How Alcohol Affects Fat Loss and Muscle After 40

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Alcohol can disrupt the balance of hormones in the body, including testosterone and growth hormone, which are very important hormones for muscle growth and recovery. Testosterone is a key hormone that plays a crucial role in muscle growth and recovery. However, alcohol consumption can decrease testosterone levels, and this can make it harder for the body to build muscle and to recover from strength training exercises. Also, low testosterone levels can lead to a decrease in your ability to perform with good energy. You will be tired, you will be fatigued, and that can affect your overall well-being.

Yo, yo, yo. What is going on, you guys? Welcome to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. I am your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to today's episode, episode 166. In this podcast today, I'm going to share with you something that I feel like is very, actually, not feel like, I know is very relevant in all of your experience right now.

That being, it's summertime, and there's vacations, and there's family get-togethers, and there's traveling, and something that all of those occasions include is alcohol. I've talked about alcohol a couple of times in various episodes on this podcast, but I want to bring it back, more relevant and up-to-date. One, because it's summer, and also because I'm hearing it.

We had a coaches meeting today with the WarriorBabe coaches, and a few of them were talking about how their clients are all having a little bit more alcohol than normal. So basically what I want to do in this podcast is remind you, or share with those of you who don't know, how alcohol affects your ability to build muscle and your ability to lose body fat. What I think about this topic overall is that it's somewhat misunderstood when it comes to fitness.

And I'm not saying alcohol is bad for you, but, I mean, shit, let me rephrase that. It is bad for you. It's poison. But I understand that a lot of you like to have social outings, and so do I. Every once in a while I will have a drink and enjoy myself and have a good time. But I think the use of it on a daily and weekly basis, which I think a lot of people are very prone to doing, is not only detrimental to your body, but detrimental to your health.

And most importantly, if you are listening to this podcast and that's something you do on a weekly basis, it is very detrimental to your results. So I want you to be more aware of these facts if you're trying to build more muscle and lose body fat, because I think a lot of people think that having a few drinks won't do any harm. But as you're about to see from what I'm going to talk about in this podcast, that's not actually the case. If you are having a drink or two on a weekly basis, that is doing harm.

And that is not going to help you get to the results you want faster. I know that occasionally enjoying a drink here and there is totally fine. But just think about it like this: is it in alignment with your goals? And is it going to serve you the results that you want to see? All right. So let's dive in. There are specifically five things I want to talk about today. The first one is that alcohol is high in calories, and those calories can add up very, very quickly.

If you are consuming too many calories that are coming from alcohol, that can lead to weight gain, and that can make your weight loss journey, losing body fat, that much more difficult. Alcohol contains seven calories per gram, which is almost the same as pure fat at nine calories per gram. Think about it like this. I love the marketing some cans do. For example, Truly has 100 calories on the back of the can, but only two grams of carbs.

So break it down. If there's really only two grams of carbs in it, then there would only be 8 calories, because there are four calories per one gram of carb, and four times two is eight. So where are the other 92 calories coming from? They're not being shown in the nutritional label. You have to take into account the seven calories per gram coming from the alcohol in that can. But people see two grams of carbs and they're like, yes.

But really what it comes down to is, when you're tracking alcohol the right way, you have to attribute those 100 calories to something. Typically I like to break it down: you attribute it either to fats or to carbs. If you do 100 divided by four, that's 25, so you have 25 grams of carbohydrates in that one drink. If you attribute the 100 to fat at nine calories per gram, it's somewhere around 11 grams of fat.

I'm just bringing this to your attention. This is what we recommend inside WarriorBabe for women who want to track their alcohol with macronutrients. You have to attribute it to some macronutrient, because there's not just two grams of carbs in that can. There's 100 calories. What the nutritional label isn't including, and this is the point I'm trying to get across, is the seven calories per gram that alcohol contains. So you have to attribute it to your carbs or your fat. Really, a can of Truly is either 25 grams of carbohydrates or 11 grams of fat.

And then think about it. If you have four Truly cans, that's 100 grams of carbohydrates right there. So I just wanted to put that into perspective. Not only does it contain the calories that it contains, but consuming alcohol will also most likely lead to you overeating or making poor food choices. It lowers your inhibitions and it lowers your control over yourself.

