Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 162: The Alcohol Dilemma, How Does Booze Impact Fitness (Performance, Fat-Loss, etc) with Jordan Lips

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

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Hey guys, Danny here. Excited to have you with me for this episode of the podcast. This is a guest appearance of mine on my good friend Jordan Lipps podcast where optimal means practical. This was an incredibly popular episode that we did together where we talked about alcohol. And this is something that I've been referring a lot of you guys to recently. So I actually got the audio file from Jordan to share it here. So you guys can hear our discussion about alcohol as it pertains to performance, fat loss, body composition, and as how and how we as coaches recommend it and kind of work with our clients on managing it because it's something that's kind of ubiquitous and

finding the right balance is really, really hard. So sit back and enjoy this really kind of well-rounded conversation about alcohol and fitness. Danny, what's going on, man? Welcome to the show. Not much, man. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, appreciate it. We've had you on before. It was a good episode. And this is a topic that I know you and I have DM'd about. I've heard you had some strong opinions on it on Instagram and kind of messaged you and thought, you know, this is definitely something I wanted to talk about on my podcast. And, you know, nobody better to have it on than somebody who's willing to ruffle a couple feathers, you know?

Yeah, I am. And you kind of nailed it, I should acknowledge my existing biases. I do have a strong opinion about alcohol consumption and alcohol as it pertains to performance, wellness, longevity, because I am very familiar with the negative and deleterious effects of excessive alcohol consumption. Alcoholism is something that's quite present in my family. And so not to play the small violin boo-hoo story, simply to just say like, look, I do have a bias. I have seen what this stuff can do to people at the literal ultimate level, like the worst things outside of killing you that this can do. I've seen it all. And so I definitely have a bias. I'll try to check as

much of that as possible so we can have a kind of balanced empirical discussion about it. But I do think it's something that we have culturally and societally given way too much of a pass, even in the health and fitness space. So I can't wait to talk. Yeah, and I think to lay some groundwork,

I think, and maybe you might slightly disagree, or we would exist on a different end of the continuum or a different part of the continuum here, but I would at least begin with saying that I don't personally have anything against the idea of alcohol in an inherent sense, in an absolute sense, in any amount at all, personally as being part of a potentially overall fine and healthy life. I would think we'll both come to a similar conclusion that there's probably no amount that is inherently healthy in any way, but there's also not in an absolute sense where you have one drink and all of a sudden it's going to undo all the other healthy habits

you have. And that, you know, neither of us are saying that you should never, ever, ever have a sip of alcohol, but we're definitely here to provide some context. And just the things that we'll kind of talk about today, we're here to discuss the potential health implications. We're going to talk about fat loss and muscle gain or body comp implications. We'll talk about a little bit like what you said, which I feel is the most actually most interesting part of this discussion is like why and how we've gotten to a point where

we as a society seem to give this weird pass, this pass to alcohol almost across the board, especially when we compare it to some other similar or not really similar vices that we could, you know, we can discuss and how to potentially incorporate it into your life in the least harmful way, right? It's like, our job is to provide that information. Your job is to make an informed decision after that, so to speak. Yeah, I love it. And I actually do think we'll agree quite a bit because despite how hard lined I am with some of my stances, I do tend to agree that while any amount of alcohol presents itself as unhealthy, I mean, you quite

literally drink alcohol because it's bad for you. The reason you get turned up is because it's not good for you. It's like a low dose poisoning of your body and your body responds by getting a little funny. And that's the whole point. But I do think to paint anything with such a broad brush that you eliminate it entirely with the many benefits it has socially would be disrespectful to what it can be when included positively. So I think we'll get to some good points. Cool. Let's start with some health implications. I think health itself probably needs defining, but I'd like to talk about it just strictly from a health standpoint, not a body comp standpoint, not a fat loss standpoint. And talk about, we could begin

with the fact that it is a class one carcinogen, and maybe you could talk a little bit about what that means. And then maybe give some reference points of other carcinogens and put some things into context for the listener. Yeah. So a carcinogen is basically something that increases your risk of developing any type of cancer. And certain carcinogens are particularly, let's say, inclined to cause specific types of cancer. So for example, tobacco ingested orally in the form of like chewing tobacco is much more likely to cause oral cancer than tobacco that is inhaled or tobacco products, I should say, that are inhaled, which are much more likely to cause lung cancer. So we look at most nicotine-containing tobacco products like cigarettes and we go, hey,

those are cancer sticks. Those will kill you. Those are stage one carcinogens. You put a big old fat lip dip in your lip, you're probably not going to escape getting some gum disease or oral cancer. If you smoke your whole life, it's not to say you'll only develop lung cancer, but if you wanted to, that would be the best way to do it. Alcohol is also a stage one carcinogen and it can cause a variety of different cancers. I shouldn't say it can cause, it can increase the likelihood or it's highly correlated with an increase in certain types of

cancers, as well as different organs, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But the few types of cancers that alcohol seems to be closely correlated with that made me as a personal trainer have to go, holy crap, I want to take note here, were actually not beyond the liver stuff, but breast cancer. It seems to be that alcohol consumption in women is particularly correlated with breast cancer. And so alcohol has the ability to be carcinogenic in a variety of tissues, but it does seem to disproportionately affect certain organs, which we'll talk about, and be more likely to cause certain types of cancers, breast cancer being the one that most stood out to me, given that I work with predominantly female clients. I'm glad you brought that up because

that to me, I'm not saying it's the most meaningful. I think that we could get into, and I'd like to get into discussion maybe, like you said, about specific organs that it's affecting in certain ways. But I think the general idea of understanding this is just, it's a class one carcinogen. This is just not a good thing for you. Like you said, the literal reason that you are feeling tipsy or drunk is because it is a poison. This is a response on the body makes when you ingest alcohol. And so I, you know, I'd love to hear it, but I'm gonna let you go in a second. It's like maybe some of the actual organs that are being affected in a certain negative way, but also like, how is this not enough? And maybe I'm jumping the gun on that because I find it's the most interesting discussion, but I think it's just, even with cigarettes, it's so blatant. It's

on the package. It's, it's, I mean, there, there is nobody who goes into buy a pack of cigarettes for the first time, who's not fully aware of what they're doing. How it maybe i'm jumping the gun but i have to just go there at this point because of the comparison that was made we have two class one carcinogens and we have one that is like so unbelievably normalized and we have another that's so unbelievably demonized and where how did we get to that point well they actually kind of flipped roles at some point historically you know there was a violent prohibition against alcohol in America in the 1920s and earlier than that, too. But cigarettes were incredibly normal, considered to be sexy. It was the cool thing to smoke. to the point where you had a larger religious, what would now be a right-wing movement early

