Weights and Plates Podcast - #36 - Alcohol, Body Fat, and Breaking the Bad Habits

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Alcohol is fun. We don't need to tell you that. It also tastes good! We all know the reasons for drinking it, but what about not drinking it? Is it possible to drink alcohol and be strong and lean? Coach Santana and Coach Trent tackle this question in today's show.   The biggest takeaway is planning. Just like you should plan the rest of your day of eating around going out to eat, you should plan your eating (and training) around your alcohol consumption. If you know you're going to the bar with some friends to knock back a few cold ones, then go a little lighter on your calories for breakfast and lunch. Don't plan a heavy workout the day after you hit the bar, either!   CT Fletcher "I Command You to Grow:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHiKDa4ip_Q   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Hey, what's going on? Not much. It's like 10 o'clock there, isn't it? 9.15 on the East Coast. Well, I'm not on the East Coast. I'm on Eastern Time, which by the way, I have, so, you know, I get a lot of folks that come in for one on ones here and I'm in Chattanooga. So I'm in East Tennessee. I get folks in from Nashville,

Nashville, the greater Nashville area, you know, Franklin. Um, I also get folks in from Alabama sometimes and Georgia and almost all of them are central time. Because if you go, I don't know where this, where the changeover happens, but if you go just West, just a little bit from here, it goes to central time. And so it always, it fucks me up every time people I'll just be sitting around twiddling my thumbs and be like, uh gonna show up so yeah just another just another reason why um time zones are bullshit i agree so today we've got a new thing happening i am drinking whiskey on this podcast as am i that's not new for you. It's new for me. I am drinking, I just bought this.

It's Evan Williams Bottled and Bond. Look at you. It's a, I guess, I feel like I needed an everyday drinker because I drink so much. No, it's pretty good. 100 proof, hot, but with a little bit of water and a little thyme out in the air. It tastes pretty good. It's kind of nutty. I am drinking Kirkland's 19-year single malt, which is basically Alexander Murray 19, except, you know, if you get the Costco Kirkland's brand, you pay, I paid $68 plus tax. I think the Murray is in the hundreds, mid hundreds somewhere. Wow. I didn't even know Kirkland made whiskey. Oh dude, you don't,

you don't get booze at Costco. Well, I don't go to Costco. So there's my, there's my problem there. Yeah. The Kirkland's brand stuff is good. The tequila is good. The whiskey is good. So is this like the same juice? Is one of those situations yeah pretty much relabel yep oh wow okay same juice just a relabel uh because it says distilled at alexander murray all right hey not bad not bad well my thing about bourbon in particular is um i've gotten spoiled you see hanging out with all these strength coaches that are into bourbon. I don't drink very often. So whenever I do pull out the whiskey, I usually want something really nice because, you know, if I buy a $60, $70 bottle of whiskey, it's going to last. And so, yeah, I'm used to, like, you know, drinking, like, Blanton's Willet.

Right. I have some Willet rye that's fantastic. I almost pulled that out, that's i gotta i gotta get that for special occasions because i can never find it that's pretty good stuff man it's that's the best stuff in my opinion i'm a rye fan but yeah you know weller weller 12 all that stuff well antique 107 um but yeah i was like i need a whiskey that i can pull out if you know if there's a group of guys come over to the house like i don not going to pull out my Will It Rye for everybody. So I need kind of like a good value whiskey that I can pull out.

And then I don't mind drinking on a Tuesday evening. And yeah, this fits the bill. Not bad. I hear you, man. So anyway, so that's the reason why we're talking about this right now. Is not just because it's good. We're also talking about it because today we want to talk about alcohol and training and alcohol and diet and body fat. Cause I think they're all wrapped up in there and we need to talk about it some more because there's some things to say. I just had a client who should go nameless. I was just

talking to yesterday. He had COVID a week and a half ago. So he took off last week because he's feeling pretty wrecked. Okay. So I was checking in with him. I was like, how are you doing, man? And he's like hungover. I'm like, oh, okay. So he went out on kind of like a weekend trip with his, uh, with his wife and, uh, I guess got hammered over the weekend. I was like, oh, I thought you had COVID. So good for him. But anyway, uh, that's to say that like, okay, so now that I'm programming for this guy, I'm going to have to make some considerations about, uh, what, you know, the loads he can tolerate and the volume that he can tolerate, not just because he was sick, but also because I know like, okay, the guy's coming off a weekend of, of partying, uh, I'm gonna have to adjust some things in his program anyway. So that's a good

starting point for us. Yeah. So alcohol's fun. Uh, we're both drinking it right now. You know, I just had to point that out. I think it's in my e-book somewhere, my little mini e-book that I need to put on the website already. No, I didn't know you had an e-book. Tell me about this. Yeah, no, I have a little short manual that I wrote a while back.

I've edited it over the years. I just need to put it on the website. But what was I going to say? Yeah, it's fun. It's a fun drink. That's why we like to do it. It tastes good. Although, you know, some people argue that it's not about the taste, but it is what it is. So alcohol, from a nutrition standpoint, we kind of treat it as a macronutrient,

even though it's technically not, but it contains seven calories per gram or milliliter. One gram equals one milliliter, just FYI. So, it's pretty close to, you know, the caloric density of fat, contrary to the popular belief that alcohol is all sugar. You know, you hear that all the time. Oh, it's, you know, it's just sugar and alcohol, because sugar is apparently, and everything bad must be sugar. Where we've been the last 20 years, but, you know, I digress. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, like, right, if it was all sugar, it would be four calories per gram. Not seven.