Then it makes you consume more, and it leads to more calories consumed in the day than you normally would have. And let's just call it what it is. I know whenever I have a couple of drinks, I'm always looking for the food. I know you are too. So think about it like that. It's not just the four Truly cans you're having that add up to 100 grams of carbs. It's also anything you are eating while you're drinking, because the alcohol gives you less control over your calorie intake.

And that can make it extremely difficult to be in a calorie deficit, or to be where you need to be to lose body fat.

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Sticking with the calories talk, the calories in alcohol are considered empty calories because they provide absolutely no nutritional value. This means that consuming alcohol can lead to imbalances in your calorie intake.

It can lead to a high proportion of your calorie intake coming from alcohol, which can make it extremely difficult to meet your daily nutritional needs while trying to lose body fat. So just take this first tidbit of information about alcohol: how many calories it contains, how it makes you consume more calories in your day, and how you're not getting any nutritional value. I've come to the stage of my journey where there have been so many recent opportunities for me to enjoy a drink.

One was my brother's graduation party a couple of weekends ago. And I look at it and I'm like, why would I consume one drink when I can have my calories go to food that I want and will actually enjoy? That's actually going to give me nutritional value, and it's actually going to give me energy tomorrow during my lift, rather than drinking a couple of drinks and feeling like absolute poop tomorrow. So that's just some perspective from that point of view.

The second thing I want to talk about is how alcohol inhibits muscle protein synthesis. That's the process by which muscle tissue is repaired and built, and this can make it harder for you to build muscle and to recover from the strength training you are doing if you're consuming alcohol. When you engage in strength training exercises, like I've said many, many times on this podcast, you create small tears in your muscle fibers as you work out.

Post-exercise, your body repairs those tears, which leads to muscle growth and strength. But alcohol consumption can interfere entirely with this process. It does it by slowing down protein synthesis and making it harder for your body to repair and build that muscle. Alcohol also increases muscle breakdown, which is completely counterproductive to what you want to be doing along your journey. It breaks the muscle tissue down even more than it can be repaired.

So basically, you're digging yourself deeper into a hole you cannot get out of if you're drinking alcohol and expecting to get results. Then you're wondering why you're not getting results, and it's because you're breaking down the muscle and it cannot be repaired, at least not at the normal level it would be if you weren't drinking. So it leads to muscle loss. That's what I'm trying to say: if you are consuming alcohol, it leads to muscle breakdown, and the muscle tissue is being broken down more than it can be repaired.

So you're losing muscle, and that makes it harder to build muscle. It's counterproductive. Protein synthesis is a huge process that has to happen in order for you to build muscle, and building that muscle is what's going to make you look more toned.

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So again, take these little tidbits of information I'm sharing with you and think about how they align with your journey. Do they align with your journey? And trust what I'm sharing with you. I know a lot of this can be a social interaction. It's more comfortable. That's how you go about hanging out with family and friends and enjoying your time. But there are so many other ways you can hang out with your friends and enjoy your time.

I can speak more confidently about this because a couple of podcasts ago, I shared with you the transformation my dad and my stepmom made, the journey they were on with alcohol, how they turned it around, and how at my brother's graduation party they didn't have a lick of alcohol. This is coming from my dad, who is an amazing human being when you know him one-on-one, but he is the most socially awkward individual when it comes to talking to other people.

He only likes to converse with his close-knit group of friends. But with other people, like family and extended family, and friends he doesn't really know or that my stepmom is friends with, it's a show. It's hilarious. I love you, Dad, if you're listening to this. But anyway, I can say that he wants to be healthier. He's working out on a daily basis.

He knows what is aligning with him and what isn't. He knows if he has a couple of drinks, the next day he's not going to stick to the 20-minute workout he does every single day. He won't go down to the little gym. So just think about that. One of our coaches said this so freaking well: you are creating a new identity for yourself, and it can be scary, and some people like to keep one foot in their old life and one foot in their new life. You just have to fully dive into your new life.