on in the 20th century pushing back against alcohol. Cigarettes were extremely popular. Everybody was smoking them. At some point, somebody figured out, holy shit, this is bad for people. It's killing them. Let's make sure that we put labels on this stuff, which is why if you buy cigarettes in the United States, you'll see the Surgeon General's warning on them. Let's make sure that we put labels on this stuff, which is why if you buy cigarettes in the United States, you'll see the Surgeon General's warning on them. I just got back from Mexico and I bought a couple of cigars in Mexico because I wanted to just buy cigars in Mexico. And the lady opens the box and on the lid of the box, there is a huge photograph of a guy on a ventilator with a hole in his throat. This will be you. They don't mess around over

there. They actually label all of their junk food as high fat, high sugar, high calories. This will cause you to get fat. So certain countries regulate things differently. But cigarettes and the regulations around cigarettes are something that we've become very familiar with. It's very normal. You will not see cigarettes in conventional media. You will not see advertisements for conventional cigarettes because there have been regulations around this stuff. Alcohol was able to kind of escape prohibition in large part due to the fact that I think Americans just took a little bit of a chill pill and moved a little bit more away from some of those hyper-conservative values that really were championed in the early 20th century, late 1800s, early 1900s. And things were a little more

liberated. Things were a little more free. Alcohol kind of took the place as this sexy, cool thing to do. Alcohol advertisements and alcohol lobbies have been... Let's start with the advertisements, but alcohol advertisements are ubiquitous with things like sports, with things like movies. You see them constantly. You see them all the time. And then from a special interest standpoint, while there are certainly lobbies and special interest groups that for decades have been pushing very hard to try to maintain some of the market hold that cigarettes have. It pales in comparison to what the alcohol lobby has been able to do, not just to keep

alcohol from being largely, I don't want to say largely unregulated, but regulated to the point where it's basically available for purchase anywhere you can buy any grocery item. And in addition to that, some of the, let's call them alternatives, and we'll talk about this, I'm sure, are usually victims of some of this spending. So the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which we've all seen those ads, if you're in your early 30s, mid-20s to early 30s, you probably remember seeing commercials. This kid walking home from school finds a bag of weed, smokes it, life down the toilet. This ad was brought to you by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Well, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America was brought to you by the alcohol lobby.

So these things are... There's multiple levels to them. But the reason why we have seen cigarettes become synonymous with poor health, synonymous with bad health decision-making, we generally, societally, I don't think, I mean, this might be mean to say, but I think most people look down on people who regularly consume cigarettes as having a really bad habit that's probably going to kill them. And unless you're like a full-blown alcoholic, people generally don't think about people who drink in heavy amounts similarly, even though if you look at the long-term health implications, consuming cigarettes and alcohol in high amounts over the course of

your life is highly correlated with a plethora of different things that are going to kill you. Yeah. To play devil's advocate, as much as this isn't a discussion that I get pretty heated about, it's like, what you're going to hear is somebody's going to be listening to this podcast. They're going to hear everything you say. And they're going to say, actually, there's actually some decent epidemiological research that says it's actually a U-shaped curve and no alcohol is actually like the super low end of alcohol, meaning like abstinence is actually more highly associated with things like cardiovascular disease than something like moderate alcohol consumption, like one to three drinks per day. that curve. It's a U-shaped curve. If you're listening, not watching, you know, U-shaped curve means that the very low, or let's say a J-shaped curve at the very low amounts, you're going to see higher risk, higher risk of let's say cardiovascular disease. And that as you drink a little bit more, we see that risk drop off down to like the lowest, meaning some

people are going to cite, oh my God, the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease is associated at least epidemiologically with like one to two drinks per day. And then obviously as that number goes up to three, four, five, six, seven drinks per day, we see that risk go back up. Why might we see something like this U-shaped curve with alcohol associated with cardiovascular disease? Sure. Yeah. It's funny. My dad used to always say this because my dad made wine for many years professionally. It was a side gig of his, but he had a multi-thousand case winery. And so this was something that I grew up around. Alcohol was never stigmatized in my family. My father made alcohol available to me.

Hey, do you want to sip? Do you want to try? So I didn't have the conventional relationship that many kids developed with, I need to get my hands on this. My parents won't let me touch it. And he would regularly reference the French paradox, which is effectively the epidemiological stuff you're talking about here, which was, hey, how come the French paradox, which is effectively the epidemiological stuff you're talking about here, which was, hey, how come the French, they have such a reduced prevalence of cardiovascular disease? It's got to be the fact that they drink this wine. Obviously, this epidemiological data is parsed out through studies that are quite literally put together to look at this. But there are things in multiple different alcoholic beverages that could be

beneficial for your heart health. For example, antioxidants in grapes, generally good for you. It might be the laziest argument in the world, but I would just simply say, I think one to three glasses of grape juice would probably be just as good at reducing your instances of heart disease as one to three glasses of wine because the different polyphenols, phytochemicals, antioxidants in these darker colored beverages, they give us a lot of unique benefits from a nutritional standpoint. And a lot of people don't get dark berries, dark fruits in their diet. So I think the benefit of a lot of the alcohol consumption from a heart standpoint, at least with wine, comes from the fact that it's

made from fruit. Also, look, if you're pairing it with meals, and these meals may or may not be slightly biased towards being more heart healthy, like, okay, well, I have alcohol with fish and I have alcohol with these other dishes. I think it's really too hard to truly parse out what actual cause is and why these drinks may at small dosages may be better than zero. Because I'd want to know what are the people who are doing zero alcohol? What are you eating? What are your movement behaviors? And so I think, yes, if you want to really look hard and you want to really point, look, look, look, this is a rationalization and a justification for how a few drinks might actually be good for you. I would say, I guess that's okay. I think it's fine. I would be more inclined to point to the other things in the beverages than the actual alcohol itself that are causing this effect. And again, just to reiterate,

I don't think one drink a day is particularly horrible for anybody. So I think we're talking about something here that's setting the bar pretty low. Yeah, I agree. I think when we look at this, again, this U-shaped curve where somebody can say, hey, having drinks, having one to two drinks outperforms having no drinks, we have to fall back on some of the limitations of that anemiology and its inability to really apply causation. And when we look at that, I laugh because there's such a confounding variable. There are several. I'd say one of them is the fact that when you have a large group of people who abstain from alcohol, what you do is you've also now lumped into that group people who were once potentially alcoholics and have done damage to their body and are now abstaining.

But now they are in the group with the people who have never had a drink before. And it really muddies that water. And so a lot of research has picked apart this epidemiology of saying, you know, there's a whole enough percentage of people here that have already had damage to their body that is muddying up this long-term risk factor, this ability for us to kind of assess how much risk they've, they've, you know, how much of their risk has gone up in their lifetime. And we also see like a couple of things you had mentioned antioxidants. I think that the big one is the resveratrol that's in, that's in grapes. And like you said, dark berries and dark chocolate and

not just for anybody out there who's sitting there nodding their head like getting your resveratrol from wine is the most ridiculous fucking thing that you've ever done in your life it's like the most inefficient it's like you're trying to get your protein from like bcaas or something it's just like a ridiculous ridiculous thing not only is there like this is this comes i laugh because you and i both, you know, we work with Legion and like one of Legion's big things that they don't use proprietary blends because one of the reasons that you can use a proprietary blend is you don't have to tell how much of something is actually in the product.

