1 toxic decision is the real reason you can’t get fit over 40
Ah, to have a young person’s metabolism, eh?
Back in my 20s and 30s, I could pretty much ingest anything I wanted and probably lose weight if I did any exercise whatsoever.
Nowadays? That’s gonna be a big “lol” from me.
Take last week, for example.
I don’t eat a lot of sugar.
In fact, I would almost never eat sugar if it wasn’t in the house.
But recently my wife and younger son (who inherited her sweet tooth) decided it would be a good idea to buy a freezer cake and some ice cream on a random Tuesday night as a treat.
Now I may have zero desire to eat sugar on a day-to-day basis, but for some weird reason, I MUST eat if it’s in the house.
So for a couple of nights until it was all gone, I gorged.
And that’s all it takes at this age, I’m afraid.
On the third morning, I woke up feeling shameful and fat as s**t.
So now imagine ingesting something that’s not only filled with useless, empty calories but has also been proven to wreck your ability to work those calories off.
Let’s talk about that real quick.
The worst diet decision you can make over 40
About a month ago I wrote a piece about the worst diet decision you can possibly make if you’re trying to shed weight or get strong over 40.
Here’s what I said then:
“Alcohol weight just looks different, doesn’t it?
“After I quit drinking, I noticed it on myself and on others all the time.
“You get puffy and paunchy in all the worst places.
“You always look tired and soft.
“And then you wonder why all the exercise and disciplined eating hasn’t turned you into an Adonis.
“Well, I’ll tell you why.
“An average, a moderately active man should ideally ingest around 2,600 calories per day.
“At the peak of my drinking, I was having about 5–6 tallboy cans of beer every single day.
“So 6 tallboys x 195 calories per = 1,170 extra, destructive, completely unnecessary calories per day.
“Put another way, about 45% of my daily recommended calories were coming from alcohol.”
But it gets worse.
Big Alcohol’s Big Lie
The advent of fitness trackers really has blown a hole in Big Alcohol’s claims that it’s safe to have even a couple of drinks per day.
As I noted in that piece, research by fitness band maker Whoop found that “of all the behaviors available to record in the WHOOP Journal, drinking alcohol is the one with the single greatest negative impact on next-day recovery.”
“On average, WHOOP members’ recovery is 8% lower when they log consuming alcohol the day before (again, this includes everything ranging from one drink to several).”
Still don’t believe me?
On that story, I received an awesome comment from a reader named Tcoztech, who presented his own evidence of how alcohol throws all aspects of your life off-balance.
And the reader used a perfect term I’d never heard before.
Here’s what Tcoztech said:
“The Whoop band led me in the same direction: You compromise the return on your fitness investment if you drink. Period.
“(I used Whoop religiously for almost two years; I never took it off except to charge it. But the whole “tracking shackle” thing started to get to me. I find the Apple Watch to be less compulsive; I put it on before working out, get my numbers, then take it off.)
“Sure, a glass of white wine here and there or a little champagne at a wedding won’t throw fitness out the window.
“But the fact remains that if you are chasing your maximum potential, like really squeaking it out, any amount of alcohol compromises you.
“We’ve been lied to for way, way too long about alcohol, not unlike smoking.
“The stuff is poison, the damage is cumulative, and regular use seems to foster bad luck.
“Anybody fitness-minded who drinks needs to look at the difference in your HRV (heart rate variability) and HR (heart rate) when you drink vs. when you don’t (over sustained periods of abstinence, not day-to-day).”
(By the way, heart rate variability is a widely used metric for determining how well your body recovers while sleeping and was the basis of Whoops numbers I presented at the top).
‘Regular use seems to foster bad luck’
I absolutely love that.
It’s so true, isn’t it?
“Uhg, I pulled a muscle really bad playing golf, now I’m on the shelf again!”
Well, maybe you wouldn’t have pulled the muscle if alcohol hadn’t disrupted your sleep and, by extension, your physical recovery.
“I can’t believe the brakes on the car just went — I can’t afford this!”
Maybe a brake replacement would look more like routine maintenance than back luck if you hadn’t spent the money for it on alcohol over the course of the last month.
The simple fact of the matter is that alcohol makes your life worse in every measurable way, and if your first reaction to hearing that is to defend drinking literal poison, well, I don’t know what to tell you.
Take it from me, Tcoztech, and anyone else who’s managed to kick the booze personally: it’s just better out here.
Did you quit alcohol and notice the physical benefits?
Have you thought about quitting but haven’t made the leap yet? What’s holding you back?
Let me know in the comments!
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