So I discovered that over the past 5 years in my time as a student my weight has fluctuated massively. Like most students I gained a ton of weight in my freshmen year, and then began to lose it as I hit my 3rd year. What was interesting to me was that I've never made a conscious effort to lose weight in my life. It wasn't until various family members were consistently commenting on how skinny I looked on my return to the UK (some genuinely concerned at how much weight I dropped) that I really had to sit back and look at what had changed. The easy answer: alcohol.
To give you a better picture of it all linking together:
I've always been active and involved in sport, and until I left the UK two years ago I'd played hockey every year, but it seemed that even being active on a weekly basis didn't stop me from gaining a lot of weight, leaving me with a hamster face. In fact when I first moved to California I stopped being active for the first year but still continued to lose weight. It seemed that no matter what level of exercise I did, my weight didn't correlate to the level of exercise I was doing.
Also, for the 5 years I've been a student my diet has stayed somewhat consistent. I never made an effort to alter my diet in anyway and always ate the same kind of foods. As far as quantity goes, I would eat less and less as my activity level reduced because I was less hungry. It's possible that I put on weight because I was eating more during activity, but that doesn't explain the weight loss in my third year of uni because I was still active then, and therefore eating high quantities.
So the only thing it can be is alcohol.
Now in my first and second years of uni I would binge drink twice a week. I put on lots of weight and it shows in my fresher year pics (especially after tour). In my third year my workload increased, and so I was binge drinking once a week at the most, drastically reducing my consumption. It was around this time people (mostly family) started commenting on how I looked skinny, but I couldn't understand why because I'd literally done nothing different as far as I knew. I would then move to California and as a result stopped playing hockey and stopped drinking. I would maybe binge drink once every 4/5 months, and have a few beers with friends once a month. Again my alcohol consumption plummeted and I began to get more concerned family members saying I should eat more pies.
In 2 years I'd lost over 10lbs purely because I reduced my alcohol consumption.
To also support my theory I know I'm not the only case of this. I've had friends go through long term illness who, because they've had to stop drinking, dropped weight incredibly quickly.
Now I've not written this blog to boast about my weight loss, I've written it to highlight something that society (especially British society) doesn't seem to talk about. I'm surrounded by people saying to me, beer in hand, that they want to lose weight. They they're going to train hard and go running everyday. All of which will be worthless if they continue to drink excessively.
It's science; so you can look it up as I recently had to (and please correct me if I'm wrong my academic friends). Alcohol inhibits recovery. So if you go to the gym every day and then go clubbing at the weekend you're almost wasting your time. And you're increasing your chance of injury and illness on top of that.
Now many of you are thinking "eff off there's no way I'm going to reduce my nights out to once a month" but there is one more plus to reducing your alcohol intake as I've discovered. At the pub I recently found that two larger shandies is enough to get me well on my way to a good night - so actually the less you drink, the easier it is to get drunk.
So now you know my secret. Perhaps keep it in mind when the New Years resolutions come around!
