Are you on a diet? Are you longing for an adult beverage, but worry about how drinking might affect your weight loss plan? If so, read on for 3 shocking tips on how to get your drink on and still lose weight.
Drink Regularly
Having a few drinks won't hurt your diet, as long as you don't make drinking a regular activity, right? Wrong. You're actually better off having a drink or two each night as opposed to only tossing them back on the weekends or special occasions.
Why? Researchers aren't exactly sure why, but long-term moderate drinkers digest alcoholic beverages differently than those who only drink on occasion. In occasional drinkers, as soon as the beverage hits the stomach, the alcohol in it is absorbed into the blood stream and the ethanol (a toxin present in alcohol) is routed to the liver. Since it has no benefit to the body, the ethanol is burned off first, and any other contents in the stomach (the carbs and sugars from the drinks) must wait to be burned off until the ethanol is completely out of the system.
The problem is, unless a person is extremely active while drinking, their body isn't going to have time to burn off that stomach contents before it is stored as fat. For whatever reason, though, regular drinkers burn far more energy while they drink -- enough to burn up not only the ethanol, but the carbs and sugars in their drink, too.
Drink The Hard Stuff
Nightly drinks are great news, but you should probably stick with something light, like a low-calorie beer or gin and tonic, right? Wrong again. New research suggests that dieters may benefit from indulging in one of the most notoriously hard-to-handle drinks... tequila.
Why? Tequila comes from a plant called the agave plant. The sugars molecules in this plant are linked together in chains that are so long the body can't digest them. As a result, the body treats the sugars like dietary fiber -- it just passes them without digesting them.
Furthermore, these long-chain sugars reduce the body's glucose levels and amp it's production of GLP-1 -- a hormone that slows the stomach from emptying. So, not only will the sugars in tequila not be stored as fat in your body, but you'll also feel fuller while you're drinking, thus reducing the cravings for high-calorie foods that often occur after getting tipsy.
If you're wondering if you can drink while on your diet, the answer is yes, you absolutely can. In fact, you can have a drink or two every night, and even hit the hard stuff without having to worry about sacrificing your weight loss plan. Just remember to drink responsibly, and contact your local weight loss clinic for more great tips for incorporating alcoholic drinks into your weight loss regimen. Click for more info.
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