It's like, that's like you telling me there's resveratrol, which by the way, again, it's an antioxidant, it's a wonderful antioxidant that's in alcohol or the, you're drinking the alcohol to get resveratrol. Like you're not telling me how much is in there. You're also not telling me what my alternatives are. Like have a piece of dark, like I don't know the exact metric of how much of a resveratrol is in red wine versus how many berries or dark pieces of dark chocolate you've had to eat.

But I'll tell you, it's a ridiculous trade for you to get your resveratrol from red wine. And then the last would be somebody might say like, oh, you know, the blue zones zones they drink, you know, the blue zones, they there's, you know, prevalence in the Mediterranean area of people drinking and they live, you know, a really high percentage of centenarians, all this stuff. Like, first of all, I think that that's been a little bit debunked. They were not alcoholics. These people had like one drink per day. And so all of the, all of the reasons that the people in the blue zones live to be a very long time are not going to be undone with the alcohol. They're going to be outweighed with all the good stuff they're doing.

And also, you had mentioned, like, if you wanted to pick apart how the alcohol might be helpful for longevity in these blue zones, I would probably point to the fact that these were extremely social and extremely family-oriented and purpose-oriented and community-oriented. and extremely family-oriented and purpose-oriented and community-oriented. These are people who are having dinner with their family. And there's so many confounding variables as to why these people might be living longer and drinking a tiny bit. It's probably outweighed by all of these amazing community and society benefits that they were benefiting from. And you're spot on. I think the blue zone has become one of the most bastardized.

It's a way for people to go, see, look at how these people act. Well, that's what we need to act like. Look how they ate. That's what we need to eat. Look what they drank. That's what we need to drink. It's like, no, it's the confluence of all of these things paired with the fact that they're very social.

They live meaningful family-driven lives. Like that's what's keeping them fucking alive long. It's not the fact that they ate a higher fat diet. I've literally seen people put a spin on the blue zone shit to sell anything under the sun. But what it really comes down to is people who are generally more active, generally more family oriented, who get together and do social things and eat a pretty damn good diet and occasionally have some alcohol. It's like, okay, so the picture of balance, this is what you're telling me, but sure. It was definitely the glass of red wine that let these people live to be a hundred years old. Anything to justify our consumption habits, right? Yeah. If you were trying to like make the blue zone diet, like your diet would just be a

diet that consisted of mostly whole foods and not too many calories. Like there's almost no other similarities across the board. When you look at the blue zone diets, like after we're going into the blue zone diets here, but if you look at them, like you go from like the Japanese who ate like mostly potatoes and rice, and then to like a Hobza tribe to the Mediterranean people in Greece. And then the Inuits, the Inuits ate almost no vegetables at all.

Like, and so you have this massive wide range thing. I promise, you know, we circled the back around to like somebody trying to say, well, there's blue zones they drink. First of all, they don't all drink. Second of all, the ones they do, it's being outweighed a million fold by the good stuff that they're doing. Yeah, low prevalence for obesity to generally active people, you know, reduced risk of all

cause mortality from lifestyle stuff is going to bump those averages up to a point where we can look at these people and go, wow, look at what they all do, but you nailed it. They don't all do the same shit. They all do a surprisingly different version of what is effectively not eating in a calorie surplus, selecting mostly whole foods and being family oriented and pretty active. Yeah. So we're going to, we're going to, at some point give a little bit of a, I'm going to put it on you, throw you under the bus here, put you on the spot of like the how much component. Cause I think what we've established at this point is there is no amount of alcohol that is on a physiological level beneficial for health. There's probably an

amount that's not so detrimental that if factored into an overall healthy lifestyle and maybe done in social settings, and we'll go through some of those ways we can make it less bad is can be fine. Uh, and one, we'll get to the, how much components of that's what you're waiting for. I promise you we'll get there, but I do want to talk about fat loss, body comp, uh, muscle gain and kind of like, you know, where we can draw the line on like how much is okay before some of these things are happening. So let's take a look at just a fat loss for a second and say, how does, let's start with the question that I really don't like that I don't care too much for is the question of like, how do I track alcohol? Let's just get that out of the way real quick.

And then we'll kind of talk maybe about how fat, how it might affect fat loss as a, as an endeavor. Sure. Like, I mean, if you're a macro tracker and you're like, okay, I want to track my alcohol, you know, there's a few different ways to do it. Some people will just say, oh, track it as carbs. Some people will say, oh, track it as fat. There's other people that will say, oh, track this many calories of it as carbs, this many calories of it as fat. But truth is, alcohol is going to mostly yield its calorie from carbohydrate in the form of sugar. So things like wine are going to yield a lot of calorie from carbohydrate, but the alcohol itself has seven calories per gram. So if you use a tracking app. Is that even helpful, by the way? People are like, oh, alcohol's seven calories per gram. Nobody is calculating their alcohol calories in grams of ethanol. Like nobody is,

oh, it's seven calories per gram. I saw somebody, I'm not going to name names. It's like seven calories per gram. So it's more than carbs. No, no, no, no, no, no. Your alcohol is a certain amount of calories and it's a certain amount of protein and it's a certain amount of satiety. And I don't care if you track it as calorie, uh, as carbs or like you said, it is probably more accurately carbohydrate intake. Well, like nobody is doing this grams of ethanol converted to seven calories per gram. And that like, just you would agree. It's probably like, I don't know. That's a question by the way. That was not, I'm not assuming, but that seems to be like a question that gets more attention than it serves. I mean, I'm lazy. So if I'm going to

track something, I'm probably going to track it as carbs. And I know that's like the degenerate lazy way to track it. But look, most of the non-alcohol calories in alcoholic beverages aren't coming from dietary fat. They're coming from hops. They're coming from agave. If it's tequila, they're coming from grapes, if it's wine. So for me, I'm looking at a large glass of beer, 180 calories. Okay, cool. I'm going to track that as carbs. If I wanted to go crazy, I could do something else. But I got a shot of spirit, like a 1.5 ounce shot of tequila. It's 110 calories. I'm going to track that as carbs. I got a glass of champagne, 120 calories. Well, that's made from grapes. And the alcohol is made from the fermentation of the sugar. So for me, just from a tracking standpoint,