But it's not a seven. It's almost double. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's closer to a fat people. That's why you can, you know, accumulate a lot of calories from alcohol. You know, in small amounts, it could be beneficial to your health. It's known to raise your HDL levels. It used to be that, oh, a glass of red wine because it had resveratrol in it. It could improve your HDL. That's your quote-unquote good cholesterol.

The last time I read up on this, they said that it didn't matter the type of alcohol. Now, this was five years ago. Maybe they changed their mind again. Remember, the problem with peer-reviewed research is that, you know, they're not controlling for all the lifestyle factors that affect these things. You know, lots of different things affect cholesterol levels. Inactivity affects cholesterol levels. There's no way to monitor that reliably. Right.

Diet. We know they way to monitor that reliably. Right. Diet. We know they're not measuring that anymore. You know, there was a time where they did measure diet when institutional review board rules were a lot more lax in the 60s. They would do prison studies and, you know, just they'd take people that were institutionalized and study them. You can't really do that so easily anymore. You know, there's acceptable ways to do it. It's just extremely expensive and, you know, unpopular.

So a lot of our nutrition studies and nutrition recommendations are based upon, you know, what people say they eat and not what they actually eat. So you got to be careful with this stuff. But I do believe a drink is probably fine. You know, maybe it's good for you. You know, there's certainly data on that. So it reminds me of, I mean, you've heard the joke, right? It's like the officer's like, how much have you had to drink tonight? And you guy looks him in the face and says, two beers.

While he's holding up a full hand of five, you know, so he says five. Yep. Two beers, officer. Right. Yeah. So that's been my experience in practice. why he's holding up a full hand of five you know so he says five yep two beers officer right yeah so yeah that that's been my experience in practice you know hanging around other people and watching their behavior and then also like working with clients uh when people go out and drink and party they say that they had one thing oh i had a mixed drink and i had a beer oh and i had some chips and queso and it's like uh but what actually happened is they had three mixed drinks and I had a beer. Oh, and I had some chips and queso. And it's like, uh, but what actually happened is they had three mixed drinks and they had two beers. Cause they're not counting the one

they drink at home. And then, then the one that they got when they first got to the bar and then they got the chips and queso. That was right. But then also somebody ordered, you know, the like apple fritters or whatever. And they had a couple of those too. Of course. But they didn't eat it. You know, they ate them, but they, they didn't order them. So they forgot about it. Right. And this is, this is the way that things typically go in my experience when we're talking about alcohol. Yeah. And then they turn around and say, you know, must be the sugar because it was all the sugar. Apple. Those damn apple fritters. Apple fritters are just all sugar. You know, there's no fat in them, just sugar, you know, right. And the alcohol is sugar.

But they drank vodka that night, so it must have just been the apple fritter. Right. Yeah, I drank vodka. It's clear. There's nothing in here. Yeah, there's no sugar. Or rum. Rum's sweet, so they assume that it's because of the sugar, but it has nothing to do with the sugar.

It has to do with the way that it's distilled and whatnot. There's actually no extra. There's no added sugar in rum. It's just a sweeter alcohol. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so kind of describe what it is and how it can really add quite a bit of calories, you know, like, you know, a lot of people think, oh, I'm drinking liquor, so therefore it's better than beer because beer is going to get me fat. Well, actually, you know, a shot of liquor, which is an ounce and a half, which is 45 milliliters, is equivalent to a 12 ounce or 360 milliliter beer can, assuming it's four to 6% alcohol. We're not talking about IPAs or high gravity, just, you know, your standard

beer or a glass of wine is five ounces. So it really depends, you know, how much volume you want in your one drink, you know, and what you prefer, right? But there's no difference between a shot and a can of beer calorically or a glass of wine, right? Other than, you know, beer's carbonated, so you feel a little bit fuller. So, you know, maybe people feel fuller and then conclude that therefore, you know, they're getting fatter because it's beer and not because it's 15 beers, you know? Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Well, so let's, yeah, let's, let's put that in context a little bit then. Um, okay. So let's, uh, let's say like one ounce of vodka, right now, what about, okay. So now before I do this, it's a, is it one ounce or one and a half ounces? One and a half ounces.

One and a half ounces, right, is in a shot. Okay, but before we talk about the calories with vodka, let's talk about what about the proof? Does that matter? So yeah, that's the next thing, right? Okay, one and a half ounce or 45 mil shot of liquor assumes it's 80 proof. 80 proof, right, yeah, so 40%. So yeah, so like I said, with beer, 15 beers is a different caloric situation than one beer. 120 proof is a very different caloric situation than 80 proof. Obviously, as the number of drinks goes up, the number of calories you consume go up. As the percentage alcohol by volume goes up,

the number of calories you consume goes up because if there's a greater ratio of alcohol in that liquid, then you're going to have more calories. That means more mils of alcohol, which means more calories, seven calories per mil, right? Makes sense. Makes sense. So if you take a, you know, let's just, you know, let's do an example. If you take a 45 mil shot of 80 proof, that's 40% of that 45 is alcohol, right?

