Any body who works in an industry where client meetings, and more importantly client entertaining, plays a big role, will know better than most the knock on effect this can have towards reaching the fitness goals that are so often desired. Recognise the following?
Tuesday night. You're in a restaurant off the high street, a client across the table and a wine list you did not choose. You order well. The evening goes well. By the time the second bottle arrives you have stopped counting, because counting would be rude and because this is the job. You are not being reckless. You are being hospitable. This is how the work gets done.
Then Thursday comes, you step on the scale, and it has not moved in three weeks. You have trained. You have watched the food. And still the needle sits where it sat. Somewhere in the back of your mind you already suspect what is holding it there, and you would rather not think about it.
So let us think about it plainly, without the lecture. The honest version is more useful than the one that tells you to stop.
What a drink does after you train
Start with the part almost nobody explains. Alcohol does not only add calories. It changes what your body does with everything else for hours afterwards.
When you drink, your body treats the alcohol as a small emergency. It cannot store it, so it burns it first and puts every other job on hold. One of the jobs it pauses is fat burning. In a study measuring whole body fat oxidation, a modest amount of alcohol suppressed fat burning by around 70 per cent for hours after the glass was empty. The fat you ate with the meal does not vanish. It waits. And while it waits, it is more likely to be stored than used.
Then there is the muscle. If you trained that day, your body spends the next day or so repairing and building, which is where the results come from. Alcohol interrupts that too. Researchers gave trained men a workout, then protein, then alcohol, and measured how much muscle they built in the hours after. Even with the protein doing its job, the alcohol cut muscle building by roughly a quarter. Add the alcohol to carbohydrate instead and the drop was closer to a third. The session still happened. The adaptation the session was meant to produce was quietly turned down.
The part that is not about willpower
Here is where the scale earns its reputation for cruelty. A large glass of red is around 220 calories. A bottle sits closer to 650. Two of those across a long dinner, and you have added most of a training session back before you count the bread, the pudding, and the fact that you rarely order the sensible thing when the wine is flowing.
None of that makes you undisciplined. You are discerning about most things, and you know all of this in outline already. The problem is that the cost is invisible in the moment and delayed by two days, so the effort and the result never sit next to each other where you can compare them. You train Monday, entertain Tuesday, weigh yourself Thursday, and blame the training.
What we would do about it
We are not going to tell you to give up client dinners. They are part of your life and, often, part of your income. The place that tells a 48 year old with a full diary to stop drinking has misunderstood the person it is talking to.
What we would do is smaller and more honest. Pick the nights that matter and drink well on those, rather than letting a quiet glass become the default on the nights that do not. Put a hard session the morning after a known dinner, not the morning of, so the repair window is not the one you spend metabolising Rioja. Keep the protein high on the days you know a dinner is coming, because it gives the muscle more to work with even when the alcohol is working against it. And step on the scale less. A single Thursday reading tells you about Tuesday's wine, not about your month.
The wine is not the pantomime villain here. It is a cost, like any other, and you already know how to manage a cost once you can see it. The trick is seeing it.
Final Thought
You do not have a discipline problem. You have an information problem, and the information was hidden two days downstream from the decision. Most of the clients we see in this position are not drinking too much. They are training hard, entertaining often, and reading the scale on the wrong day.
Bring the two things into the same view and the frustration tends to lift. Not because you drink less, though you might, but because the effort and the result finally line up.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where the effort is leaking out of your week, that is a good place to start a conversation. The first one is free, and you can book it here: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.exclusive-fitness.net/contact/&source=gmail&ust=1785768732836000&sa=E
Exclusive Fitness is a private, one to one personal training studio in Canterbury, led by senior coaches Tom Forrest and Leon Baker, supported by a team of trainers, with sports physiotherapist Jake Wilson based in the same studio.
Some of the data behind this piece:
Parr EB et al. "Alcohol Ingestion Impairs Maximal Post Exercise Rates of Myofibrillar Protein Synthesis Following a Single Bout of Concurrent Training." PLOS ONE, 2014.
Siler SQ et al. Work on the effect of alcohol on whole body fat oxidation. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1999.