I will generally have those calories tracked as carbs. If you are somebody who's like, okay, I have this macro and it's at a particular premium. And if I like carbohydrate, for example, and I always hit it early, can I track this alcohol as fat? I guess, but it doesn't change. You have bigger issues. You have bigger issues of a need to be perfect with each of your macros, if that's the dilemma you're having. Yeah. You're literally trying to juggle machetes on a tightrope because you're also trying to work something challenging like alcohol into an extremely constrained eating behavior that, quite frankly, is going to cause you more problems than it's going to solve. But most of these alcohol products, beverages, start with a carbohydrate that's fermented into its eventual But most of these alcohol products, beverages start with a carbohydrate

that's fermented into its eventual end product. So for me, basic high school education goes, all right, it starts with carbs. It ends up as carbs and alcohol. I'm going to track it as... I'm going to track it as... It ends up as... I'm going to track it as mostly carbs. So for the macro people out there, that's how I would do it. Yeah, cool. And I don't disagree with that. I think a lot of people can also just do fine to go into their tracking app, track what they had, which you might say is one ounce. I know that on Chronometer, I'll do like tequila one ounce and I won't ever look at what it... The app does this for me. So I'm just going to go ahead and put that in. And you're sure that MyFitnessPal has so many user generated things that sometimes you'll see glass of wine is 150 calories, but there's no macros on it. I would look for one with a check

mark. You don't actually have to do most of this math most of the time. If somebody's asking, which I am, a direct question of, hey, how does alcohol affect fat loss? Where does your brain go? What are some of the things that you would want to discuss with that person? That's a great point. And so the first thing I would say is let's talk about how alcohol affects fat loss indirectly, because we know how it's going to affect fat loss directly. When you hear the term, what affects fat loss directly, We're mostly talking about calories, right? Like that is the primary driver of body fat reduction or body fat accretion is going to be where your calories at. If you're taking in too many calories, you're going to gain body fat.

If you're eating less than your energy expenditure, you're going to lose body fat. We already went over the fact that alcohol yields a considerable amount of calories from carbohydrate and alcohol. So if you drink a lot, you're going to incur an additional caloric burden. So that's the way that alcohol directly affects your body composition. Indirectly though, the list is like a mile and a half long. It makes your sleep considerably less effective, right? It's going to kneecap your REM sleep, especially if you drink in high amounts. I can't give you an exact amount of alcohol, at which point your REM sleep diminishes. But I remember when I first found out, I was surprised by how small the amount was. Additionally, alcohol will reduce your inhibitions.

This is why when we drink and we go into social settings we feel a little bit looser we feel a little bit more confident perhaps you're more likely to approach that person at the other end of the bar who you find attractive and those same you know inhibition reducing qualities are also going to make it more likely that you gravitate back towards the chips and salsa, that you maybe have an extra scoop of ice cream. So there's somebody who's diet focused and you're very disciplined. You can think of the alcohol in the same way it acts as a social lubricant and makes it easier to do things you might otherwise be intimidated by. It's also going to make it easier

to deviate from your plan. It's going to make it easier to deviate from your diet. So those are one of the two things I would say most come to mind when I think of indirect. Obviously, if you're drinking enough that you're dehydrated, that's going to affect your fat loss. If you're drinking enough that you wake up hungover, that's going to affect your fat loss in that you probably will find it harder to train hard the following day if you're training, or you'll generally just feel like crap, which makes it hard to keep your movement up and you're neat where it generally would be. So the list of ways that alcohol affects your fat loss indirectly is substantially longer. But I will say this, having worked with a lot of people, I don't even know how many. I usually say thousands because it's got to be over thousands. And I've been located in Sonoma County, which is the world's hub of wine production.

This is where you go if you like wine. I have worked with a lot of people. And the number one behavior, and I know that this is, again, lazy. If somebody says, hey, I'm really having a hard time losing fat or losing weight, or my body isn't changing as rapidly as I like, and I'm exercising, and I think I'm doing well with my diet, the number one behavioral intervention that I find works really well is saying, well, can you reduce your alcohol consumption? Like, well, how much are you drinking? Oh, I drink. Okay, well, cut that out. And almost immediately, people start to see change, not just because they're removing, you know, let's say 300 to 400 calories a day from alcohol that was coming from a glass,

a big glass of wine or two, but really because they train a little better. They sleep a little better. They're able to make better food decisions. So I do think that from a fat loss standpoint, alcohol is really tricky. And it's something that I would generally recommend if people are comfortable with abstinence, that they abstain from alcohol while trying to lose fat. And some coaches would say, that is going to lead to binging. That is going to lead to restricting. That is going to lead to binging. That is going to lead to restricting. That is going to lead to X, Y, Z. And I might agree. I think that really depends on the person.

But if somebody's goals are really important to them, and they're willing to abstain from alcohol, and they're capable of reintroducing it without going into a full-blown binge, I think that's the way to go. Yeah, I don't disagree. Actually, I'm actually very, very interested and happy that you did. You said nothing about alcohol inhibiting lipolysis. I'm so happy you said nothing about that because I think that there's so many people out there who a lot of coaches out there who learn first about the mechanism by which alcohol shuts

off fat burning and they that's the end of what they learn. They turn off the YouTube or wherever they learn this on. And they immediately go make a post on Instagram. Well, drinking alcohol shuts down lipolysis. You don't burn fat while your body's digesting alcohol because it's a poison and your body deals with it first. And that's all true. Your body drinking alcohol, your body notices that as a toxin and wants to get rid of it first and metabolizes that first, it stops lipolysis. It inhibits fat loss for the time in which your body is digesting and metabolizing the alcohol. That is true, but no, who gives a fuck? This is comes down to, I think Lane did a video on this once it comes down to like single digit calories at the end of the day that you are

burning less. And so I'm really glad you didn't say that because it really doesn't make a difference. It's the indirect factors, the indirect, uh, effective alcohol. It's the fact that this is hundreds of calories that are not satiating that these are hundreds of calories that if you are staying within your calories have now displaced foods that likely have a better society and be potentially more helpful distribution of macronutrients. Um, you know, more nutrition, more nutrition, right. You were sleep, which again has its own cascade of indirect and direct benefits. Um, listen, I put this on a weekly, uh, check-in for one of my clients. I was wondering what they would say. Okay.

