415: Drinking Alcohol and Counting Macros

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 415.

Hello and welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke, and this topic of drinking alcohol and counting macros is one that I've wanted to record an episode about for a really long time, but I'm finally getting around to putting my thoughts and ideas and research together into something that I hope will be really helpful in helping you make the decision about what role alcohol plays in your life, especially in your health and fitness journey. My job is not to tell you whether you can or should drink alcohol or whether you shouldn't drink alcohol. My job and my goal with this episode is to give you information to allow you to make an informed decision about your own journey, your own health and fitness goals, and what you want to do in order to reach them. 

Can You Drink Alcohol and Still Reach Your Goals? 01:48

So the question we will open up this podcast episode with is, can you drink alcohol and still hit your goals? And that is the question that I want to analyze and think about over this episode. And the answer may surprise you because it is probably not what you think. The first thing that I want to point out is that when it comes to alcohol, we tend to have this all or nothing mentality. And a lot of times people think, well, in order to lose weight, I have to cut out all alcohol. Or the opposite of that, I'll just fit the alcohol into my macros and it will be just fine. The truth is, is that alcohol has a real impact. I'm going to get into talking about how your body handles alcohol and how it impacts your body. And it's not just the calories itself. 

So we'll get into all of that into the episode, but this is not about judgment. This is not about, should you do it? Should you not? I really want to give you information so that you can make some informed decisions in your journey. Because what will never work is somebody telling you, don't drink alcohol. You can't drink alcohol. Or telling you, yeah, alcohol is no big deal. You can drink whatever you want. Someone else telling you whether or not you can or can't do something is never going to be the long-term solution. What I truly believe when it comes to your health and fitness journey, the answer to most of the questions we have about our health and fitness journey is education, learning about the thing, and then using that information to make informed decisions about how we want to live our life. So that's really what I'm looking to do. I'm not here to tell you which decision to make, but I am here to give you information to help you feel like you can make a really informed decision about what you want to do when it comes to your own health and fitness.

Alcohol as the Fourth Macronutrient 03:39

Let's start with the technical piece, and that is how alcohol fits into your macros. When we talk about macro counting, macro stands for macronutrient. It means nutrients that your body needs in large amounts. That's where the word macro comes from. Micronutrients are things your body needs in small amounts. These are like vitamins and minerals and then nutrients that your body needs in large amounts. And there are typically three macronutrients that we talk a ton about when it comes to counting macros. We talk about carbs, we talk about protein, and we talk about fat. And each one of those does slightly different things in your body, and that's when we're counting macros. We're counting usually those three macronutrients. 

But in reality, there's actually four technical macronutrients. There are carbs, protein, fat, and then alcohol is actually a fourth macronutrient. And we don't usually talk a lot about the fourth macronutrient because it is not an essential macronutrient, meaning you can go your entire life and never drink alcohol and be completely fine. Your body does not need alcohol to function in the same way that it needs carbohydrates, proteins, and fat. So usually we leave it out when we have the conversation about macronutrients, but technically it is the fourth macro. And each macro has a different caloric value associated with it. One gram of protein is four calories. One gram of carbs, four calories. One gram of fat, nine calories. One gram of alcohol, seven calories. So they all have slightly different caloric values, but you can tell that fats and alcohol have a little bit higher caloric value per gram, right? You have your seven calories per gram for alcohol, your nine calories per gram for fat versus four calories per gram for protein and for carbs.

Alcohol’s Caloric Value and How to Track It 05:33

But something that's very different when it comes to alcohol is that your body processes alcohol very different than it processes the other macronutrients because alcohol is technically a poison. It's a toxin and our body needs to take care of that toxin, so it prioritizes in metabolizing that toxin. And we'll talk about that as we get deeper into the episode, but that becomes really important when we talk about how it impacts your body. 