Yeah. Without even doing any math, let's say that you're getting barrel proof, which is 120 proof, which is 60% alcohol, right? Mm-hmm. So now you have 60% of alcohol in the 45 mil so clearly 60 of 45 mils is greater than 40 of 45 mils which means you're getting more calories right yeah makes sense to me yeah so it's like probably one and a half times more calories right so if there's 130 calories in an 80 mil shot which which I know off the top of my head, then you're getting probably 195 calories, you know, in 120. So yeah, so it's a difference

in 130 calories in your 80 proof and 190 calories in your 120 proof, right? And then anything in between is going to be somewhere in between calorically. But, you know, whiskey drinkers, you know, get a lot of them that listen to our show probably, are probably drinking between 80 and 120. You know, sometimes you'll find a good whiskey for 130 tends to be, I don't want to say rare. Most of the higher proof ones just tend to be in the 120s. You know, sometimes I'll see stuff over 130. And I think of Stagg Senior from back in the day. I mean, but now you're talking about rare, you know, expensive whiskey that, you know, just buy off the shelf. So, you know, if you want to just use round numbers, you're looking at 130 to 200 calories. If you're, you know, drinking whiskey that ranges from 80 to 130, right?

Right, yep. And you're not just having one. We know you're not just having one. I have one or two. I'm a dietician. I'm an outlier in terms of my eating habits. I typically have one or two. It's a special occasion or maybe a weekend.

Not every weekend. I might have three, you know, but most people aren't just having one, especially most people that hire us. Remember, we're doing all the hard work that the average person doesn't want to do, and that's in the weight room and also with our food, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, let's be realistic here. You know that this weekend, a lot of you listening had five, maybe everybody, or tequila, or maybe even whiskey, are also having it in a mixed drink of some kind. And that's going to add more calories to the situation. So, you know, like any good Southern boy, I like a good old-fashioned, I like a good mint julep. But, you know, now we're talking about taking that shot of whiskey and adding essentially sugar water, right? Adding simple syrup to it and adding sometimes a Luxardo cherry or something,

which also is basically it's soaked in sugar, preserved in sugar, and that ups the calories as well. And I would be willing to guess, I mean, I don't know off the top of my head, I'd have to sit there and kind of hash out what I use in an old fashioned, but, you know, now we're talking about a drink that per cocktails, probably 200 calories, 250 calories, just assuming you're using 80 proof whiskey and nothing, nothing crazy, not barrel proof or anything. So yeah, that if you have two old fashions or three old fashions now that's really adding up you know that's easily six seven hundred calories right and now i think you can understand like how alcohol can become a problem especially if you are trying to cut um if you're if you're trying to put yourself in a caloric deficit we we've mentioned this before, a lot of times people will be really good Monday through Thursday. And it's the weekend is where things

go off the rails, right? If you overeat by a thousand calories, then you can undo four or five prior days of a 200 calorie deficit, right? Or if you overeat by 2000 calories on the weekend, you can overcome essentially a 400 calorie per day deficit that you did Monday through Friday. And it compounds, right? So we mentioned before that the thing is like we're not drinking, you know, we're typically not drinking one and a half ounces of alcohol in isolation. Sometimes it's mixed with stuff. Often we're drinking more than one. We're also like, I don't know about you, but I get a couple of, you know, I get a couple of drams of whiskey in me and then I want something sweet. I want a dessert. And, you know, so there we go. So it's also driving other dietary habits. You're making

other dietary choices you may not have made had you not started drinking, right? So that's going to add to the caloric intake as well. And now all of a sudden, it's not just the amount of calories and the alcohol that you drink. It's also the amount of calories and all the extra food that you ate on top of it. It's the apple fritters. It's the sugar. Gets you every time. It's just the sugar, man. It's the damn sugar. Sugar, sugar, sugar. We got to do an episode on sugar.

I started an article on sugar. I need to finish it. But yeah, you know, as he just said, that pretty much sums it up. If you have five, six drinks, you're probably having close to 1,000 calories, right? And that's assuming no mixers, you know? Right. So you could easily get 1,500 calories from right? Yeah, just in the drinks. Assuming no mixers, you know? Right. So you could easily get 1,500 calories from alcohol depending on what you're drinking.

And then on top of it, you're going to have that pizza, have that dessert, go home, kill a bag of Doritos because you drank too damn much. I mean, I've heard all sorts of things over the years. I've done all sorts of stupid things too when I was a college kid. $5 pizza, Domino's, you just get thrilled about the bargain, then you don't realize you're shoveling away, you know, hundreds and not thousands of calories. So, you know, I get it. But, you know, I get these, you know, I get these questions all the time. I get, you know, people like to sign up for coaching or hire a coach, and they don't really understand that they're going to have to make some sacrifices. Right. If you're going to keep a bunch of snack food in your pantry and drink five pours a night, your likelihood of success, if your goal is to lose body fat, is very low.