What would be some potential downsides of, of how, you know, alcohol might affect fat loss. And somebody wrote drunk. You want cheese fries hung over you does too. And I was like, this is like, put it in such a good way of like inhibitions are down. You've now had non-statiating non-nutritious calories. You probably now are more likely to go over calories on average. Not everybody. Some people are too great in fitting this in and they have a wonderful life. That is so true. But more people than not

are now a little tipsy, probably still really hungry. Cause those calories didn't do anything for satiety. You get cheese fries or insert whatever here, and then you're hung over again. Your meat is down that day. Your training is worse. You have the other cascade of poor sleep. And what do you get? You get pancake. You get some, you know, our society's like, oh, you get carbs to soak up the alcohol, you know? And you're like, okay, well, carbs must mean a stack of chocolate chip pancakes. It can't mean, you know, a bowl of oatmeal or something. All right. So it never, it very rarely turns out to be a good thing. And I do think that the direct effect of all inhibits, like all, I think that this is like massively overstated. I couldn't

care any less about that. You telling your client to, to consider abstinence in the attempt to, you know, better, better perform in terms of fat loss has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the overall adherence and they're feeling better and they're more satiated and they're getting better sleep and they have better workouts and they're, you know, uh, having, you know, more proclivity to get up and move throughout the day, et cetera. And so I just think that that you, you put that really well in terms of like leaving that out and focusing solely on the indirect or mostly on the indirect. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social

media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, I try to generally stay away from any transient physiology adjustments that happen as a byproduct of training or nutrition because they're transient. And so if somebody goes, yeah, well, dude, standing on the vibration plate increases your growth hormone like crazy. I'm like, yeah, but then you get off, you know, or like, what about doing this immediately post-workout? It's going to skyrocket your insulin 400 times normal. Yeah. But then it's going to come down.

Let's talk about that because that's actually, when we talk about not to cut you off, but you're on a really great track with this, like, um, short-term response physiologically might not represent long-term changes. Um, well, let's talk about how it might affect muscle gain. Cause I think what we see, you know, almost across the board, if you only focus on the physiology is that it's pretty detrimental at first glance. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think if you go back to the indirect, we'll start with the indirect. It's like, okay, if you're drinking regularly and that's affecting your sleep, that's going to affect things like testosterone and hormone, which are important for muscle growth. It's probably going to affect your training quality, which obviously is things like muscle growth and muscle protein synthesis.

I haven't seen anything convincing enough to make me go like, this is going to completely castrate your gains, for lack of a better term. You're just effed. I do think it's very possible to drink alcohol and build muscle. But I don't know how much alcohol you're allowed or going to be able to drink before it starts to affect the efficiency of your muscle building process. I also think most people, when they want to gain muscle, they want to gain it while gaining as little fat as possible. It's very rare that a client comes to me and says, I'd like to do a full-blown bare-mo dirty bulk. Most clients come to me and say, hey, I'd love to build some muscle and I'm comfortable with gaining as little fat as possible. So if we can, let's do what many people refer to as a lean bulk. And so if somebody comes to me and says, yo, I want to build muscle,

I'm going to say, okay, cool. Let's do 200 to 500 calorie surplus. We're going to give you 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight at the minimum, as high as one gram. If you're a total psycho, we can go above that, but it's probably going to rob you of some fuel that you can train and recover with. But we have a framework here. And I do think you have more leniency for fitting alcohol into that framework. However, let's just talk about that 200 to 500 additional calories. If we're talking about the small amount of additional calories we might add to somebody's total daily energy expenditure to put them in a small surplus, and I give you two glasses of wine that's yielding effectively sugar and alcohol, I don't think in the long run that is going to be optimal fuel for building additional tissue. We're training hard. We might be better sourcing those carbohydrates from more nutrition or more nutritious options, maybe even some healthy fats, maybe even some additional protein.

But you put two people on the same diet where the macros are mostly the same, and one guy gets 200 to 500 calories extra from alcohol and the other gets it from bodybuilder tuna and rice out of a Tupperware. I don't think that at the end of the day, those two guys are going to be like massively far apart, but I put my money on the person whose additional calories are coming from fuel that's more easily to be used for recovery, more easily to be enhancing recovery, less likely to be affecting you in all these shitty indirect ways. So I think when I talk about alcohol and its negative implications for people's fitness, it's much more obvious to me that that's going to be

harder on somebody looking to lose fat than it probably is on somebody looking to lose muscle because those negative physiological changes with regards to hormones like testosterone and growth hormone that come from shitty sleep, those, those are also transy. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I don't disagree. I think that I think if you Google, uh, you know, again, if you're watching some YouTube video, like, you know, how alcohol kills your gains, you'll hear a decrease in muscle protein synthesis. You'll, you'll hear a decrease in testosterone. You'll hear a conversion of testosterone to estrogen. You'll hear a decrease in growth hormone. And I, and I think that this podcast that hopefully has an overarching feel of like alcohol is probably not great. Um, but now

we're making two separate points of like physiologically in a small scale, these things aren't messing you up a ton. It's not like you drink two drinks per day. And that is going to decrease MPS muscle protein. This is where you can't build muscle or it's going to tank your testosterone where you have no libido and you can't make any gains or you're, you have no, you make no growth hormone and you, you know, transition, you convert all this testosterone to estrogen. It doesn't really happen like that way. You'd have to, you'd have to be drinking a lot for that to happen and a lot consistently. But I do think, again, if we're thinking of like these two hypothetical scenarios, if you're having somebody who's like, uh, you know, some of the, Hey, alcohols are really affecting my gains.

I bet you it's because your training is shit. Your sleep is shit. You know, your diet isn't as potentially nutritious or as adherent to your calories because of some of the other things that we've talked about in terms of lack of inhibitions and lack of satiety and nutrition. It's not going to be because you're like, man, I'm drinking two drinks a day and my testosterone is down 300 points. That's not probably what it is. But you and I both, again, thousands of people, when alcohol is an issue, it is not because of the inhibition that stops lipolysis. It's not because your testosterone

is tanked. It's because of these indirect factors where alcohol is making the overall adherence to whatever you're trying to do more difficult in an indirect sense. It's fucking up your sleep and it's taking up too much of the space that you could otherwise use for more nutritional foods. I mean, it really does come down to that. From a fat loss and performance standpoint, it's the indirect ways that are affecting you, not necessarily these small scale physiological adjustments, which I do think are important when we talk about what we started with, which is things like, okay, what are the carcinogenic impacts of alcohol consumption?

What is the effect of alcohol consumption on the liver? Like, okay, if you're chronically elevating some of these key liver enzymes that when they're chronically elevated can lead to things like cirrhosis. Well, those increases are transient, right? And they go away, but you do it every day for 20, 30 years, then that starts to cause a problem. But when you're talking about muscle growth, it's substantially less impactful. So I'm glad we parsed that out. I think that's good. Yeah, I definitely think you're right. There's a difference between I'm having a couple drinks. It's not affecting my gains so much directly physiologically, but maybe if I'm doing that every day for 40 years, that it's having health implications down the road for me,

for sure. I have a couple of like some rapid fire-ish questions, but we do need to kind of address the elephant of the room of like where we might draw the line and how much is okay. And then we can move into a discussion of, are there patterns or ways about including ways to include alcohol that are less bad? And so let's address the first one of like, you know, it's going to be difficult for us to give you guys a specific recommendation, you know, to go home and be like, well, I can just have two drinks, Jordan said, I'll live forever. And so just how might you go about kind of answering that question with a bit of nuance there? Yeah. So I think first you have to acknowledge that because drinking is social, a lot of our drinking habits and behaviors are modeled by the people we grew up around and