What does the life of the person you want to become look like, which I've talked about many times on this podcast? What does that health look like for you? And maybe alcohol is something that needs to be turned down a notch, because you have other goals that aren't in alignment with alcohol consumption, because of what I'm talking about in this podcast. Alcohol makes it really fucking hard. Excuse my language, I just curse because I'm really passionate about what I'm talking about. But it makes it really hard to get to where you want to be and accomplish the goals you want when it comes to fat loss, building muscle, weight loss, anything in general when it comes to fitness.

Especially this third point: alcohol can disrupt the balance of hormones in the body, including testosterone and growth hormone, which are very important hormones for muscle growth and recovery. Testosterone is a key hormone that plays a crucial role in muscle growth and recovery. However, alcohol consumption can decrease testosterone levels, and this can make it harder for the body to build muscle and to recover from strength training exercises.

Also, low testosterone levels can lead to a decrease in your ability to perform with good energy. You will be tired, you will be fatigued, and that can affect your overall well-being. Not only your overall well-being, you also won't be able to perform your strength training exercises as strongly as you could if you have low testosterone levels. And naturally, as women, we already have low testosterone levels.

So if you are consuming alcohol on a weekly basis and it's a part of your life, but you have this goal you want to accomplish, remember we already have low testosterone levels. Drinking is just lowering your testosterone levels even more, and that's going to decrease your energy and increase your fatigue, and that's going to affect your overall ability to recover properly and repair muscle tissue.

Secondly, as I said, growth hormone is another key hormone that plays a crucial role in your muscle recovery and muscle growth, and it also helps with fat loss. But alcohol can decrease growth hormone levels. As a side note, a lot of women in WarriorBabe go through hormone testing when they join our program. We partner with Equal Life, and we have our clients do saliva testing.

Then we get those results, and we can see how their thyroid is, how their DHEA is, how their sex hormones are, testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, A1c, blood glucose, and I'm missing a few other things. We get that data, assess it, apply it to our clients' nutrition and fitness lifestyle, and improve areas where they have deficiencies through specific methods of nutrition and exercise.

But anyway, I see a lot of growth hormone decrease, and I see a lot of testosterone that's already low and plummeting, and alcohol is only going to make that worse. With alcohol decreasing hormone levels, it will make it that much harder for you to build muscle, recover from strength training and lose body fat. Alcohol also affects other hormones like insulin and cortisol, which I also see having an impact on women in the test results that come back, and that can have a negative impact on muscle growth and recovery.

Insulin is responsible for delivering glucose, the energy, to the cells, and alcohol can interfere with insulin's ability to do that. That can lead to low energy levels and make it harder for you to do any type of strength training in the days after consuming alcohol. And cortisol is a hormone that is released in response to stress, and alcohol can increase cortisol levels. I see high cortisol levels all the time in women going through our program.

They either have high cortisol, or their cortisol is absolutely freaking flatlined, meaning they have no curve whatsoever. You should have a curve. In the morning it should be up and elevated naturally, then it should come down midday and decrease by the end of the night. That doesn't exist in a lot of women. So if your cortisol is elevated and then you're drinking alcohol on top of that, alcohol increases cortisol levels even more, and high cortisol levels lead to muscle breakdown and make it harder to build muscle.

So again, it's counterproductive to the things you want to accomplish when you're trying to build muscle and lose body fat. Alcohol, if I didn't already say it, which I know I did, is poison, but it's also disruptive. It's so disruptive to the process of trying to achieve your goals.

The fourth thing, and I'm just going to touch on it lightly, is that it dehydrates the body. When you're dehydrated, your body's ability to perform at optimal levels decreases, which can lead to fatigue, muscle weakness and muscle cramps. Overall, it alters the balance of electrolytes in your body, like sodium, potassium and chloride, which are all important for muscle function and muscle recovery. When the body is dehydrated, these electrolyte levels become entirely imbalanced, and that can lead to spasms, poor recovery and, like I said, cramps.

So, all in all: the fourth one is dehydration, the third one was disrupting the balance of hormones, the second one was protein synthesis and how alcohol disrupts it, and the first one was the tons of calories it contains and how those calories break down when you're consuming alcohol.

