How Much Wine Can I Drink Over the Holidays?

Today we are talking about How Much Wine Can I Drink Over the Holidays?

There’s a physiological theory called the Motivational Triad: we as humans are trying to at all times: avoid pain, seek pleasure, and conserve energy.

So all the time, no matter what the season, we are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Both pain and pleasure can be completely emotional.

And holidays are full of pleasure. Feelings like excitement, festiveness, boredom, happiness, merriment are all calling for the extra pleasure of alcohol.

And pain.  The holidays can be a mix of all sorts of emotions including financial stress, family pressure, grief, and disappointment. These feelings are also calling for the relief and numbing of alcohol.

Alcohol during the holidays is a multi-layered, multifaceted subject because of the emotionality of the holidays.

We drink more over the holidays from both good and bad emotions.

And you should know that drinking alcohol is always an emotional event.

It’s not required for health.

It’s not required for hydration or sustenance.

Every time we drink, we are drinking with our minds. With, for, and from our emotions. 

To evoke emotions like happiness or cheerfulness and to damper feelings like loneliness and disappointment.

Drinking is always an emotional event.

Similar to what we’ve been talking about with sugar. Drinking alcohol is a mind and body disruptor.

It is a toxin, just like sugar.  The ethanol is alcohol, no matter what kind of alcohol or how much water you drink between glasses is a toxin.

On the body side, alcohol itself is not very fattening or high in sugar.

It’s not the sugar content of most of the alcohol we drink that is the problem.  Now if you add orange juice and such, then you’ve created something different, but a glass of wine is not going to throw your blood sugar off the charts.

Alcohol is actually not that fattening in and of itself. It will cause us to accumulate fat in other ways though.

This is what we care about when we are talking about alcohol and weight control.

Ethanol is absolutely poisonous to your body.  So when you drink, your liver puts everything else on hold (including if you were burning any fat) and focuses all its efforts to break down that ethanol before it kills you.  

Alcohol and the ethanol it contains damages your liver. We all kind of know this, but it’s super bad for our fat-burning efforts because our livers are like the quarterback of our metabolisms. 

Without a good quarterback all the plays are messed up and no one can score. Without a fit and healthy liver, you can’t burn fat the way you want.

Alcohol blocks fat burning, not because of the sugar, but because of the toxic ethanol.

When you drink, your liver must stop burning fat to immediately prioritize breaking down the toxic alcohol you just consumed before you die.

Drinking after dinner is particularly damaging to your weight loss efforts as you block fat-burning while sleeping. Sleeping is our best time to burn fat.

But there are two other reasons alcohol doesn’t serve us when it comes to getting control over our weight.

Remember that alcohol is first and foremost a brain toxin. When you drink, you make terrible food choices.

After a glass of wine, you are much more likely to be permissive with your food choices and choose toxic foods that further damage your metabolism, like cookies, hot chocolate, pastries, and other holiday treats.

This is actually the #1 problem with alcohol, because we think we can control this part instead of respecting and recognizing the effect alcohol has over our ability to make good decisions. 

When we drink, it sparks cravings for sugar and we are not able to resist. These cravings continue for up to 3 days after drinking just one glass of wine.

The other deeper issue is that we drink to soothe our feelings.  Drinking is always an emotional event.  Always. I can feel a few of you thinking, no, I’m not an emotional drinker… remember drinking is always an emotional event.  

We have to eat certain fats to survive. We have to eat certain proteins to survive. We absolutely have no nutritional need for alcohol and it’s actually poisonous, so when we drink it’s because we want to either feel something like, sociable and charming. Or not feel something like stress or pain.

Let’s circle the wagons a bit on this subject.

Alcohol is a poison that damages your metabolism and blocks fat burning.  We choose to drink alcohol because of how we think it will make us feel.

We generally don’t know how to feel our feelings and when we take away our drug of choice, whether that’s sugar or wine, we feel vulnerable and helpless to our feelings.

But we don’t like alcohol as much as we think we do.  Its dopamine-inducing effects wear off over time.  

In the Freese Method we spend 3 weeks diving into the emotionality of food and alcohol.  We dive into the brain science and the emotional science to take back control of our eating and our drinking.

We do “the good work” to stop overdrinking. 

We plan our drinking ahead of time. We know how much we will drink and what consequences we have signed up for and how we are going to mitigate those consequences as well.

We are in full control of our drinking and choose our ultimate gratification over instant gratification because we are calm, intentional and in control.

We have a relaxed and easy relationship with alcohol.

If you want a better relationship with alcohol than what you have now, it is available to you. How many drinks can you have over the holidays?

You can have as many drinks as you have planned, in advance, understanding the consequences, and with the plan in place to mitigate those consequences and you take full responsibility for why you want to drink ahead of time.

Alright, well done everyone.

You absolutely have what it takes to lose weight, stop overdrinking, achieve glowing health and stop stressing about food, we just need to repair your metabolism first.