So to continue this conversation around macro counting and alcohol, if you do choose to count and include alcohol in your diet when you're counting macros, a lot of times the question is, well, how do you track it? Because if you've looked in a tracking app, oftentimes you'll have a carb goal, you'll have a fat goal, you'll have a protein goal, but most people don't have an alcohol goal, right? We don't have a goal amount of alcohol that we're supposed to drink every single day. So that means that what you have to do is we have to track that alcohol, those macros that are alcohol, we have to track them as something else. And typically, I usually have clients track it either as a carb and or as a fat. I really prefer clients to track it as a fat and you'll start to understand why when we talk about fat oxidation later on in the episode, but you can track it as either a carb or a fat. The reason that we don't track it as protein is because it doesn't do any of the things that protein does. And we want to make sure you're getting plenty of protein to be able to support your muscle building, to support muscle maintenance. And so we don't want to take away from the amount of protein that you're supposed to be eating. So that's why we essentially give it to carbs and or fat. 

Using a Tracking App to Account for Alcohol 07:09

So what you can do is, and some apps do this very beautifully, MacrosFirst is one that allows you to track alcohol very easily. When you scan the bottle or input it into the database, it will immediately recognize that it has alcohol and MacrosFirst actually has a little slider that allows you to select how much of it you want to track as carbs versus how much you want to track as fat. So it's very simple to track in MacrosFirst, which is the app that I usually recommend with my clients. But in general, you just have to convert the calories that come from alcohol, specifically convert them into carbs and or fat and then track it as such. And that doesn't take into account, if you have a mixed beverage, you may have alcohol in that beverage and then you may have other carbs and fat that are in that beverage too. So I'm just talking about how we track the actual alcohol because it is that fourth macro. It is a different macro and you have to take those calories and allot them somewhere.

So just quickly, the technicality of how you would do that is you take the calories that are from the alcohol and you divide it by four to count it as a carb, or you divide it by nine to count it as fat. Again, I love MacrosFirst because it makes it so incredibly easy and you don't have to do any of that math and you can just use the little slider bar. So really highly recommend MacrosFirst as a tracking app, especially if you're wanting to track alcohol when you're counting macros because it just makes it super, super simple.

Alcohol, Fat Oxidation, and Fat Loss 08:34

So that is the how to track alcohol if you choose to drink alcohol. But here is what the calories and the tracking, it doesn't actually tell you. So at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned that your body treats alcohol as a toxin, or it is a toxin, I should say, to your body. So because of that, when alcohol enters your body, your body prioritizes that as thing number one we got to attend to. And so what happens is you end up shutting down a lot of the non-essential systems in your body so that your body can focus its attention on clearing the toxin from your system. 

One of those things that shuts down during this process is fat burning, fat oxidation. So all of your fat burning is put on hold until your alcohol is cleared. And you have to understand, fat burning happens on a consistent basis, like all day long. It's not like you're just burning fat just while you're working out or just while you're sleeping. It's kind of an all day long process. But when you drink alcohol, your body stops doing that process. And the more you drink, the longer you drink, the longer you are holding off on fat oxidation.

So this means even if it fits into your macros, and you can fit alcohol into your macros from a numbers perspective, you are halting progress while your body processes it. So the more you drink, the longer that fat burning is paused. And the more often you drink, the more you are getting in the way of the actual fat oxidation that's going to cause you to lose fat. In addition to that, we all know that alcohol affects your decision making capacity. It lowers your inhibitions. It makes it harder to stick to your plan. It makes your decision making is a little bit cloudy. It also is usually combined with other high calorie, high fat foods. Most people are drinking beer with wings or a cheese plate with wine. And so you're having a lot of extra calories that you're eating. You're eating those calories. You're consuming the alcohol.

Remember, fat oxidation is not happening while that alcohol is being detoxed from your body. And so you're consuming all of these calories with a halt on actually burning any fat. So you can see how this kind of creates this feedback loop that isn't doing you any favors when it comes to fat loss. And then the more you drink, the more you tend to not care about your macros. The more you tend to not care about the decisions you're making, the more other things fly out the window. And we just don't make the best decisions.

Everyone knows you don't make the best decisions when you are drunk. And so you have the calories from the alcohol, which is pretty significant. You don't get any satiation from those calories. If you were to eat 300 or 400 calories a day, worth of food, you would get some satiation factor from that. When we drink our calories, we don't get the same kind of satiation. So you have these empty calories that you're drinking. Plus you're eating a lot of food usually with the alcohol. Fat oxidation stops. And you can just see how this is a whole cycle that is bad news bears.

