Can You Drink Alcohol And Still Lose Weight?

It’s Friday night.

You’ve been dieting for a few weeks, you’re counting your calories, and you’ve been making some solid progress towards your weight loss goals.

Now, your friends are going out for drinks and they ask you to come out with them.

What should you do? 

You don’t want  to lose all your progress, but you definitely don’t want to stay inside by yourself on a Friday night either.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, don’t worry. 

The good news is you can enjoy a night out with friends and not ruin all your weight loss progress. 

In this article, I’ll show you exactly what you need to do to make sure you stay on track with your weight loss progress, while enjoying alcohol.

Let’s jump in.

Weight loss 101

I know you’re probably going to try to skip over this part, which is why I put it first. 

Don’t skip it! It’s important!

To lose body fat, you need to burn more calories than you consume. This is called a calorie deficit.

Think about a calorie deficit like a scale. On one side of the scale you have the calories you consume from food and drinks. On the other side, you have the energy you burn in the form of calories.

So where does alcohol fit in?

As long as you are burning more calories than you consume, you will lose fat.

That means just like one slice of pizza won’t make you fat, or one donut won’t magically make you gain fat, you can budget alcohol into your calories for the day and still make weight loss progress. It’s about the overall amount of calories you consume for the day.

Is alcohol fattening?

Believe it or not, alcohol itself isn’t easily stored as body fat, even though it does contain calories (1). 

When you drink, your body will prioritize getting the alcohol, which it treats as a poison, out of your body as quickly as possible. You’ll actually pause digesting calories from food until the alcohol clears your system.

So how can drinking alcohol make you gain weight?

If the calories from food and alcohol you consume are more than you burn for the day, you will still store the extra calories as body fat.

The body fat will just come from the food you’ve eaten that day, not the alcohol.

The calories from alcohol create a buffer, which means the calories from food you’ve eaten that day are more likely to be stored as body fat.

We can use this knowledge to help keep fat gain to a minimum when we come up with a drinking game plan!

Your game plan

The first thing you need to do is make sure you’re in a calorie deficit for the day.

Let’s say you read my article on how many calories you need per day and you find out you need to be eating 1,800 calories per day to lose weight.

If weight loss is your goal, you want to make sure you’re eating around one gram of protein per pound of goal body weight.

This means if you weigh 200 pounds and you’re looking to lose 20 pounds, you would set your protein target for the day to 180 grams.

Eating enough protein is going to help keep you full while you’re in a calorie deficit, help you keep your muscle as you lose weight and it’s going to help you burn more daily calories than if you ate a lower protein diet.

For these reasons, you do NOT want to steal calories from protein for alcohol! You want to take calories from mostly fats and some carbs instead to make room for alcohol later in the day.

Dietary fat is the easiest macronutrient for your body to store as body fat. When you overeat, your body will look to store body fat before carbohydrates or protein (it’s actually close to impossible to store protein as body fat). So, it makes sense to mostly steal calories from your fats for the day.

Protein has 4 calories per gram. So if you are eating 1,800 calories per day and 180g of protein, 720 calories are going to come from protein (180 x 4 = 720 calories).

That means that you have 1,080 calories leftover for the day that can go to carbs, fats and alcohol. 

Alcohol has 7 calories per gram, carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram.

It’s up to you how you want to distribute those calories, and it’s going to depend how much you’ll be drinking.

Are you only going to have a glass of wine or two with dinner? A few beers over the weekend?

You won’t have to cut that many calories out from your carbs and fats. Maybe only 200-300 calories, depending on the type of wine or beer you’ll be drinking.

The real question arises when you’ll be having 4, 5, 6 or more drinks in a night. Are you doomed to lose all your weight loss if you’re planning on a night out on the town?

While moderation is the best way to make sure you’re still making progress, going out doesn’t have to ruin all your progress if you follow these tips..

Low calorie drinks always win

If you’re going to be drinking to get drunk, avoid drinks with a lot of added calories. You want the most alcohol for the least amount of calories.

Straight spirits with soda water or zero calorie mixers are your best bet. There’s a reason the international meathead drink of choice is a vodka soda. If you want beer, light versions are always better for weight loss. 

Remember that losing weight comes down to being in a calorie deficit, and getting the most alcohol for the least amount of calories is going to help.

No drunk food

It’s not a great idea to starve yourself all day long just to make room for alcohol. You should make sure you still get in all your protein and some calories from carbs and fats.

Why?