the people that we drink when we're drinking or the people we're with when we're drinking. And so the first thing I would say is forget what the people around you do. Forget what their limits are. Forget how they interact with alcohol and what their relationship is. And be honest with yourself. Is one drink at the end of the day enough for you to get the effect you would like? If one drink is enjoyable, it gets you a small buzz, that's what I would stop with. I would really try to use alcohol in the lowest dose to get the desired effect. Truly, I would. I would say, what is my desired effect here? Do I drink alcohol because I enjoy the taste? Do I drink alcohol because I enjoy the buzz? Do I drink alcohol because it helps me detach and escape from something in my

life? You have to get to the actual reason why you're consuming any drug. As a regular consumer of cannabis, when I am consuming a lot, a lot of times it's because I'm using it to escape from some bullshit in my life that I'm not confident confronting when I'm sober. And I've had to check that at multiple points over the years of my cannabis consuming. I'd just be like, hey, that's too much. It's not affecting you negatively because you have a high tolerance, but this is not a healthy relationship with the substance. So whatever substance you're using, as a non-psychologist, non-doctor, non-expert internet guy you shouldn't listen to, whatever substance you're using, I think it's important to get very clear as to why you're using it.

And I think it's additionally important to acknowledge your relationship with that substance. Don't use as much as your friends use. Don't use what you think is normal, what you think is good. Ask yourself, what's the desired effect? And what is the lowest amount of the drug that I can use to get that desired effect? I think that that is a safe and effective way to look at alcohol consumption. Personally, I find that that seems reasonable. And then I think you have to ask yourself, okay, if you really love it, you're like the people that live where I live, where wine is ubiquitous with meals, and they truly, truly love it. Ask yourself, am I willing to make some of those health trade-offs? And if the answer is yes, then

you're going to fucking die anyway. So what the hell? I don't really care. If you go, I want to have wine with every meal because I live in Sonoma County and I have access to the best wine. If I go to the grocery outlet, I can get better wine than most people can get anywhere in the world. I can enjoy some of the best produced, finest wines in the world right in my own backyard and I love it. And I've gotten into the habit of enjoying it with meals. And I'm okay if that affects my health negatively. Then you might raise that limit. But if at any point you realize you're using the substance to escape, you're using a substance to buffer any emotional trauma or any emotional tribulation in your life, whether it's freaking caffeine, cannabis, alcohol, pre-workout, whatever, I do think it's worth reevaluating your relationship and having a regular checkup with anything you're consuming. And I don't know if that's helpful per se, but that's generally what I work with when I talk to clients or the framework

that I work with when I talk to clients about how they can have this in their life without letting it sidetrack them from their larger goals. Yeah. I love that you use the word trade-offs. That's a word that permeates through my content and my coaching and the word choices I would use with clients. At the end of the day, it's not our job as coaches to choose. It's our job to help you make an informed decision and to maybe struck, you know, I I've been going to, that's funny. I've been going to not going to pull this into this category, but I've been going to therapy for like a year now or so. And I, my initial goal in life, my initial goal in life was to be a therapist and, or a psychologist or work in some field in this regard. And I'm, I'm on the other end of it now. And it's the first time I've been with therapy when my parents got divorced when I was young, but not really seriously now as an adult, more seriously. And I love the structuring, the conversation component of walking somebody through their own decision-making that I've almost, I'm obviously on the other end of that at this point, but I'm realizing that it's a lot of what we do as coaches,

not the same. We're not psychologists. Just saying, being able to help your client talk through this discussion of what is worth it? What are the trade-offs? What is the realistic downside? What are your realistic, real-world anecdotal upsides that you enjoy? Like you said, you live in Sonoma County. You're like, man, I'm going to capitalize on this. I love the taste. I like getting a little buzz. Okay. Guess what? You have three drinks a day increases your risk ratio for some health disease later down the road. Probably. Yes. Maybe, you know, sleep isn't as great. Okay. You're, you're like, okay, here's the list of downsides here, the list of upsides you get to choose. Now it's all I, all I want for people

on this earth. And I could start sweating because I feel so seriously about this just to be making informed decisions about what you enjoy and living life on your terms. And what is asking yourself, what is, what is my best life? What does that look like? Does it look like not drinking ever? Does it look like drinking occasionally when I see a buddy or I go out for a beer with my dad, or does it look like a glass of wine every day with dinner or every, every meal? Cause I live in Sonoma County. So I think hopefully you're taking from this podcast that like, Hey, this isn't helpful for muscle growth, but in small doses, probably not super detrimental. It's not helpful for fat loss. It's actually probably more harmful for fat loss than it is for muscle gain. The indirect ones really do add up. I mean, if you're out there

and you're struggling with adherence to fat loss and you're drinking one to two drinks per day, I would, I would put all my money on red, red being that you would do much better without that. Totally. And so you get to decide, hopefully listen to this podcast on some level of like, what are the trade-offs? What is it giving me? Like you said, why am I doing this? What are the pros? What are the cons? And you can make a better, more informed decision. Yeah. And I recently read a book from Anna Lemke out at Stanford called Dopamine Nation. And she is a psychologist and she does specialize in at Stanford called Dopamine Nation. And she is a psychologist and

she does specialize in working with people with addictions. And it's a phenomenal book. I can't recommend reading it enough. For those of you who like scientific, I want to call it pop science in the same way we have pop psychology. But it's really digestible scientific information about how these dopamine reward feedback pathways in our brain work and how addiction works and how addiction takes place and how these roots really dig deep and how it can be so hard and so challenging for us to break free from these habits. One of the things that she recommends for recalibrating your relationship with a substance is a trial period of abstinence, even one day, seven days, 30 days. And so something else I would recommend to anybody who's

trying to figure out where and how they would like alcohol in their life is do a trial run of abstinence and see, does not drinking make me feel better? I cannot tell you the number of clients who have said, hey, I want to try a dry December. I'm going to try not drinking. Me and my friend group are going to try it. This was without my influence. And I've gone, okay, cool. I think that's phenomenal. I think that will help with your fat loss goals. I'm 100% on board. I would rather assure somebody that they're making the right decision than be like, you shouldn't drink alcohol. I will occasionally say, I don't recommend clients drink while trying to lose fat. I think it's to your point, it just makes it so much harder than

it has to be. But the number of clients who come back to me and say, wow, when I took a month off drinking, that made a really big difference in how I felt. And I don't think I'm going to go back or I think I'm going to go back and have a much lower intake level. I think that that's worth doing if you're using any substance, even like pre-workout or something. Yeah, caffeine. Oh my God, caffeine totally happens. Get rid of your afternoon double espresso and realize that your shitty sleep was really because you were having that double espresso and you that your shitty sleep was really because you were having that double espresso and you might not need that afternoon espresso if you didn't have it. And then you got better sleep. So then you didn't need it. And then you didn't have it. And then you got

