In my last blog I explained just how alcohol can sabotage your weight loss efforts. Now let me help you out with some pointers so you can outsmart the booze and be one lean looking machine:

No gripes, no excuses and no complaints. When all my patients come into the 20/20 Lifestyles program to lose weight, I make a point to say there is absolutely no alcohol during active weight loss. A couple of weight lifter buddies of mine in college knew that beer was a means of excess calories that were just going to give their abs that flat affect. So they had decided to cut out all food for dinner and simply replace those calories with beer to continue to lose weight and get defined. All I can say is I would love to see their livers now. Guess what happened! Even though they cut out their night calories to make room for the beer calories, they could not budge the scale and their body fat percentage was actually increasing. What was going on here?

As a physician, I am always getting patients who want to lose weight and they all know they need to reduce their calories and increase their exercise. Sounds simple right? Well, again, I am going to have to let you down: It’s not. Everyone needs to understand that weight loss is not as simple as “just do it.” Many individuals do not realize that it takes planning ahead for meals and snacks, learning proper times to eat to keep your metabolism burning all day and finding the right balance of foods that do not cause you to be hungry or have cravings. 

A lot of people think that when you’re in the gym, you’re there to burn fat. However, that’s not always true. The amount of fat you burn during a workout can be pretty small when you compare it to the amount that people typically lose in a week. If you expend 600 calories in a workout, you might burn around 30 grams of fat. That’s not much.

I have written blogs on the importance of getting eight hours of sleep and the correlation to weight loss. Less sleep causes people who are trying to lose weight to only lose half of what they would have lost had they gotten eight hours of sleep. For those individuals who are not dieting but eating the right number of calories to maintain their weight, it can cause weight gain.