Alcohol’s Impact on Sleep and Recovery 11:56

And then unfortunately on top of it, your sleep quality takes a major, major hit. And if you have any sort of tracking device, you have an aura ring or an Apple watch that you wear at night or any way that you're tracking your sleep, you will see a significant decrease in the quality of your sleep with alcohol on board. Alcohol disrupts your REM sleep. It disrupts your ability to be able to get into deep sleep. So even if you're sleeping for the same amount of time, the quality of sleep that you're getting is garbage during that time. And when we have poor sleep, you have elevated cortisol, which increases your hunger the next day. It puts a stop on recovery. We'll talk about training and stuff in just a minute. But when you have poor sleep, you have worse recovery from all the work that you're doing inside of the gym. And then of course, when you have a bad night of sleep, your next day is affected. You have more cravings, you have less energy, you have less ability to push hard in the gym. 

And then if you have chronic poor sleep, that's one night of sleep that you're missing out on.  But if you're drinking often and you have chronic poor sleep, you're going to have a lot of impaired fat loss regardless of trying to be in a caloric deficit. Unfortunately, sleep quality, especially as people get older, becomes one of those things that is like, we just have to try so hard to protect it. And alcohol just throws that out the window. I am in some Reddit threads with people who track their sleep via Aura and Apple Watch and some of these different devices. And there often is a question that gets put up in the Reddit threads that's like, what's the biggest change that you've made since wearing this wearable, this device? And hands down, every time that question is posed, alcohol is the thing that comes up. Because when you start tracking your sleep, you can see the direct impact that alcohol has on your sleep. And it's hard to ignore anymore. The numbers don't lie. And you can see those numbers side by side of days when you drink versus days when you don't. And so the number one thing that people say is when they have that wearable and they start seeing the data, they just naturally start drinking less because you can actually see the consequences of drinking alcohol in the actual numbers. 

Alcohol’s Impact on Muscle Growth and Hormones 14:11

Okay, next. I said I would talk about training. But again, when you put alcohol into your body, your body is dealing with a toxin. And so instead of mobilizing fat, it is dealing with the toxin. And instead of building muscle or repairing tissue, it is dealing with the toxin. So if you went to the gym that day, remember, muscle growth doesn't happen from what happens in the gym. During the gym, you're actually creating tears, microscopic tears in your muscle. You're actually damaging the muscle in the gym. The growing bigger, the gaining muscle, the gaining strength happens in the 24 to 48 hours post-gym where your body is repairing that muscle tissue and building it back stronger. That is not happening if you have alcohol on board. Because again, that is not an essential process. Your body does not need to do that. What it needs to do is it needs to deal with this alcohol, with this toxin. And so any muscle building is put on hold while your body detoxes. So you're literally undermining the work that you did at the gym that day or the day before. Protein synthesis is impaired. Your ability to recover is impaired. Inflammation increases. All of these things that are putting a hamper and putting a stop on the very muscle building process that you are trying to activate if you're trying to build muscle in the gym. 

If that wasn't enough, alcohol actually has an impact on your hormones as well. So alcohol increases ghrelin, which is the hormone that tells you that you're hungry. So it increases ghrelin, which is why a lot of times people tend to eat more when they're drinking, because your hunger hormones are actually activated. So it increases ghrelin. It decreases leptin, which is the satiety hormone. So you don't feel as full as you're eating. And that can even carry into the next day where you have the… Especially if you drink a lot and you have a hangover, a lot of times that stimulates them wanting to eat more the next day. So it just overall makes it a lot harder to stick to your calories and your macro targets. And it really is essentially empty calories. It's kind of like a soda in that it's not giving you any nutritional value for your body. There's no protein, there's no carbs, there's no fat, usually, oftentimes. There's definitely no fiber, there's no minerals, there's no vitamins. You're basically attributing and utilizing calories in your macro budget towards something that isn't fueling your body as well, or at all, really. And if you took those same calories and allotted them towards something that was more satiation, something that had more micronutrients, obviously that's going to be healthier for your body. So you're kind of choosing between using those calories for something that could actually help build your body for using them for empty calories in a liquid that doesn't actually provide any caloric value for you. 