better sleep. And then, and so I think that what you were saying the whole time I wrote down caffeine in my notes, as you were talking, I was like, Oh my God, it's exactly what happens. I'm not, I don't know. Abstaining from caffeine is actually an interesting topic, but even just in this context, potentially just like limiting and having certain parameters around it. Like you said, testing where it really sits in your life, how you really feel about it with this period of absence. That's actually super cool. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that any amount of introspection and any amount of abstinence or that gives you the time to really sit with, okay, how do I feel about this? Do I feel better? Do I feel worse? It gives you

a lot of clarity. And on the flip side, if you remove alcohol from your life, let's say you're a regular drinker and you remove alcohol from your life and you feel horrible, that is the sign of a dependency that has formed. And the same thing is true of caffeine. If you remove caffeine from your life and you're like, oh my God, I have a crippling headache and I feel horrible. Welcome to drug addiction. It's real. It affects all of us. We're all operating effectively with the same neural circuitry. It's been influenced by our genetics, by trauma, by a variety of different things, sure. But most people who have a substance dependency, when they stop using that substance, won't feel good for a little while. And so I think there's

so much to learn from taking a break or weaning off or working back, whatever, with all of the different substances and drugs we work with, including the drug that nobody wants to talk about, which is our fucking cell phone. But I digress. Another day for another day. All right, let's talk about some of the tips that we can give to limit its negative effects, make it less bad. What are the things I can do to make this less bad? What are some of the things that jump out to you? We can go back and forth on some of that's helpful. So my first thing, if you like the way alcohol makes you feel, but you don't have a preference for the kind of alcohol, I would say stick to like things like tequila, vodka, spirits, liquor, stuff that you can take in shop

form that's lower on the sugar spectrum, just because sugar, even though, again, the dose makes the poison, large amounts of sugar aren't good for you either. And so if you're drinking two glasses of wine a night, and that's got 30 grams of sugar in each, I often tell clients like, oh, you drink two glasses of wine a night. They're like, yeah. I'm like, okay. So you drink a soda a night. And they're like, no, soda is bad for you. I'm like, well, it's the same amount of sugar, but this sugar also has alcohol, which is a carcinogen. So you drink cancer sugar. How's that feel? No. But seriously, if you enjoy the way it makes you feel and you're not particularly inclined to be like, no, it has to be Chardonnay. I have to have a glass of Chardonnay in the summer

and I need my Pinot in the winter. If you can just do spirits, I would do that. That's my number one tip for people who would like to drink, but body composition is important to them is stick to the lower calorie stuff that fucks you up quicker. Yeah. I think an obvious one is limiting additional calorie mixers. And like you said, sticking to just spirits that kind of goes without saying of like, mom could probably get a diet soda with this instead of the actual soda, or I could just get it straight on the rocks. Honestly, I find that I found in my later years, one of the, one of the best ways for me to limit my total alcohol consumption is just to make it taste worse for me to get like, you know, like a, like straight or mixed with, or with water or obviously just club soda or something and get rid of the lime. Like,

don't give me anything that tastes remotely good. You know, I, I, it's not that I don't at all ever enjoy the taste of certain alcohol, certain wines. That's not, I'm not over here saying that, like, I know people love their love, the taste of certain things. Okay, fine. But if you're someone who's not particularly in love with it and you're trying to like, okay, I want to have a drink or two, maybe get a little buzz them out from friends, whatever. Try making, it's like, it's like making your food taste more bland, you know, there's like one potential strategy in limiting, you know, calories. It's like, don't put 10,000 different sauces on there. It's like, maybe don't get the, the strawberry daiquiri, you know,

maybe get your like tequila on the rocks, like extra disgustingly dry, you know, like, and then see if that limits your alcohol intake. Yeah. I mean, I was just at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun. And if you ask for alcohol straight, they look at you like, what, excuse me? You do not want this blended into a sugary confectionery delicacy that will keep you coming back. No, I just want to poison myself as fast as possible. It's really, that is quite possibly the most impactful tip for enjoying alcohol with the lowest deleterious impact on your body composition. Something I would love to hear if you,

if it was, I know you had recently read a book on alcohol and that was kind of, you had spoken up after reading that. Obviously, I know you had strong opinions beforehand, but that was like an impetus to start talking about it a little bit more recently. I'm wondering if there was a discussion on the difference between binge drinking in high quantities in one sitting versus spreading it out. And so I'll have clients who are like, I don't drink during the week, but I like getting tanked occasionally or some variation of that sentence. Like, is there a difference between having 10 drinks in one night or one drink over 10

nights? Do we see a difference? Yeah. I think that you don't have to have a super good grasp on the physiology of how your body metabolizes alcohol to acknowledge that pounding back 10 drinks in one sitting is going to be substantially more challenging on the liver than spacing those 10 drinks out across seven days. than spacing those 10 drinks out across seven days. What we do know about binge drinking is a lot of binge drinking, or I would say a lot of alcohol-related deaths, a lot of alcohol-related incidences, a lot of alcohol-related violence is clustered around binge drinking or high amounts of drinking. I don't know what qualifies something as a binge. I do think from a scientific literature standpoint, there is a definition for a binge, but I think that's basically pointless. Because when you ask somebody in college what a binge is, it's going to be very different from

what somebody who drinks rarely would describe as a binge. But if you're getting, I like the phrase you use, tanked, hammered, that is going to be pretty bad for you in almost any situation. It's going to be very challenging on the liver. It's going to hammer your sleep, your productivity. It's probably going to massively disrupt your digestive system because alcohol is very inflammatory. I don't fancy myself as a gut health bro, but from a gut health standpoint, alcohol is really

fucking bad for your gut health. And it bugs the shit out of me that everybody talks constantly about X, Y, Z. This is bad for your gut. This is bad for your gut. This causes leaky gut. You might have leaky gut. I almost never hear these people talk about alcohol, which is probably the worst thing for your gut. It really is inflammatory. It's bad. So when you bring it in in really high quantities, you are taxing all of those systems that I already mentioned. And I have the book with me right here. And there is one particularly interesting figure in here, if I can find it. I'll circle back to it eventually. But alcohol in high amounts, like two drinks a day,

increases. So when you start, I don't have it, but I remember it. One drink a day is going to increase the likelihood of cancers in the mouth and throat. Two drinks a day is going to increase the likelihood of cancers in the digestive tract. Three drinks a day is going to increase the likelihood of cancers in the mouth and throat. Two drinks a day is going to increase the likelihood of cancers in the digestive tract. Three drinks a day is going to increase the prevalencies of cancers in the smaller, large intestine, liver, some of the filtration equipment that we have. And so if you know that on a daily basis, going from one drink to three drinks disproportionately increases the likelihood of the carcinogenic impact. What the hell do you think happens when you drink 10 drinks?