likelihood of success, if your goal is to lose body fat is very low. If your goal is to get stronger, you know, if you're drinking several pours a night for even a couple nights a week, it's going to interfere with your performance. My cousin always jumps to my mind when he was 20, he was in college running the linear progression. And I always knew when he drank because his form would go to absolute hell the following Monday. And I'd be like, you got wasted, didn't you? And he'd say, yeah, and you know, it is what it is, you know. But it doesn't just, you know, make you feel like shit and you're dragging, you can't move very well, your coordination goes off, your technique goes off, that can lead to tweaks and unavoidable injuries, too. Right, right. Or even simply, you know, like, most of the people that are listening now, simply, you know, like most of the people that are listening now, most of y'all are novices or maybe early intermediates, or even maybe like somewhere in the middle range of being an

intermediate lifter. So you're, you're making progress on a, on a daily, twice a week, once a week, maybe twice every like biweekly, every two weeks kind of schedule. Okay. So if you're going to do that, you know, if you want to get stronger and you want to put on the muscle mass, you're going to have to make jumps in weight. Like the bar has to get heavier, right? And so let's say you're on a weekly progression. Okay. So maybe Monday is your intensity day. Okay. Well, you got to drive the weight up on intensity day if you want to get stronger and get more results. And if you keep doing things to make that, you know, to artificially hamper yourself on that intensity day, well, that's just one more

week that you kind of screwed up. You know, when you get, when you get past the novice phase and programming gets more complicated, each constituent workout, you know, it kind of has to all work together as a system in, within the little cycle that you have, right kind of has to all work together as a system in it, within the little cycle that you have. Right. So like, if you have a weekly cycle, it can't, you kind of need all three workouts. If you're, let's assume you're doing a full body split, right. You can't just take one out and be like, well, it's kind of the same. I'll just be able to jump like normal next week. Maybe you can, sometimes you can, sometimes you can, sometimes you get away with it. Sometimes you can't here. Here's the problem when it goes wrong and you're like, oh, man, I ran into a wall.

What happened? It's like, well, how many days did you fuck up your intensity day because you got hammered on the weekends? And that affected your ability to execute the lifts on Monday, right? You can extend that to a lot of different habits that we have, sleep, stress, all that kind of stuff. But, you know, whatever the reasoning have, sleep, stress, all that kind of stuff. But, you know, whatever the reasoning being, like, it makes a difference. Well, you think about it, like, lifting is a form of stress. And when you add in other stressors, your body is competing to adapt to these other stressors.

And eventually, you're not going to be able to adapt to the training. You're not going to be able to complete the training because you're busy recovering from other shit. Every form of stress that you add into your life, you have to recover from. So ideally in a perfect world, you know, if your goal is to get as strong as humanly possible, you have to reduce those other stressors, you know. Or, and this is more commonly what happens because lifting is not everybody's top priority. It's up there for me. I do this for a living. You know, Trent does this for a living.

But for most people, it's not priority number one. So you're going to get stronger over a longer time course. It's going to be much slower. But, you know, if you keep showing up, you're just going to get stronger as a side effect of continuing to show up. And I was just talking to a few people about this at the gym. So, yeah, if you're going to drink, yeah, it's going to fuck you up and it's going to slow things down. If you drink and then you do a bunch of CrossFit or, you know, hike 10 miles, you know, now you're adding two stressors into the mix. And the thing about other activity is most people that like do hiking and, you know, other outdoors activity, you know, it's not as competitive as lifting. They're not quantifying,

you know, what they do. They're not trying to incrementally load it, you know, so they don't really, you know, if they, you know, go hungover and do a long hike hungover, they'll be like, oh man, I barely got through that, but I feel better that I did it, you know? Yeah, sure. But, you know, if they go to the gym hungover and miss their squat, they get furious, right? Yeah. So, you know, I've had that happen where, you know, you have somebody that, you know, will sit there and get hammered and then, you know, do a long hike. Maybe two days in a row they'll do this whole thing where they're drinking and hiking and drinking and hiking or drinking and camping and doing other outdoor stuff. Then they'll come in Monday and they'll miss their squat. Why the fuck am I missing?

Why am I not making progress? Well, because you added the stressor of a long, challenging hike and lots of alcohol drinking, you know? Right, right. And, you know, even if it's not physical activity, right, even if you're not out hiking, you know, like maybe you crushed a bunch of beers while you tubed on the river, a popular pastime in Texas. Okay, well, you know, first of all, just sitting out in the sun all day or going to the football game all day and drinking all day, probably dehydrated too. And then, or, or you just staying up late. And even if you're just staying up late, like, oh, well I was out Saturday night, you know, we went out, I got, went to bed at 3am.

Well, I mean, if that's not something you normally do like that, that that's going to fuck with your recovery over the weekend on top of the alcohol itself. Right. It's also the sleep. And so, yeah, it's just a whole system. And all this to say is like, you know, it's just, you realize the trade-offs that you're making. It's not our job to decide what is worth doing for you in your life, but it is our job to point out where the trade-offs are. That's right. And that's a big thing. Like you've said it many times on this show, right? There's a lot of folks who have goals that are incompatible with their lifestyle.

100%. And honestly, that might be everybody that starts coaching, right? Oh, yeah. That probably is everybody that starts being coached for the first time. It's like you have a goal, and your current lifestyle today, before you get coached, when you came to me, is incompatible with your goals. And I'm here to help you show you what you have to do to get to those goals. And it's up to you to figure out where on the spectrum you want to exist. Yeah, so that's a big part of what we're pointing out here. Well, think about it, man. You're a musician, too. Same thing goes there. How many people get to, quote-unquote, intermediate or advanced with a guitar, you know?

