The human body is a fantastic machine.

It has countless ways of self-regulating so that we take care of our own heartbeat, hormones, temperature, digestion and many other functions without any conscious thought, and as long as we look after it then it serves us pretty well.

This includes our appetite

We regulate how much food we eat with precision, as long as we eat mainly healthful foods and listen to our hunger and appetite signals effectively. The problems start when we start eating and drinking foods that are not freely available in nature, and one of the ways in which our self-regulation can go wrong is if we start drinking our calories.

Foods containing liquids, for example soups and smoothies, are fine. These are foods rather than drinks, and our bodies treat them as such. Our ability to regulate our food intake starts to decline when we imbibe calories as drinks, either sugar sweetened beverages or alcohol.

When we eat any food our mouth and stomach send messages to our brain informing it that food has arrived, and that it should prepare us to stop eating fairly soon, a process that takes about 20 minutes, by which time we should have eaten plenty to sustain us until the next meal.

As for alcohol, the picture is slightly worse!

So if we, for example, eat 200 calories in the form of solid sugar, let’s say sweets, for breakfast (not that we recommend this!!), then our brain registers that 200 calories and sets about tweaking all the relevant hormones and appetite signals so that we naturally want to eat 200 fewer calories throughout the rest of the day so that our overall intake ends up about right. And left to its own devices, our brain will do this very effectively to within about 10 calories or two cornflakes every day. Pretty impressive!

However, if we drink those 200 calories instead of eating solid food, so in the form of an energy drink or similar, our brain simply doesn’t notice. It makes no adjustment at all for the calories we have just taken in, and because they are in a very simple, immediately digestible form we absorb all of them, so we end up consuming 200 extra calories by the end of the day.

Remember, our bodies are designed to deal with naturally occurring foods and drinks, and there are few naturally occurring drinks that contain calories. With the exception of a few things like coconut water, we are designed to drink water.

Alcohol is an energy dense nutrient

It contains 7 calories per gram in comparison with 4 calories and 9 calories per gram of carbohydrate and fat respectively. So it’s more energy dense, and in a similar way to sugary drinks our brain simply doesn’t notice those calories and makes no adjustment for them. But to complicate things further, alcohol also switches our brain into starvation mode, significantly reducing our satiety hormones and increasing the ones that give us the munchies!

And if you’ve ever wondered why it absolutely has to be a curry, kebab or chips and not broccoli after the pub – it’s because alcohol also causes physiological changes that lead to us craving junk, not health food.

Don’t drink your calories!!!!