Drinking and Fat-Loss Progress 16:59

Okay. So that's all the bad news bears. And I think most of us know that alcohol isn't good for us. There's a lot of research that has come out, especially recently, that talks a lot about how there really is no safe amount of alcohol. For years, we kind of thought, oh, you can drink a glass of wine, that's actually heart protective. The latest research is coming out and just saying, hey, it's a toxin. It is a poison for your body. There is no safe amount. So what does that mean for you? This is not me telling you you can't have a drink. This is not telling me that you can't have a glass of wine with dinner. It's not me telling you that you should never drink a beer or have a cocktail with your friends. I'm not telling you what you should and shouldn't do with this information, how you implement it into your journey. You can drink and make progress. I have had clients who have lost weight while having occasional alcoholic beverages. But it is important to understand the trade-off because there is a trade-off. There is a trade-off you have to be aware of. And if you're going to make the choice to drink, especially when you're in a fat loss phase, you need to understand what trade-off it is that you're making. Some women choose to include alcohol into their plan and drink occasionally. And on some level, you just have to accept a little bit slower progress if that's what you're going to do, because it is going to impact your goals. But there's a trade-off there. Maybe you're willing to have that happen. And then some people realize that the trade-off really isn't worth it from a health standpoint, or from a recovery standpoint, or from a fitting into my macro standpoint, and they choose to drink either less or choose to abstain entirely.

I think that there are some really important questions to ask yourself as you're making this decision about what you want your alcohol consumption to look like. Especially if hearing all of those things is bringing up the yeah buts in your mind, of wanting to push against some of the things that I'm saying. I think the first honest question to ask yourself is, why am I drinking? Are you drinking from social pressure? Is it habit? Do you actually enjoy it? Are you trying to relieve stress? Are you bored? Are you drinking because you actually want to or because you think you should? I think that's a really important question to ask yourself. Is this adding value to your life or is it just something that you do automatically without actually choosing it or actively making a decision about it? I think that question of why am I drinking is just a great question to ask ourselves. And then be really honest with the answer. 

The second question you can ask is, is this serving my goals? If your goal is fat loss and you are drinking three times a week, you are working against yourself. I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm not saying you can't make any progress, but you are working against yourself. You're making your job harder. You're making it harder to lose fat. And you might have to work twice as hard at the gym and with food in order to offset every single time that you're having that alcoholic beverage. 

Another question to ask yourself is, am I willing to accept the trade-off? Again, there is a trade-off. I want to be really clear with that. And sometimes we're okay accepting the trade-off. I have lots of things that I do that are suboptimal in my journey, but I am willing to be okay with accepting that it's going to be suboptimal. It's just important that I go into it with my eyes wide open. So are you willing to accept the trade-off? You're going to have slower progress. It's going to compromise your recovery. It's going to impact your sleep. It's going to be a little bit harder to adhere to your plan. Are you willing to accept that trade-off? You know, really honestly, sometimes the answer may be yes. And that's okay. Right? That's fine. But I really want you in that moment to make it a conscious decision of like, yes, I know there's a trade-off here and I am okay with making that trade-off. And making it a conscious decision versus making it just a default. 

Finding a Middle Ground With Alcohol 21:04

And then the last question I think is helpful to think about as you're making this decision is, what would happen if I didn't drink? Would you still have fun? Would you still be social? Is it the idea of not drinking really scary? That's a little bit of a red flag. What are you avoiding by drinking? Are you using drinking as a crutch? Or as a way to avoid negative feelings? Or just like we can buffer with food and we can have emotional eating, emotional drinking can be a real crutch as well. So what are you avoiding by drinking? And again, what would happen if I didn't drink? I think that's a really great question to ask yourself. 

Now the truth is you don't have to quit forever. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't drink at all. I'm just giving you the information that you can make decisions with. But recognize too that even if you go through a period of time where you're drinking less and really focusing a lot more on your health and fitness goals, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to quit alcohol forever or that you never can have a drink for the rest of your life. You can make those decisions on a week-by-week basis, on a month-by-month basis, on a year-by-year basis. You also don't have to drink every weekend or drink every night. There is a middle ground in there between never having alcohol again and including it daily or even weekly into your diet. 