You don’t want to go into your night of drinking completely starving. If you haven’t eaten all day, alcohol is going to make it really hard to turn down McDonald’s at 2am.

It’s a lot easier to make good choices earlier in the day, when you’re in a clear state of mind. 

Get your protein in, along with lots of veggies and some filling carbs. You’ll be a lot less likely to say “f**ck it!” when you’re drunk and overeat on late night fast food.

Make a pact with yourself before you go out for the night. No drunk food! You’ll thank yourself in the morning.

Calorie cycling

If you know you’re going to be going out well ahead of time, you can save some calories for the weekend by eating fewer calories throughout the week.

If your daily caloric deficit is 1,800, you can instead eat 1,500 calories Monday through Friday. You’ll then be able to consume 2,550 calories on Saturday and Sunday, while still being in a weekly calorie deficit. 

This is called calorie cycling.

I want to note that if the idea of saving all your calories every week for alcohol on the weekends seems too good to be true, it’s because it is. You shouldn’t be doing this every week, because you will probably start to see your workouts decline.

You won’t be able to train as hard or recover as well throughout the week if you’re always depriving yourself of calories, which will lead to a decrease in the amount of muscle you can keep while you’re losing weight. 

Every once in a while it can be a good method to avoid overeating (or should I say, overdrinking) on the weekends.

What if I don’t count calories?

Well first, I’d ask why not?

Counting calories and tracking macronutrients is the most efficient way to reach your goals and be able to enjoy the things you like.

It also teaches you really valuable skills about what’s actually in the foods you eat every day. Once you learn those skills, you’ll have them for the rest of your life.

Of course you don’t have to count calories or track your macros to make weight loss progress. The only thing you need to do is be in a calorie deficit.

With that said, the same rules as above still apply to you. 

If you’re going to be drinking later, try to have mostly protein, vegetables and some carbs early in the day. 

Choose spirits with diet mixers or other low calorie drinks over beers and sugary options.

Skip the drunk food. Just go to bed.

When should you workout?

Even though you won’t gain fat from a night of heavy drinking as long as you’re in a calorie deficit, alcohol does have some other negative effects when it comes to your workouts.

In low doses, alcohol slightly raises testosterone in men and women (2). This explains the boost of confidence and bravado associated with being a little tipsy. If you only have a few drinks, you probably have nothing to worry about when it comes to working out.

However, as the amount you drink increases, testosterone tends to plummet. In studies where blood was taken from intoxicated emergency room visitors, testosterone in men was 45% lower than sober visitors! (3) While this doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a bad workout the following day, it’s probably not going to help either. What’s interesting is this only seems to apply to men. Women in the study actually saw an increase in testosterone. 

Research has also shown that heavy drinking can temporarily reduce muscle protein synthesis (which is an essential part of muscle growth), even when optimal amounts of protein are consumed (4). While this is only temporary, it’s not great news if you just finished a hard workout earlier in the day..

A heavy night of drinking also leads to dehydration, poor sleep and possibly (probably) a hangover. None of which are good news for you or your workout the day after drinking.

If you care about having good workouts, planning out your week is going to help when it comes to minimizing the damage of heavy drinking. 

Even though nights of heavy drinking aren’t always planned ahead, you probably know which nights you’ll usually end up going out. It’s a good idea to put your workouts as far away from your shenanigans as possible.

I would plan on working out the day before you plan on going out, in the morning if possible. That way you can get at least 24 hours of recovery before you start drinking.

If you’re going to workout the day after you drink, try to workout in the late afternoon or evening. That way you can give yourself some time to rehydrate and catch up on sleep.

Keep in mind that even if you are planning your workouts around the nights you drink, you won’t make as much progress in the gym if you’re drinking heavily every weekend.

Drinking heavily once in a while probably won’t make much of a difference. But if your workout progress is important to you, keeping your drinking to a minimum is a good idea.

Wrapping up

If your goal is to lose weight, you can absolutely drink alcohol and still make progress towards your goals. 

Remember that the only way to gain weight is if you’re consuming more calories than you burn.

There isn’t anything magical about alcohol that will make you gain fat, other than the fact that it’s easy to drink too many calories of it.

Moderation is the key. On one hand, if you’re binge drinking every weekend and not making progress towards your goals, you might need to cut back to see the results you want.

On the other hand, you shouldn’t feel like you can never enjoy a night out with your friends. 

I hope these tips help and as always, if you have any questions, leave them below!