It's no secret that drinking alcohol can add extra calories to your diet, increase food cravings, and slow down your metabolism. Quitting (or reducing) your alcohol consumption is an effective way to extend lifespan by losing excess weight, especially when combined with other evidence-based weight loss methods. When it comes to calories, it's clear that quitting alcohol and losing weight go hand in hand. Alcohol itself may not be the direct cause of weight gain or difficulty controlling it, but it does affect your eating and drinking behaviors, which can lead to results you're not happy with. You may also experience strong cravings for sugar and other comfort foods, which could counteract any possible weight loss starting from the first week without alcohol.
If you're looking to stop drinking to lose weight, you should see results after 30 days. Here's how you can have a relationship with alcohol (or not) while working to achieve your weight-loss goals. After such a big drop in weight the first week, it's normal to expect to continue that momentum. However, heavy drinkers and binge drinkers are at greater risk of obesity due to the metabolic changes that occur when the body metabolizes alcohol frequently.
Let's take a look at how quickly your body changes (and how fast you can lose weight) when you stop drinking. It's important to take on these challenges from the start and motivate yourself so that there isn't any alcohol-based celebration that you can't bear with a non-alcoholic drink in your hand. You choose to drink or not to drink and you don't owe anyone an explanation if you skip the cocktails. Alcohol can prevent weight loss, and it may not be very individualized, as are all things related to nutrition.
If you stopped drinking six 175-ml glasses of wine a week, you would save about 960 calories, which is equivalent to three hamburgers or five and a half bags of French fries. As much as we would all like to hear a resounding “yes”, losing weight by not drinking will depend on the calories you eat rather than the calories you consume.