I think that it can be really helpful to about drinking more strategically. Right, like utilizing alcohol in a way where it's a special occasion or it marks something special or a special event or things like that versus just habitual weekend drinking. I think there can be some balance that you can find there that still allows you to celebrate and enjoy adult beverages on special occasions versus having it be something that happens several nights a week or every weekend. There's a big difference between drinking one to do two drinks occasionally and drinking four plus drinks every single weekend.

Examining Your Relationship With Alcohol and Making a Conscious Choice 23:13

Now, if I'm being honest, what I see with my clients are the women who make the fastest progress are ones that often significantly reduce or even eliminate alcohol. This is not because I tell them to, but because they see the very real trade-off of what happens when they drink alcohol, of how it is the empty calories and how it impacts their adherence, how it impacts their body and it impacts their recovery. And, I think, again, if you don't have a wearable, I think getting a wearable and being able to see reflected in your data and in your numbers, scale weight as well as sleep data, can really help you to start to make that link that this choice that I make does impact my body in a multitude of ways. Again, that doesn't mean that you can't ever drink or you can't ever make that choice. I make suboptimal choices all the time, but I go into them knowing that it's suboptimal, knowing that there's a trade-off, knowing that I am making a choice that maybe isn't the best, but I understand and I'm willing to make that sacrifice. I think that is the most important piece when we are making decisions. 

I also think if this really triggered you and the idea of not drinking feels really impossible, that that is worth examining because I do think a lot of us use different behaviors, alcohol being one of them, to be able to cope with stress, anxiety, social discomfort. Some people use food, some people use alcohol, some people use phones and scrolling. Some people use buying things off of the internet. There are a lot of ways that some people use porn. There are a lot of ways that we will buffer, but we will try to avoid negative emotions, anxiety, stress, things like that. That is a deeper issue. I think identifying how we utilize substances in a way that maybe is not the healthiest for us and instead learning how to process those negative emotions, learning how to sit with anxiety, sit with the stress or the discomfort and be able to process that appropriately is really, really important. If the idea of not drinking just feels completely impossible, I think that that's worth addressing and figuring out why, figuring out what is underneath that and what you're trying to cover up with the use of alcohol. I really think sometimes having fitness goals, realizing how alcohol gets in the way of those fitness goals can really be a catalyst to addressing your relationship with alcohol. That might be uncomfortable to hear, but I do think it is important point. 

Experimenting With Less Alcohol 25:38

Now, again, it's not my job or anybody else's job to make your decisions for you, to tell you to drink or to not drink, but I do want to make sure you understand what's happening with your body and allow you to make a fully informed decision about what's worth it to you and what's not. I want you to make that decision from a place of awareness and not from a place of ignorance. To wrap things up, yes, you can technically fit alcohol into your macros, but the calorie count is really the least important part of the story because alcohol is a poison. It is a toxin and your body treats it as such. It puts all of its resources towards clearing that toxin and things like fat burning, recovery, sleep, all are hampered. It hampers your decision-making capacity. It changes and impacts your hunger hormones and that is all happening, whether you're aware of it or not. That's happening on the backside when you choose to have alcohol. You get to decide whether that trade-off is worth it and how often it's worth it to you. I think really that's the conversation that most people should be having with themselves. Do I have to never drink alcohol again for the rest of my life? It's how often is that trade-off worth it for me? My guess for most people, it is worth it less than they're currently drinking, unless you're not drinking very much at all. But for a lot of people, that trade-off is actually, it's not very worth it as often as you're doing it currently. And if you're somebody who is in a fat loss journey and you're struggling to make progress and you are drinking regularly, this might be a good experiment for you to try of cutting back on alcohol and seeing how that impacts your progress. Because I'm going to guess that you're going to a lot more progress with less alcoholic beverages in a week than you ever will with a lot. 

I hope this was helpful. I hope it gave you some questions to think about and ask yourself as you are making a decision about how alcohol fits into your life and into your health and fitness journey and hopefully opened your eyes to feel like you can make that decision with more information and more understanding about the consequences when you are making that decision. That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm Amber. Now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything.

Outro

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