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, everybody's a novice, pretty much. Yeah. And then, yeah, a handful of people are intermediate, and very, very few people develop the chops to play at, you know, a professional level. And then even fewer people get to what, I guess the advanced level would be, you know, like where you can play jazz and you can improvise with a trio or something, you know, like there's, and the reason being, you know, yeah, at some point it just becomes like, in order to get better, you have to dedicate your life to playing music. It's no longer enough to just play by yourself or practice to like some videos or something. You got to go and like go hang out with other musicians and play with them

all the time. Put yourselves in musical situations. It's kind of the same thing, you know, advanced lifters, that's what their life looks like. They live at the gym. They're just lifting, you know? Yeah. They have a baby and the next day they're hammering it. Christmas Eve, they're in the gym. The day after Christmas, okay, great to see you all. I got to go train. Yep. Thanksgiving, they're training all the time. Ever see that one video with CT Fletcher, Command You to Grow? Oh man, you've talked about it. I don't think I've actually, I've seen clips of that video. It came out eight years ago. It's funny. Yeah. I haven't seen the whole thing.

It's just, it's super entertaining. But the one part, I think what really drew me to it was, you know, not necessarily that I bought into the idea that, you know, I got to do arms every single day of the year to get 22-inch arms without taking steroids, which is like the claim, you know. Every day. Every day. steroids which is like the claim you know every day every day you want to if you want to get 22 inch arms without taking steroids i'll tell you how i did it and it ain't no motherfucking secret for first year and a half i trained in the gym every time i stepped in the motherfucking gym i trained arms because i was determined to have big motherfucking arms oh man so i i was very entertained by that and uh the part where he starts talking about

how i'm trying to remember it's been a while let's see that's the beginning i remember the beginning um i haven't memorized um but there's a part where he's like he just talks about how he did it every day right so he said basically what you said you just essentially quoted him without realizing it but he's like every damn day training arms on christmas new year's my motherfucking birthday right anniversaries every damn day training arms that's's how I did it, motherfucker. Right. I worked my fucking ass off.

And, you know, at least one of those things is true. Yeah. Which is that he was there every day. I believe that. I don't believe anything else about the steroids, but I do believe that,

that he was there every day. So, you know, my lifters get a kick out of it because I was just so entertained by that video, man. Oh, it's great, man. I don't know why I just, you know my lifters get a kick out of it because i was just so entertained by that video man oh it's great you know it's like watching like i send i send my lifters sometimes i'll send them like uh you know like ronnie coleman videos especially if they're doing like some some i'll sign like some curls or like some rows or whatever i'd be like all right so like before you do these you got to watch some ronnie coleman oh yeah and that's like if that

doesn't get you hyped up to do like sets of 12 on your rose i don't know what will um but yeah and so so there it is so that that's i think that's the crux of what we're talking about today is that alcohol is like everything else it's a lifestyle decision uh whether you're gonna whether or not you're gonna drink it what you're gonna do how many you're gonna have not you're going to drink it, what you're going to do, how many you're going to have, how you're going to incorporate in your life. And so, you know, you've got to account for this stuff. You can't just sweep it under the rug and be like, oh, I had some drinks and that, but I don't think that's it. It was the apple fritters. It's the sugar. I just got to cut all the sugar out of my life. I'm just not it enough volume. I'm not, and do more volume, but cut the sugar out, do more volume. And then that's, that's what I need. No, no, no. It's the thousand calories a weekend that you, you know, that you drank.

But I think there's some other stuff too, right? So the, it's not just the calories, right? We've already pointed out that there's, there's other stuff that comes along with it, right? There's other behaviors. Like you stay out later, you eat other food. But it also, like alcohol, especially if you're going to drink a lot of it, has impacts on your endocrine system, right? And it has impacts on your sleep, which also has an impact on your hormones. Yeah, I mean, alcohol disrupts your metabolism. For your biochemistry geeks, it disrupts the Krebs cycle.

It can deplete B vitamins, which are necessary to facilitate normal human metabolism. They're also cofactors, so they're involved in various chemical reactions in human metabolism. So that's why I recommend before you go to bed after a long night of drinking to take a multivitamin, plenty of water too, and sodium and potassium to rehydrate. Probably Gatorade would be good. But, you know, I read a long time ago. It's been a while since I've read the endocrine responses to alcohol, but I read a long time ago that it can lower T,

and it makes sense. Testosterone, for those of you new to the lifting world, T is, you know... Capital T. What is that? Capital T is a slang for testosterone. But yeah, it can lower testosterone. It can apparently raise estrogen, so it can throw the ratios off there.

Yeah, I've heard that beer in particular, some people claim that that is estrogenic. Now, is that alcohol or is it the beer in particular? It's probably the alcohol. Okay, yeah, yeah. It goes back to so many variables not controlled, you know? Sure. Yeah. But, you know, it also, you know, damages your liver.

You know, have damage on your kidneys. Your liver regulates your blood glucose levels. Remember, you deposit glycogen in the liver. Liver takes in glucose, stores it, releases it back into the bloodstream. Muscles can't do that. Our muscles are selfish. They only feed themselves. So once the sugar goes into your muscle, it stays in there until you contract the muscle, then it starts feeding itself with sugar. The liver can release it into your bloodstream.