The last thing, and it's freaking scary, is that it interferes with the quality of your sleep. People think that when they drink alcohol, they actually sleep better. That is so far from the truth. I have an Oura ring. I've had this thing since before it was even freaking cool. And actually, a couple of weeks ago I had a one-on-one with one of my clients that I still coach, and she showed me her data after having a glass of wine. This data is so freaking cool. What happens is, your heart rate is elevated.

If your heart rate is already elevated through the night, then there are other factors we need to work on. But for me, normally I'm in the low 40s when I sleep, and if I have alcohol, I'm in the 60s or 70s. My client was normally in the 60s, and she was at 77 throughout the night on the day she had a glass of wine. Some of you might start out at a higher heart rate, but throughout the night it should be decreasing, not elevating. Not only that, alcohol also completely plummets your HRV.

Your HRV is your heart rate variability. It's the way your body handles stress. So it goes back to my point about how alcohol raises your cortisol. If your HRV is low, then you are stressed to the nines. My HRV is normally 120, 130. If I have alcohol, whether it's one drink or a few, it's like 20.

That's like 100 different. Maybe 30, pushing it. It's wild. And sleep is so important for muscle recovery and growth. Not only does a lack of sleep affect all the things I just said, it also affects the hormones that regulate your hunger and your metabolism, which makes it harder to lose weight. I'm going to talk about that for a second.

But first, during sleep, the body is supposed to repair and regenerate, including your muscle tissue. This process is so freaking important for the growth, the recovery and the results you want to see. It happens when you enter the stage of deep sleep.

But that doesn't happen. You don't enter deep sleep. Or if you do enter deep sleep, all these other things are being affected, so your deep sleep doesn't even count. Whenever I drink, there's no deep sleep happening on my end. I'm in the normal, I forget what it's called. There are four different stages it shows. It's not deep, it's not REM, but there's a level that a lot of people are at most of the time. Let me open it up for a second.

Light sleep. I'm in light sleep the majority of the time. Ain't nothing happening in light sleep. But anyway, like I was saying, when it comes to metabolism, ghrelin and leptin are the two hormones that regulate your hunger. When you have a lack of sleep, those hormones get way off balance. When you don't get the sleep, levels of ghrelin, your hunger hormone, increase, and leptin, your fullness hormone, decreases.

This is why you feel hungry the next day, and why you want to consume all the junk food the next day: all of these hormones are now completely out of whack. And this makes it harder to lose body fat. It makes it harder to get to where you want to be. Having a drink doesn't sound like it's harmful.

It sounds like a nice way to relax for a lot of people. But shit, after hearing this podcast, I hope you think a little bit differently, especially if you're trying to accomplish some type of goal with decreasing your body fat and building more muscle, which I believe everybody listening to this podcast is, because that's all I talk about on it, right? It may sound like something nice to do to relax, and sure, every once in a while it is. I drink maybe once in a blue moon. It's literally maybe three times a year, if that.

Maybe next time you could consider, instead of having four, having one. And then slowly cut back. It took my parents eight months to go from heavily drinking to not drinking at all at social occasions. So I'm not saying make this change immediately, but think about the impact it's having on you, and each time you're going to have a drink, reconsider and maybe have less than you did the last time. And the next time, maybe have less than that.

And slowly remove this thing from your life, because it doesn't really serve that much of a purpose, to be honest. So, all in all, in conclusion: alcohol can have a negative impact on building muscle and losing body fat. It leads to increased calorie intake, it inhibits muscle growth and protein synthesis, it disrupts your hormone balance, it causes dehydration, and it interferes with your sleep quality.

All these factors make it very, very difficult for you to achieve your goals when it comes to building muscle, recovering from strength training, getting good-quality sleep and losing body fat. So again, reconsider next time. Maybe have a drink and drink tons of water, but then slowly phase it out, because in my opinion it's just not worth it. All right? We want you to maximize your workout performance and get the results you want, and especially with summer being here, just think about it a little bit differently so you can get to your goals faster. That's all I want for you. That's all we want for you. All right? I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.

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