How To Drink And Stay Lean
I’m gonna show you how to be a drinking expert and have the best buzz at the party. This is something you won’t read in any other fitness guide. Unlike the other fitness experts, I’m telling you to KEEP your Party Lifestyle. While we know that alcohol is a toxin and doesn’t belong in your body, we can’t deny the fact that alcohol plays a big role in society. Think about every social setting you’ve been in; I’d bet that alcohol was present at over 75% of them. Alcohol is not going anywhere, so thinking that you won’t drink while trying to get lean is unrealistic.
Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing wrong with not drinking. But if you’re a young guy or girl at a party, you don’t wanna be the weirdo in the corner drinking water every night watching everyone else have a great time. You WILL get made fun of and you’ll probably look sketchy. Besides, what’s the point of looking good if you can’t enjoy yourself?
However, before we can have our fun, we first gotta address the reality of drinking. In Sun Tzu’s famous book “The Art of War”, the ancient Chinese philosopher says “know your opponent before you do battle with him”. In this case, alcohol is our opponent, so let’s know more about him:
Alcohol is The Leading Cause of Weight Gain In College
Fact: 4 out of 5 people gain weight in college.
Fact: The #1 reason for the weight gain is attributed to excessive alcohol consumption.
It’s Not Your Fault
I’m gonna say that this weight gain is not young people’s fault. In fact, I’d say we can thank alcohol education for the extra pounds. Have you ever noticed that their way of “educating” people on alcohol is by saying: don’t drink?
Newsflash, young people like to have a good time. They are gonna party, and they are gonna drink. Telling a young person not to drink is like telling your shit not to stink.
People Suck At Drinking!
Here’s the deal: It takes most people 5 years to become an expert at something. Well by the time most people are in college, they’ve been drinking for AT LEAST 5 years, yet they still suck at drinking!
We still manage to get hangovers, throw up in friend’s cars, piss people’s beds, and make poor decisions. Heck, we still blackout and hook up with the 4ft chubby bartender Juanita behind Barley House on a Tuesday night (sorry Derek). Here’s my point, it’s time we got better at drinking!
The truth is, alcohol is bad for your body, but you can minimize its effects by following the advice I give you. I’m gonna show you how you can have fun and still get lean. I know we’ve been hammering the points why alcohol is bad, so let me give you some encouragement that you CAN keep your party lifestyle:
Lean Muscle Fact:
People who drink are on average leaner than those who don’t drink.
Hell ya! That is one of my favorite facts. Right now I’m gonna give you some quick tips to get you started on getting lean and partying as much as you want.
Quick Tip #1: Save Calories For The Night
This tip is about allowing yourself drinking calories for the nighttime and still staying lean. If you know you’re gonna be partying on a certain night, try to estimate how many drinks you’ll have. Then multiply the number of drinks you’d have by 100 (the average calories in a typical drink). This number you find will be the number of calories you want to save for the nighttime.
Subtract your Saved Calories from your Maintenance calories (click here if you need help finding your maintenance calories) to see how many calories you can allow yourself to eat that day.
Example: Say my Maintenance Calories were 2800 calories per day and I wanted to have 5 drinks on a Tuesday night.
Maintenance Calories – (# of Drinks)(100) = Calories I can eat that day
2800 – 500 = 2300 calories.
So during the daytime Tuesday you could eat 2300 calories, then that night drink 500 “cocktail” calories, and still not gain any weight. However, if you were trying to lose fat during this time too, you would have to subtract additional calories to create your calorie deficit.
Quick Tip #2: How To Find YOUR Perfect Buzz
Yes, the “perfect buzz” does exist. I’m gonna show you how to find yours. Here’s the deal: for most people, it takes between 3 and 7 drinks (depending on your weight, metabolism, drinking tolerance, etc) to get a good buzz on. This “perfect buzz” area is technically called the “Euphoria stage”.(In case you have a breathalizer and want the exact numbers for this Euphoria stage, it’s a BAC between .03 and .12.) So next time you party, take some social shots or play a couple games of beer pong to get your buzz on.
(In quick tip #4, I’ll show you how to keep this perfect buzz going all night!)
Quick Tip #3 Knowing When To Pump The Brakes
When your BAC goes past .12, the fun starts to go downhill. Common symptoms of this stage include impaired judgement and perception (Beer Goggles) and a loss of coordination. So, if you start losing your balance on the dance floor or start feeling a little like Hellen Keller (impaired hearing or vision), it’s time to pump the brakes on the drinking and let your body fall back into that Euphoria stage.
Quick Tip #4 : Let The Good Times Roll
As soon as you hit a good buzz, drink 1-2 drinks an hour for the rest of the time you’re partying to keep your perfect buzz going. Why? Because the average person metabolizes 1-2 drinks an hour.
Quick Tip #5: Drink Hard To Stay Lean
The type of alcohol you drink has a huge effect on how lean you can become while still partying as much as you want. My advice? Drink mostly hard alcohols like vodkas, tequilas, and rums. Beers have on average 120 calories, while shots have around 80. Those extra calories add up fast! For example, 10 beers would set you back 1200 calories! On the other hand, 10 shots would only set you back 800. Of course, that’s not including chasers. For chasers, go lime, diet soda, or be a bad ass and skip the chaser.
Quick Tip #6: Drink The Good Stuff
While it’s the ethyl alcohol (ethanol) that get’s you drunk, it’s the congeners and the sugars that give you the hangover. “Congeners” are alcohol impurities, and they give most of the flavor, smell, and appearance to alcoholic drinks.
Remember this: “The worse the alcohol, the worse the hangover”. this is because cheaper alcohols aren’t purified and distilled as much as the nicer alcohols, so therefore they have a bunch of congeners (impurities). On the other hand, nicer alcohols are distilled a bunch of times (for example: Grey Goose is distilled 5 times, and doesn’t give as bad of hangovers as, say, Popov).
Quick note: if you want to know all the distillation information on the most popular vodkas (and therefore drink smarter), I’ve included it in the Vodka Report that you can access in the Lean Lifestyle Inner Circle. You can join the Inner Circle here!
Quick Tip #7 Stay Away From Sugar
Ever wonder why your hangover is way worse when you have a few sugary cocktails the night before? It’s because your body breaks down sugar through the same pathways as it breaks down alcohol. These main passageways are the kidneys and liver, and the more backed up they are, the longer the toxins are in your body. The longer the toxins are in your body, the more likely you are to have a hangover the next morning.
Bottom Line: minimize the sugary cocktails to minimize the hangover.
Those Tips Should Get You Started In The Right Direction
I could keep going, but those 7 tips should get you started in the right direction. However if you want the FULL guide on how to drink and stay lean, you can now learn all my secrets I’ve learned over the years, including some gems I learned bar-tending in New York as well as working for a high end vodka company. You can learn all these secrets for FREE when you join The Lean Lifestyle Inner Circle. In fact, members get access to my 6 part How To Drink and Stay Lean video series JUST FOR JOINING! So if you haven’t joined yet, you can join the Lean Lifestyle Inner Circle here!
Last, train hard, party harder! Your training should improve your life, not consume it.
Jeff