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Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Alcohol is absorbed into the stomach and then broken down by the liver into acetate.

When acetate gets into the bloodstream, fat burning processes are called to a halt.

Most of the fats from foods in the bloodstream, then get converted into body fat. 

On top of this, acetate can easily be converted to body fat.

So, unfortunately, we are looking at a triple whammy against fat loss!

So how much alcohol can we consume before our fat loss stalls completely?

We’re often told:

“Drink in moderation”.

Unfortunately, the scientific definition of ‘moderation’ equates to: 

• 2 drinks for a male; and
  
  
• 1 drink for a female...
  
  

Now all of a sudden “moderation” doesn’t seem quite so practical, does it?

Here’s the good news:

You CAN go about fitting alcohol into your weekly calorie allowance so you can still lose fat, and I’m going to teach you how.

First thing’s first, track your alcohol:

This one’s a no-brainer. Beer, wine, spirits or whatever else you are drinking all contain calories. These calories need to be tracked.

The problem is most tracking apps will not account for the alcohol content in alcoholic drinks (only the added carbs and fats). 

But alcohol has 7 calories per gram, so we need to account for this.

The best strategy is to figure out the amount of calories in the drink - for example a beer might contain 150 calories - then take these calories away from either carbs or fats.

To take them away from carbs you want to divide the 150 calories by 4 because carbs have 4 calories per gram. Now we know we have 37 fewer grams of carbs to work with today.

To take them away from fats you do the same thing but divide your 150 calories by 9 because fats have 9 calories per gram. Now we know we have roughly 17 fewer grams of fats today, from this one beer.

So which is best - subtracting from carbs or fats?

If fat loss is your main goal, you want to reduce your fats throughout the day to make room for your alcohol.

Remember how the byproduct of alcohol, acetate, signalled to the body to store fats floating in the bloodstream as body fat?

Well if we consume fewer fats throughout the day, there will be less fats in the bloodstream to convert.

So we will gain less body fat!

Now this is only relevant in the context of our total calories.

Making sure we’re in a deficit over time is more important than our exact macro split.

You also don’t want to go below your minimum recommended fats intake of around 0.6g per kilo of bodyweight.

So I would pull from your fats until you get to [your weight in kg’s x 0.6] then pull the rest from carbs. 

Either way - never subtract from your protein, and you’re good to go!

On that note - to make it super simple - rather than macro-tracking that day, you can simply calorie-count and hit a protein target.

If your macros are:

Protein: 160g

Carbs: 250g

Fats: 60g

Calories: 2180

Then you’d simply think “my calorie target is 2180 so if I’m going to have 6 beers which are all 150 calories each (900 calories) now I’ve got 1280 calories to work with for the day, and I need to hit 160g protein”.

To create even more room for certain events you can Macrocycle:

Macrocycling means you’ll consume a little bit less calories on some days when you don’t really need the calories as much, in order to have much more calories to work with on the days you want them.

In the example above, rather than consuming 2180 calories every day of the week (15,260 calories across the week) instead I could “save” some calories for the weekend by going:

Mon-Fri: 2000 calories per day

Sat & Sun: 2630 calories per day

The NCF Fat Loss Macro Calculator calculates your Macrocycle for you!

What about alcohol’s effect on building muscle?

This one’s much more cut & dry.

Alcohol decreases muscle protein synthesis, which means it directly reduces how much muscle you could grow after a workout.

Whilst the body is processing alcohol, no gains are being made.

So if you want to be the biggest, bestest bodybuilder you can be, you probably want to separate your workout away from your alcohol consumption.

That might look like getting our workout in early morning, then starting our drinking late afternoon. Or better yet - have a rest day!

Although training hungover the next day won’t feel amazing (you could have another rest day too if you plan your weekly training correctly)…

It would be marginally better from a muscle-growth perspective than training then drinking straight away.

Here’s the bottom line:

If losing fat and building muscle are your goals, you need to understand that drinking will have some implications on your results.

As always - the devil is in the dosage.

At the end of the day, life is for living and nutrition should supplement your life, not control it.

Even if you end up consuming alcohol and food to the point where it pulls you out of a deficit, the truth is one or two days spent in a surplus will not ruin weeks/months of fat loss progress. It’s a small blip in the road that you can easily make up for later.

Not with cardio. Never with cardio.

Now if you’ve got a holiday coming up where you know you’ll want to relax and have a few drinks pretty often:

Why not take a diet break and come back up to maintenance over the holiday?

Any time spent at maintenance will, by definition, maintain the progress you have made.

PS we don’t do restrictive, monotonous meal plans around here, so we would never tell you what to drink.

But, in case you were wondering what the most calorie friendly options were…

That’s all covered in the Alcohol Cheat Sheet which you can access within our private community Fat Loss Hacks For Frustrated Dieters.

In there we post helpful info just like this, every single day. And yes, it’s free to join.

I’ll see you on the other side!



Coach Vaughan Burrell.