an energy surplus because you’re going to drink a gallon or you have a festive dinner beforehand, it helps if you deplete glycogen stores beforehand.
Scientific binge drinking tip #3: Always cut when consuming alcohol, never bulk. If you can’t cut, deplete glycogen stores before drinking.
You now know how alcohol interacts with other nutrients and how you can adjust your diet to cut fat while binge drinking. Now that you know what to eat, we’ll look at when to eat it.
Minimal Alcohol, Maximum Drunkenness
Optimal nutrient timing on alcohol depends on your goal.
Let’s first assume you simply drink alcohol because you like being drunk. We’ll consider the alternative afterward.
To get the most bang for your buck, you want all of the alcohol you drink to reach your blood. That way, you need the least amount of drinks to get drunk. This saves money and calories (more on that later), and it spares your body from having to deal with an excessive amount of alcohol.
Let’s look at how to get drunk like a pro.
Sipping & Chugging
Your liver can break down only a certain amount of alcohol per hour, regardless of the amount that’s in your blood.
Absorption through the digestive tract happens much faster. If you drink alcohol faster than your liver can metabolize it, the alcohol accumulates in your blood. This is shown in the graph below for 1 to 4 drinks.
This graph basically shows you how drunk you get by drinking 1 to 4 drinks, and how long it takes you to sober up.
If you drink 1 drink per hour, you get the small spike on the lowest curve every hour. That won’t make you drunk, at least not if you can hold your liquor. You want to be on the upper curve, so it’s more efficient to take a few shots than to sip on beer the entire evening.
Food has the same effect as sipping on your drinks. A full stomach slows the rate at which alcohol is absorbed into the blood [9-13]. This, again, slows down the accumulation of alcohol in your blood and makes you need more drinks to get drunk.
Scientific binge drinking tip #4: To get drunk with the least amount of alcohol, chuck down all your drinks at once on an empty stomach.
Now let’s consider the alternative to drinking alcohol purely to get drunk: You feel forced to drink a lot of alcohol because of social pressure from your friends.
Say what you want, but anyone who isn’t completely lacking experience in peer pressure knows this is at least part of the reason most people drink.
I could tell you to get new friends, but I am a consultant, not your father. Besides, a strong personality takes time to develop. Silverback gorillas don’t grow silver hairs on their back until they mature and only then can they lead instead of follow.
In this scenario you can’t predict how much you’re going to drink. Once alcohol has cut your social brakes and people start shoving drinks in your hand, you probably won’t even be able to keep count. So, you want to minimize the effect of each drink so that the amount of alcohol you end up drinking does minimal damage.
Maximum Alcohol, Minimum Damage
To minimize the damage from a night out, you want to do the opposite of what you do when you want to get drunk. You want to spread your alcohol consumption over time as much as possible.
To minimize the damage from a night out, you want to do the opposite of what you do when you want to get drunk. You want to spread your alcohol consumption over time as much as possible.
Scientific binge drinking tip #5: To minimize the damage from alcohol, space your drinks over time as much as possible.
But there’s more. You want to binge on protein and carbs before you go binge drinking. The food counteracts alcohol’s effects in several ways.
A full stomach slows down the rate at which alcohol is absorbed into the blood. Absorption from the stomach is much slower than absorption from the intestines. This prevents accumulation in the blood.
A portion of the alcohol is already broken down in the digestive tract by the digestive enzymes of the food.
The decreased rate of gastric emptying gives your liver more time to break down the alcohol before it ever enters your blood (called first pass hepatic metabolism). As the alcohol drip feeds to your liver, your liver enzymes don’t become fully saturated. They can deal with the flow of alcohol without becoming overwhelmed.
Food stimulates blood flow to the liver and the production of liver enzymes that also help break down alcohol (alcohol dehydrogenase & cytochrome P450IIE1).
All of this decreases the absorption rate and increases the elimination rate of alcohol. The result? The percentage of bioavailable alcohol that actually reaches your blood drops to around 70% for most meals. High protein meals are particularly effective at stimulating the liver and delaying gastric emptying. They can reduce alcohol’s bioavailability to under 40%. [3, 9-13]
A good meal can therefore allow you consume over twice the amount of alcohol otherwise needed for the same level of intoxication. A meal basically cuts the damage from alcohol in half. The best meal is something that stimulates your liver and delays gastric emptying. That means protein, fiber and a high volume of food. Casein, egg white, fiber supplements and vegetables are therefore best.
A good meal can therefore allow you consume over twice the amount of alcohol otherwise needed for the same level of intoxication.
Scientific binge drinking tip #6: To minimize the damage from alcohol, consume a large meal composed of lots of slowly digesting protein and fiber before you go drinking.
Although we can influence how much alcohol reaches the blood, we cannot influence how much is digested. That means the calories in alcohol still count. Let’s look at how to deal with that.
Picking your Poison
Alcohol, the actual macronutrient, contains 7.1 calories per gram. Sure, it has a high thermic effect which increases the cost of its metabolism by about 20%. In obese individuals, this is a huge increase in their metabolism. However, if you’re lean and physically active, that’s just a few percent more than the thermic effect of fat and carbs, and it’s lower than that of protein. This means it doesn’t make much sense to use net calories for alcohol if you don’t take into account the thermic effect of food for the rest of your diet as well [14-15].
Fortunately you can save a ton of calories by drinking only dry wines and spirits, possibly mixed with diet drinks. Spirits and lite beer have about a 100 calories per drink, wine has 125, and beer has 150. They all contain similar amounts of alcohol, protein (none), and fat (none).
If you drink 20 beers on a night out on top of your regular diet, you consume nearly 3000 extra calories. Chucking down 8 shots or so on an empty stomach as per the tips above will get you just as drunk and saves you almost 2200 calories.
Sherry is the least caloric drink, with only 75 calories per glass, whereas cocktails can run up to over 500 calories per glass. The table below with data from the US National Institute of Health shows you how many calories are in 1 regular serving of your favorite drinks.
This table shows the calories in alcohol.
Scientific binge drinking tip #7: Only drink dry wines and spirits.
As a rule of thumb, beer contains 150 calories per drink compared to 125 for wine, and 100 for spirits.
Alcohol has a way of making you consume even more calories though. I know I only promised 7 tips, but this one’s on the house.
Scientific binge drinking tip #8: If you’re prone to overeating after a night out, save up some calories during the day and prepare a filling, high protein meal that you can easily eat when you get back home (or wherever you end up).
The 3 regular macronutrients suppress your appetite in proportion to the amount of calories you consume of them. The more you eat of them, the more they fill you up. Alcohol doesn’t do this. In fact, alcohol can even increase your appetite. [16]
Combined with reduced executive control, AKA impaired judgment, it is easy to overeat when you’re drunk.
Drink Up
You don’t have to be a social recluse to build an awesome physique. Many of my non-competing clients regularly drink alcohol and still make great progress. Binge drinking isn’t healthy, and it will somewhat compromise the development of your physique, but it makes for great experiences (if you remember them). An optimized diet isn’t just about maximum muscular hypertrophy and fat loss. It should be part of the lifestyle that allows you enjoy life to the fullest. If drinking is part of that for you, use these tips and drink up!
Originally published on BayesianBodybuilding.com
About the Author
Online physique coach, fitness model and scientific author, Menno Henselmans helps serious trainees attain their ideal physique using his Bayesian Bodybuilding methods. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter and check out his website for more free articles.
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