Mmmmm…. Weight Loss With Beer?

An online acquaintance is fond of saying, “The Internet is Full of Things” when they happen upon something that is particularly out of round online, so to speak. This is just as true when it comes to the fitness arena, and we’re going to take note because, well, we’re weird, and we’re online, and sometimes, stuff just can’t go unremarked. To that end, here’s something that is going to cause at least one frequent visitor here to Squee in a most entertaining and alarming manner: It seems that some dude in South Africa has written a book about a beer-centric diet.

Dave, stop dancing that way. You’re scaring the children. And the livestock.

This appears to be an honest effort to reach across the divide between gym and pub, and not merely in the completely facile, “Twelve beers is about fifteen hundred calories, and after drinking that much, I’m too full, drunk, and/or hungover to eat” kind of way.

As much as I’d love to be able to endorse this plan unreservedly… I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

First, though, there are some good bits of advice.

Think back to your ‘fighting weight’. Not how much you weighed when you were 18, but your best ‘mature’, adult weight. How many years has it taken to get to your current weight? If the answer is four, or six, and you want to get back to your all-time favourite weight, then the ‘least’ you owe to yourself is the same time. In fact, you will probably do it somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of the time.

One thing really caught my eye about this in a good way — the bit about “not how much you weighed when you were 18.” There will come a day when your body goes, “You know what, I feel like settling down a little bit. You’re not going to be able to eat whatever, whenever, and just burn it off tomorrow. Get used to it.” For most of us, this kind of sneaks up on us gradually (I like to think I can pinpoint exactly when it happened for me – Easter weekend 1999, after eating a really, really great dinner with a bunch of friends). Most people are not quite completely physiologically mature at 18, especially in terms of overall metabolism — at that age, we’ve still got a lot more resiliency and baseline calorie-burning than we generally do as we settle into our late 20′s and beyond, which is, barring an inconvenient asteroid impact, hopefully going to be a much longer portion of our lives. Trying to compete with the you of 18 is a recipe for disappointment unless you have a lot of time to devote to such pursuits.

Recalibrate against your new baseline. If you haven’t got a “fighting shape” of your own to shoot for (and not everyone does), try to set some tough but achievable goals for yourself. You didn’t put the weight on overnight, it’s not going to come off that way without a visit to the nice doctor with the abdominal shop-vac.

Now, onto his bulleted list of stuff, some of which needs an application of the Loving Cluebat of Truth. Cluebat targets get an X.  Yeah, I play a healy Priest, but I can’t pass up a perfect Angel of Death reference.  He says:

• Beer bellies are not caused by beer!!
• Eating is more important than not eating to lose weight.
• X The bodies fat cells don’t multiply. They just ‘fill up’.
• X Only fat can be stored as fat. Carbohydrates cannot be converted and stored as fat. (Well, strictly speaking, it is believed that less than 5% of EXCESS carbohydrates can, but let’s not get bogged down).
• X Fatty foods can be more addictive than alcohol and nicotine.
• Muscle cannot change into fat and fat cannot change into muscle.
• You can speed up and slow down your fat-burning capacity.
• Fat can only be reduced by being burnt (or through liposuction!!) and not by dieting. Starvation directly causes fat-storage.
• And finally that, the greatest key to losing your gut is knowledge, followed by a sprinkling of willpower.

X1: The word we’re looking for here is “Wrong.”

For a long time, it used to be thought that people got “fat” by filling up those “insidious little sponges,” just as you described. It was conventional wisdom that the only difference between obese people and non-obese people was that obese people had all their fat cells “filled up” to maximum capacity. It’s now known that we can — and do, in fact — “grow” more fat cells in adulthood, and that obese people have more fat cells than non-obese people. What happens is that when fat cells have expanded to their maximum size, they can divide, thus producing an increase in the actual number of fat cells. Obesity develops when a person’s fat cells increase either in number (called hyperplasia), in size (called hypertrophy) or very often in both.

X2: This gets a good one upside the head with the LCBoT, too. It’s just not supported by any evidence your humble scribe can find with the most finely-crafted Google searches he can muster. However, statements along these lines are all over the place:

Myth: Not all calories are created equal.
Fact: A calorie is a calorie whether from carbohydrate, protein or fat. What is important is that your total calorie intake is balanced by calories used. However, research shows if you’re eating more calories than you need — from any source — the calories from fat are more easily converted to body fat. It’s also important for both overall health and weight maintenance to balance your intake of protein, carbohydrate and fat.

Perhaps our beer-loving compatriot was confused, or merely misstating the metabolic tenet that your body will replenish muscular glycogen stores first, using the first-available calories from a meal. Simple sugars (carbohydrates) will be the first calories in the blood stream, since fat needs to be broken down via digestion and a couple metabolic processes before it can be used (and then subsequently re-converted to fat for storage — this is also why it takes sustained diet and exercise changes to actually start burning it off, because the body is reluctant to give up its ZOMG FAMINE, SAVE TEH CALORIES!! stockpile). However, any excess calories beyond what are needed to replenish the energy stores in our muscles and blood stream will get turned into fat, whether they’re from a bacon double cheeseburger, a beer, or a carrot stick.

X3: This is more exaggeration than misinformation; doing some link-chasing turns up helpful phrases like this:

“When these nutrients are consumed in the form of binges, this can release excessive DA [mesolimbic dopamine], which causes compensatory changes that are comparable to the effects of drugs of abuse.”

Uh, thanks, American Society for Nutrition. In civilian English, “Eating an entire pizza causes a similar flush of certain brain chemicals to doing drugs.” Nobody tell Nancy Reagan. A longer list of links and citations, although they’re presented with a bit of agenda and slant, can be found at VegSource.

While we laud Mr. Manthorp’s passion for his favorite fizzy beverage, and do enjoy a frosty cold one as much as the next guy, it’s with a heavy heart that we must say that the beer diet isn’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be. I’m afraid you’ll still need to put down the Brewfest Stein.

[thanks to Dave for a) being a good sport, and b) catching X1, which I'd overlooked in the first draft.]

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