You store a little bit in the kidneys and in the fat cells too, but I'd say 80% of your glycogen is stored in your muscle and roughly 20% is stored in your liver. So they say about 400 grams in the muscle, 100 grams of liver, and then trace amounts in the kidney and fat cells. Yeah. So, you know, somebody asked recently about diabetes and alcoholics and this and that. And, you know, it damages your liver. So your liver is not functioning correctly. You know, you're not going to have good glucose homeostasis if the key regulator is damaged you know you should think about that

from a simplistic standpoint you know without going into a bunch of physiology and biochemistry you know your liver is responsible for regulating your blood sugar and you are damaging that organ by drinking lots and lots of alcohol that can also damage the pancreas as well. The pancreas is the organ that releases insulin to lower blood sugar. So, you know, when you take that into account, you know, you could potentially, you know, make yourself more glucose intolerant through various mechanisms. So, yeah, you know, in terms of the endocrine system, yeah, it can affect your sex hormones, but it can also affect glucose release and insulin release as well if it's if it's heavy enough use you know sure sure and i imagine too i mean this is also like you've got the confounding variable of um you know if you

are if you're also getting fatter with drinking a lot, right, and you have more adipose tissue, that also in itself is estrogenic, right? Just having a lot of excess fat tissue. Yeah, yeah. You know, if you get more fat tissue, you could become more insulin resistant. And insulin resistant. Yeah, right. And, you know, to be a little more specific, because it just came back to me because we were just having this conversation at the gym, long-term chronic alcohol abuse could lead to pancreatitis. And remember, the pancreas has those little beta cells.

Those beta cells release insulin. This is kind of what I said earlier. doing something that's going to increase your risk of pancreatitis, you can also potentially develop some diabetes since you're not effectively releasing the hormone responsible for lowering blood sugar levels when they're getting elevated. So yeah, so it's just, it's a lot of bad things that can happen. Of course, it damages brain cells. That's obvious, you know, to a lot of people. Yeah. It has direct effects on the brain. And yeah, you know, you take all that into account. I mean, why would it benefit your training to get drunk all the time, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, yeah, hopefully that's pretty obvious to people who tune into this show. But, you know, more sort of acutely,

though, so to kind of sum up what you said earlier, my sort of layman's understanding is that when you drink alcohol, essentially your body, it disrupts metabolism because essentially your body has to work on processing that or digesting that first. And then it can kind of get back to what it was doing before you started drinking, right? Would that be a fair way to say it? Yeah, you have to recover from that. That takes a few days. Okay. Yeah. So, so, you know, if you're drinking half an ounce of whiskey, not really a big deal, right? But if you have four of them, four ounces of whiskey, that's a much bigger project for your body to have to, you know, kind of process that, clear it from your bloodstream, and then get back to, you know, the other metabolic processes that it was doing beforehand. Yeah, yeah. So you got to give it time. And the heavier, the heavier the bout of drinking, the worse it's going to be. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Then, you know, when it comes, then there's sleep,

right? You recover through sleep. Alcohol can disrupt your sleep if you're drinking a lot of it. I mean, I remember, you know, I always sleep pretty well, but if I have a half-pour, I'll knock right out and sleep just fine. I'm not recommending people do that. This is an N of 1 anecdotal anecdote. This is an N of 1 anecdote. I'm not recommending that people drink before bed. Typically, it has the opposite effect. You know, everything I've read and everybody I've talked to, you know, they might fall asleep, they can't stay asleep. You know, it's what I've heard about alcohol. So, you know, it disrupts your sleep. You sleep like shit. You end up sleeping less and the quality of your sleep goes

down. You don't get in a REM sleep, so you don't get a deep sleep you're not rested and uh obviously affects your behavior too your motivation you know even if you do drag yourself under the bar you may not push as hard you feel like shit you know sure yeah um makes more irritable so just a lot of things that happen when you drink heavily now does that mean you can't drink no i said you know well a drink so what do we define as a drink? I said 45 mils of liquor at 80 proof and a 12-ounce can of beer, five-ounce glass of wine. That beer is 4% to 6%.

That wine, you know, wine percentages don't typically vary too much. It's in the low teens. Yeah. You know, somewhere in the, I don't know. 10% to 15%. 10% to 15 percent depending on the wine so usually it's the beer and the liquor where people try to game the system and say oh you know well you know i drink liquor like you drink 120 that's like a drink and a half

you know you're drinking ipas that are 10 barley wine beers or whatever that yeah so you got to think of that right you, one to two is probably fine for most people. You know, you start drinking three, four, five, six, seven, you know, I mean, if you spread them out, it's less than if you have them in a short amount of time, but it's less negative. But it's still, you know, you're still going to feel that drag the next day. You know, is, is that a lot of, a lot of the people listening to this show and a lot of people that we work with are looking for like performance is important, obviously, right. For the reasons that if you want to get the results out of training, the training has to progress. And if you're doing things to, if you're throwing wrenches in the machine to stop your progression, then you're also not going to get the results you want. going to get the results you want. But I think for a lot of folks too, they want to, um, they want to trim up, right? They, they want to lose some body fat and they want to recomp over time. And, um, and that the gym is a driver, right? For sure. But at the same time, like we've said many times, like the, the, the kitchen is probably where most of the work is going to happen. And, um, and so if you are in that position and you do have more body fat than you want, and you want to recomp, you want to get leaner, you know, whether or not you need to be in a cut or not, that's a separate conversation. But let's say that you are, or you at least don't

need to be in a surplus. Well, it's the behaviors that come with drinking in excess that are going to, you know, that that's probably going to throw the bigger wrench, right? Is having three drinks over a weekend going to wreck you by themselves? Probably not. But like I said earlier, it's not just the three drinks, you know, it's, it's, it's the fritters and the burgers and the pizza and the extra French fries. And you reached over and you're like, Oh, this guy had onion rings at the bar. It's like, I'm going to have a couple of those. So he didn't finish his it's that stuff, right. That, that really adds up. And that's, and like we said before, you know, that that's where, um, that's where the results are lost. It's, it's usually in these, like it's the bingers right over the

