Drinking too much can increase cravings and reduce your ability to make can drinking make you gain weight good food choices. Late-night tacos or fries are much more likely after a few drinks. Some evidence suggests that drinking can trick you into feeling hungry when you’re not. But if you drink heavily like that every night or even multiple times per night, you may find that weight gain sticks around, even when you’re not drinking or recovering from drinking.
As a result, it will take you longer to torch the extra calories from beer and food. Regularly drinking alcohol, especially in excess, can worsen these conditions, leading to weight gain and further complicating the body’s ability to regulate fat and sugar metabolism. In reality, there’s no evidence that drinking beer (or your alcoholic beverages of choice) actually contributes to belly fat. In fact, one of the most risky behaviors for developing a beer belly seems to be binge drinking. Studies have found that drinking more than four drinks at one time can increase your risk of belly fat, no matter what drink you choose (19, 37, 38, 39). Some evidence suggests that eliminating alcohol among people who drink heavily helps control weight.
“The good news is that earlier stages of steatotic liver disease are usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you abstain from drinking alcohol,” Dr. Sengupta assures. Alcohol does not cause weight gain the same way eating a donut does. It impacts our decision-making, lowers our metabolism, produces additional stress, and traps us in an unhealthy cycle of binge eating and lounging. Whether you are a heavy, moderate, or casual drinker, consuming alcohol can seriously impact your waistline.
“The extra calories from moderate drinking (one serving of alcohol for women a day or two servings for men per day) can certainly fit into the calorie allotment for weight maintenance,” Angelone says. The important thing is that you factor those calories in along with what you eat, she says. However, heavy drinking of any alcoholic beverage will put you at higher risk of gaining belly fat.
This is important to note, since low levels of testosterone may increase your risk of weight gain, especially around the belly (30, 31, 32, 33). Overall, it’s thought that the more you drink, the higher your risk of gaining weight and developing a beer belly (8, 19). Because of their phytoestrogen content, it has been suggested that the hops in beer might cause hormonal changes in men that increase the risk of storing belly fat. Gram for gram, beer contains as many calories as a soft drink, so it has the potential to add a lot of calories to your diet (2, 3). Males are more likely to gain abdominal fat from drinking than females. Females may gain weight in their abdominal region after menopause when estrogen levels naturally decline.