You know what I mean? These are really dangerous effects that you're probably playing with. If you can drink in a way during the week where it's spread out and you avoid these large-scale binges, I think that's probably a good thing. And, you know, without getting on my soapbox, like people kill people when they drink, you know, they make really bad decisions when they drink that much. People get behind the wheel of a vehicle and people literally die every 15 seconds because of somebody getting behind the wheel when they're tanked. You know, it's not a joke. Like it's not something to, you know, you can assume that I would never be

that person who would do that. But I'm pretty sure every single person, not every single person, I actually know a surprisingly high number of people who drive under the influence and think it's no big deal. But a lot of people who have killed somebody behind the wheel of a motor vehicle would tell you that wasn't what I set out to do that day. And so binge drinking can lead to some really negative societal impacts or really negatively impact your relationships. And the meme of, I got drunk enough that I texted my ex, like, hey, maybe we can avoid some of that stuff too. So I think binge drinking is worse than spreading it out personally. Yeah. I think that again, we have indirect and we have direct, we have physiological, we have practical, we have life implications. And I think

that there's a laundry list. I was doing some research earlier before this podcast, and I found a lot of similar facts and figures about the alcohol-related incidents almost entirely being linked to binge drinking episodes, which I saw the figure, it was like four drinks in an hour for women and like five or six for an, in an hour for men or something like that. Maybe not an hour, maybe it was two hours. I think it was two hours. And then I thought I saw that figure and I was like, for some people that's binge drinking for some people that's Thursday afternoon for some people that's a pregame. And so there's like way across the spectrum of like what that means for, for binge drinking. But there was also, um also a fairly certain tone of this is going to be worse. And so I think people hear that argument of like, okay, 10 drinks over 10 days or 10 drinks in one

day or 10 drinks in one incident or 10 drinks over the course of 10 incidents. Calorically, it's the same, right? I mean, we're talking calorie balance, which is always happening. And it's like calorie cycling. It's like if I have 5,000 calories today or 1,000 over five days, it's the same, but it's not the same for alcohol. Having one or two drinks. We're applying that framework of how we look at a pizza that we've all done as back road track. Would you rather have one slice of pizza every day for seven days or seven slices of pizza on Saturday? It's like, yeah, except pizza doesn't have a toxin in it that when consumed by amounts literally kill your fucking

brain. Like people drink enough in college that they die. Like people die of alcohol poisoning on the reg. So binge drinking, I think it's just substantially worse than binge eating when you're looking at, okay, what is the impact of binge drinking compared to spacing your drinking out versus what is the impact of binge eating versus spacing your eating out. While binge eating disorder is very serious and not to be taken lightly, generally speaking, people don't binge eat and then have all of these negative effects permeating into the lives of the people around them as well as alcohol. Yeah. I think some of the other ones, just to kind of rapid fire, I want to be respectful of your time. We're coming up on an hour, would be like, listen, drinking with food, probably better than drinking on empty stomach,

drinking further from bed, definitely better for sleep and drinking close to bed. This idea of a nightcap is a terrible idea. If I drink, if Jenna and I will have like a glass of wine with dinner, just very infrequently, I'll usually have it like while I'm making dinner and finish it maybe during dinner, um, instead of like this, Oh, like after dinner nightcap. And so that can be something that's going to help your sleep maybe further from your workouts, obviously prior to your workouts, probably a bad call from a performance perspective. And immediately post training is probably bad from a muscle protein synthetic perspective, uh, limiting additional calorie mixers. And then I liked the one of like the last two that I would say you can add, if you

have something on your mind, it's like drinking with friends and family and making sure that these if this goes back to like why you're drinking it's like you know there's probably uh there's probably a slightly confounding benefit to like these blue zones where like if you're having a couple of drinks with friends and family and having a good laugh and there's some of that like um like oxytocin or tocin or whatever that's like that's going around that you're feeling good there's some of that, like, like oxytocin or tocin or whatever, that's like, that's going around that you're feeling good. There's like other things going on. That's probably better than like, I'm drinking alone, playing Call of Duty, getting hammered, you know, texting my ex-girlfriend. Those are probably different effects on the body, at least in the sense of like, you could be doing something also partially beneficial for you. I

mean, the research on like this, this togetherness, this feeling of family and community is really, I mean, we know this as a fact that it is good for health and longevity. And so if those are some of the scenarios in which you're choosing to drink, that that probably might be better on average. And then also the last thing would be to accept that these have negative effects and fate and understand them and make these informed decisions, like tips to limit the negative effects of alcohol in your life. For me, it was like, well, first acknowledge that they have negative effects on your life and consider if you're okay with that you know yeah totally uh something i'll add ear of the dog a common hangover remedy of like i'm hungover i'm gonna kick my day off with a

bloody mary um that doesn't do shit it's like you're just getting a little bit more drunk again which makes the pain of the hangover a little bit more manageable. Hangovers are real. They're caused by a variety of different things. How we experience them is highly unique. Although most people will generally feel things like dehydration, lethargy, headaches, you should always drink water when consuming alcohol if you can, because it gives you the opportunity to dilute some of that blood alcohol level. If you can, a tip that I give to clients is if you're going to be drinking a lot, try to have a non-alcoholic beverage in between every

alcoholic beverage. It's really simple. It's just quite literally going to dilute the shit in your blood so it doesn't concentrate as fast, which will probably be better for you in the long run. B vitamin deficiencies, particularly thiamine, vitamin D1, are common in people who drink a lot. And encephalopathies like Wernicke's encephalopathy, which is a type of what many people used to refer to as wet brain, It's usually caused by massive amounts of binge drinking and it's treated with vitamin B1 deficiency or it's treated by supplying a deficient person with vitamin B1. So be aware that alcohol does have an impact on your drinking or alcohol does have an impact on how we metabolize and absorb

certain nutrients. So if you drink a lot, it may be worth supplementing with just a B vitamin complex as well. Cool. Awesome. We're going to put a pin in there. Dude, super fun conversation. Basically don't ever drink or you're going to die. Can't build muscle, can't lose fat. And so this is TLDR sum it up if you just kind of hopped into the episode here. So no, just kidding. Why don't you tell everybody, tell everybody where they could find you if they're living under a rock and they don't have you in their, uh, in Instagram Rolodex just yet. Yeah. So you guys can find me on Instagram at Danny Matranga. That's the best way to, to kind of connect with me. All roads kind of to my other content are linked there. I also have a podcast,

Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. Jordan has been on, I think, twice now. And it's very similar, I'm sure, to the content you're getting here. Mostly evidence-based, practical looks at how you can make your life a little bit healthier, a little bit better in the performance category without making massive sacrifices. I try to appeal to the normal person in the room, not just the neurotic body composition obsessed personal trainer. So it's all there. Cool. Excellent, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, no problem.