weekend where you can, you can undo so much of the progress that you had created already throughout the week. Yeah, from a body fat standpoint, you know, all that stuff, you know, you'll put it on, you know, drinking and eating a bunch. From a training standpoint, if you're drinking several pours over a short period of time, that's going to do the most damage. If you're drinking several pours spread out, I drink slow. My friends get pissed because they get wasted and I'm still on my first or second drink. I get shit for this all the time,

but I try to drink slow. I eat slow. But anyways, I cut down. I lost 25, 30 pounds recently and I drank on Fridays at the gym. Some nights I might have had three. Sure, yeah. There were probably nights where I had four,

but this is over several hours. So yeah, I definitely felt it the next day. I was dragging, you know, not dragging bad like I was hung over from a, you know, day of tailgating and a night at the college bar. But, you know, I felt a little bit of a drag the next day, but, you know, I still PR'd my squat and deadlift. I still lost all the weight I need to lose.

You know, I adjusted my diet accordingly. So, you know, I'll say this, I'll say that spreading it out is better than drinking it all at once, but both will have a negative effect. Yeah. And that's obvious. If you're drinking, you know, five pours in an hour, you're going to get pretty hammered. If you drink five pours in five hours, you know, you're going to feel something the next day. You're going to feel the negative side effects of it the next day, but not nearly to the same extent as drinking five in an hour, you know? Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense. Right. Cause again, it's, it's, uh, there's also the behavioral aspect of that, right? Like if I'm, you know, when I drink whiskey, um, my preference, like I said earlier is to drink really nice stuff. Um, I don't drink is to drink really nice stuff. I don't

drink a whole lot of it, so I don't mind spending money on a good bottle because it's going to last me for a long time. But it's also because I'm going to enjoy it. I'm there to sip on some whiskey and have a conversation with some friends. I'm there to listen to some, I'm going to put on some Oscar Peterson in the background, listen to some jazz and sip on that thing and enjoy it. I'm not pounding burgers at the sports bar, right? It's just a totally different environment. So the, those, the behavior around drinking is different when you spread things out versus drinking a whole bunch at once. 100%. Yeah. All right. So let's get down to brass tacks a little bit about like kind of some recommend, can we draw some recommendations for people, you know, with like managing their drinking?

I'm going to throw one out there. Let's see what you think. You coach a lot more folks with, you know, nutrition than I do. I think that the average person that wants to have a good body composition and wants to change their body composition for the better, they want to get leaner. They want to be more muscular. They want to train well. Um, I think that they should drink a maximum of once per week and that they should have, they should limit themselves to two drinks during that, during that whatever day that they decide that they want to have those drinks. Um, I don't think, I don't think that they should have one drink on two days because it's very easy for a lot of people for that one drink to become two. Once they pour the first drink, the second

drink, just whoop, where did that come from? I've seen that many times. Uh, some people don't have a problem. I don't have a problem with that, but I know a lot of people who do. Um, so I think it should be one day, two drinks, that's it. Um, and, and, you know, do that for a while is my suggestion and build the habit of controlling yourself and having the one drink and being satisfied with that. And that means maybe you're going to have to switch alcohol. You know, maybe like try a cocktail and sip on it for a while. Try some whiskey if you don't drink whiskey or whatever, whatever sounds good. Instead of like, you know, doing a Ja a jaeger shot you know something that you can actually sit with for a little while that would be my suggestion but i don't know what do you what

do you think i think first you know people that are having the issues you're talking about are hearing all this and they're like well fuck that's you know i tried three times that man you know there's a fraction of our listeners that probably have had that thought cross their mind. Well, you're not going to go from six to one. That's not how I recommend people approach things. You're going to do it incrementally. So if you're drinking six pours over a three-hour period, maybe try to go five pours over a four-hour period. Try to LP that shit.

Yeah, sure. If you have serious alcoholism, and you know who you are, you know, I'm not a doctor, I don't, you know, I don't run AA meetings, I don't diagnose alcoholism, you know? But, you know, if you have serious alcoholism, then you need to go seek help, you know? Whether it's, you know, through your own reading and learning, you know, or through friends, family, there's lots of ways to approach that. That's beyond the scope of what we're talking about here.

They're talking about addiction at that point. That's not what we're talking about because some people, it's all or nothing. They just can't drink. Sure. It's unfortunate. You know who you are. I'm not talking to you when I say, hey, go from six to five, because I'm not going to insult your intelligence like that. It's a very challenging thing to do when there's an addiction present. So I just want to put that out there for those of those who are suffering from that. You know, I understand that. I had a very good dear friend who, you know, was an alcoholic years ago.

your friend who, you know, was an alcoholic years ago. And, you know, I'm very familiar with some of the symptoms and behaviors of that. And that's not who we're talking to here. But, you know, if you're the kind of person that, you know, goes out and drinks, you know, just like people who want to eat, you know, it's another type of, you know, indulgence, I should say. Yeah, sure. Then, you know, start thinking about your alcohol consumption, you know, and just think, okay, well, wait a minute, five glasses of wine, you know, wine's another popular one. Okay, well, you know, maybe try to have three or four, you know, and then try to work towards two, you know, and if you're going to do that, then, you know, cut back on the carbs and the fats earlier in the day, but, you know, try to keep your protein up because alcohol is catabolic. up because alcohol is catabolic. So, you know, I go, I know I'm going to a restaurant on a Saturday night, you know, and I might have a steak and some whiskey, you know, I'll have my breakfast,

I'll have my omelet as always, but I'll probably cut out the oatmeal, you know, maybe I'll just have a banana and that's it, right? You know? Yeah. And then I'll have, you know, another protein source, you know, throughout the day, you know, maybe I'll have a burrito bowl that I make myself with extra lean meat, vegetables, no carbs, you know, then I'll have a burrito bowl that I make myself with extra lean meat, vegetables, no carbs. You know, then I'll go out. I'll have my steak, my vegetables. You know, my fat's pretty much going to cover my energy nutrients, as I like to call them, in the cooking. Then I'll have a couple drinks, you know.

Or, you know, if I'm not going to eat, then I'll probably eat more throughout the day. And then I'll save calories for a couple of drinks. I'm like, okay, well, I need, you know, 200 to 300 calories. I'm going to have two to three drinks, you know? Yeah. And that's how I think about it. Now, I like liquor. You know, I like whiskey. I'm not going to go order a cocktail. If I'm going to order a cocktail, I'll make different adjustments, right? Sure. And, you know, sometimes I'm in the mood for an old-fashioned, you know, just not very often, but treat that like a dessert. You know, sometimes I want ice cream. Sometimes I want an old fashioned, sometimes I want wine, you know, uh, but typically I just want, you know, whiskey or wine is what I typically bounce

back and forth between with certain people. Like my neighbors are beer guys. So I'll have beers with them, you know, they're out in the driveway. I know I'm having beer. So I'm like, okay, well, haven't drank yet. You know, it's usually at the end of the day on a Saturday, I'll get home and they'll be out and I'll be, all right, I'll join you. You know, so I'll have, I know I'm like, okay, well, haven't drank yet. You know, it's usually at the end of the day on a Saturday, I'll get home and they'll be out and I'll be, all right, I'll join you, you know, so I'll have, I know I'm going to have probably a couple beers. So that means no whiskey that night, you know? Yeah. Yeah. But it's like anything else, you're looking at your slots, you know, you have your carbs, fats, proteins, and you have your alcohol. And I'll typically pull from the carbs and the fat and try to keep the protein up and then take a multivitamin before bed and, you know, call it a day.

You know, make sure I'm drinking a couple of big glasses of water, throw a salt tablet in there, you know. Now, let me just make this clear because I know some people just heard that last sentence you said and were like, oh, well, just stop eating carbs. I just won't eat any carbs over the weekend and I'll be fine. I'll basically just make up for my alcohol consumption right there. Oh, perfect. I got it. Okay. So when intensity day rolls around on Monday, when you've got to hit a 5RM squat, how do you think that's going to go with zero carbs on board? Probably not very well, right? So, no, we're not talking about like cutting out, you can't just cut out all of your food to make room for alcohol. No, no, that's absolutely, we're not telling you to do that. I've had people try to

do that before and I've seen that in the gyms. Like, what's going on? They're like, well, you know, they were concerned about their caloric surplus and then not thinking about actually fueling themselves for the workout yeah i see when i drink like that and mind you three is a lot for me it's a friday night i've had my last heavy workout of the week and i get two days off you know yeah sure so i think that i think that's why i get away with it um Um, yeah. Well, and I think, but yeah, I think the big thing here too is like, it, it, it's, um, it's the fact that you've planned it. Um, I think, I think the, the person that we're really talking to right here is if you have just drank alcohol as a part of your, you know, social gatherings and going out to dinner or going out to eat in general, and you just really haven't considered

it. It's like, oh, we're going out to eat. Oh, this is going to be great. Yeah, I'll have a beer. Everybody's having a drink. Okay. I'll have one too. Okay. Well, did you think about that? You knew, you probably knew, like, you know what your habits are, right? Like, you know that like, yeah, it's Friday night. We usually go out. Okay. So, you know, you're going out to dinner already. And, you know, like you just described and we've talked about in previous episodes, you want to make a plan for that. It's like, okay, we know you're going to overeat by somewhere on the order of 500 to 2000 calories, right? So probably you're going to overeat by a thousand calories, you know, versus had you not gone out

to eat at all, right? Okay. Well, you just plan for that. You have a light lunch or light breakfast, light lunch, and you'll be okay. You can kind of minimize the damage, right? So to speak. Well, the same thing, you can just do the same thing with your alcohol consumption. What I find is that most folks that have a problem with this and that they're not getting the results they want out of their dietary changes and their training is because they haven't really considered the alcohol at all. It's just sort of been added on and it's like, it becomes just a social thing. It's like, oh, everyone else is having drinks. I'll just, I'll have some drinks too. But they didn't plan around that. So, you know, that's all we're saying is just with a little bit of planning, you can, you can sort of, you can figure out what your slots are. I like

that way of thinking about it. Right. Yeah. So, all right. So now that we've been a giant buzzkill, I got to finish my whiskey here. So we need to sign off. All right, man. Thank you for tuning into the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana or weights, a double underscore and double underscore plates. Very good. You know where to find me Jones barbell club.com or you can find me on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream. Yeah. So we'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks. Thank you.