Is mommy wine culture secretly sabotaging your fat loss?

In today’s episode, we’re having an honest conversation about alcohol and how it’s impacting your fat loss progress.

Especially in mom culture - The nightly glass of wine, the “mommy needs a drink” jokes, the margaritas at girls night.

To be clear: this episode is not about shame or telling you that you can never drink again.

But if you’re trying to:

✔️Lose body fat
✔️Control cravings
✔️Improve your sleep
✔️ Feel better in your body + clothes

… you may need to look at your relationship with alcohol.

Inside this episode I’m sharing:

• My personal journey with alcohol
• Why alcohol pauses fat burning
• How it impacts cravings and decision making
• Why those “just a few drinks” add up quickly
• Healthier ways to unwind at the end of a long day

If fat loss has felt harder than it should and alcohol is part of the equation for you… this conversation might open your eyes.

Want to connect with Christie?

Make sure to follow Stronger Within so you never miss an episode. New episodes drop weekly with practical tools for sustainable fat loss, mindset shifts, and habits that fit your life.

Ready to go ALL in on your goals with high touch, personalized coaching and strategy so you can lose fat consistently without restricting yourself or spending hours in the gym? Apply for 1:1 Coaching!

Looking for a low commitment way to get direct access to me and my expertise? Join my group coaching program, Strong as a Mother!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey friend, welcome back to Stronger Within, the podcast for women who are done chasing quick fixes and are ready to build real strength and lasting change from the inside out. I'm your host, Christy Magri, and here we talk about becoming Stronger Within in your body, your mindset, and the daily habits that shape your life. If you're ready to build a body and life you feel confident in for good, you're in the right place. Today's episode is for you. If you feel like you are doing so much to lose weight, you are checking a lot of the boxes, tracking your food, lifting in the gym, eating more protein, making more health-conscious decisions, doing cardio, getting your steps in, but the scale's not moving, you're not seeing progress. There is one habit that could be sabotaging your fat loss progress. And I find that it's something that is kind of normal, normalized in everyday culture and society. Like you're kind of weird if you don't drink. Now, I will say I feel like my generation, I'm a millennial. I feel like we are starting to break the cycle. And I know a lot of people that don't drink now. I am one of them. Um, and I want to give a disclaimer before I start this episode that this is not about shaming anyone. I do not want you to feel judged. I don't want to tell you that you can never drink again if it's something that you enjoy doing, but I do want to share the facts because I want you to have all the information that you need when it comes to making consistent progress because I know you want to feel good in your body. I know you want to lose the weight, I know you want to progress. And so we need to have this open and honest conversation. Second disclaimer is it's gonna get a little vulnerable up in here. So I'm gonna share a little about a bit about my personal journey with alcohol because my relationship with it has changed a lot over the years, and I don't love talking about this time in my life. I am pretty shameful about it. I don't like it, I don't like talking about it, I don't like acknowledging it. I just love to shut shove it down and pretend like it didn't exist. I do share glimpses of it here and there, but I'm not that person anymore, so I don't love to dwell in that. But I feel like for today's episode, it's important that I also get a little vulnerable and share that part of my life with you. Okay, so we might as well just start by getting right into that. So I feel like I need to back up a little bit to my childhood and my upbringing because that did play a huge role in kind of what happens next. So I grew up with a single mom and mommy culture, mommy wine culture specifically, was very normalized in my house. I remember going to the package store with her as a kid. By the way, where are you from? Because I'm from Connecticut and we call them package stores here where they sell alcohol, but I don't think they're called that everywhere. But I remember going with her as a kid, like going in multiple times a week, and she would get those boxed wines, um, the ones that you like pour it, like it's like a water pitcher. And on top of that, like nightly wine culture, she would go out a lot on the weekends. Now, my mom had me when she was kind of young. She was 22 or 23, I can't remember, which that's pretty young. She, my dad, who I don't speak to, he's he was in and out of my life as a kid, and now as an adult, I'm like, nope, I don't want anything to do with that. Um, it wasn't a great relationship. Like, they should have never been together from the beginning. And I was born and unexpected surprise, and I my mom just was not in a position to have a child. So I feel like she struggled to grow up, and so she didn't really get out of that party phase. Like, I remember in, you know, when as I was growing up, she's in her 30s and then her 40s, like it was just very normalized to go out to the bar, drink on the weekend. Every kind of social event involved drinking, and that was all I knew. And her friends did the same thing, like the circle of people she hung out with. So as I got older, as I became a teenager, I started to dabble in it, obviously. She also would give me wine coolers when I was like 13, 14 years old, so there's that. But I was like, oh, this is just normal, like, this is just what people do. And then I went to college in 2012, and obviously in college, there's partying, there's drinking, and for me, I just did not know my limits. I did not have a healthy relationship with alcohol at all. I'm also a very small human. I am barely 4'11, so any small amount, like me trying to keep up with other people, just does not end well. And also for me, a big part, like my upbringing, again being vulnerable, but I really struggled with like any self-confidence. Like, you think about on a scale of one to ten, how much self-confidence do you have, one being the worst. Like, I would have been negative. Like, I was a loner growing up, I was extremely insecure. I really even still struggle with this to this day, just in terms of like at like asking somebody for help or even like at the store, if there's like an inconvenient thing I need help with, like, I feel guilty. I as a kid grew up walking on eggshells, and so I always feeling like I was an inconvenience. And so for me, that was something that was really hard to break. So had zero self-confidence. So alcohol was this thing that you add to the mix. And it's like, oh, now like the drinks are flowing, I can talk to people, I'm feeling confident. And so that was a part of that college experience for me. And again, I I didn't know my limits. I was literally, again, here we go, into being vulnerable and shameful. I was the person who would drink to the point of blacking out, and I didn't care at this time either. Like, I didn't really realize that it was wrong. I didn't realize there was a problem with it in the moment. And now looking back, I'm like, oh, you had lifelong trauma that you hadn't worked through, that you hadn't come to terms with what it was and healed. And you know, you're using alcohol as this mask to help you numb parts of your life you're not happy with. And so I have made a lot of decisions I'm not proud of, and honestly, things that have could have gotten me or somebody else hurt. And again, I don't like to talk about this stage in my life because it's super embarrassing, and I quite literally hate myself for it. So it's important for me to share this so you know that background. And also, I still had a problem with it in when I graduated college, so like in 2016, 2017, 2018, even that was when it started to get better, but like 2016 and 2017, I still had problems, and that was the time when I first started consistently going to the gym and lifting, and I started to track macros, and of course I wasn't seeing results because I was still drinking all the time, and yeah, it just was a bad addiction. It was a bad problem, and I became a mom and I got my shit together, luckily, and um now I am almost two years completely sober because you know I would still have it on like a special occasion if there was like a party with friends or a wedding or whatever, but it was never worth it. Like, even if I had two drinks, I felt like absolute crap the next day. It was never worth it. And during the time when I was drinking a lot too, oh my god, my body felt terrible all the time. I had headaches, I remember having to take medicine all the time, obviously feeling nauseous in the mornings. Like, I just never ever want to experience a hangover like that again, or any hangover again. When I was pregnant with Chloe, actually, it felt like I had a 24-7 hangover because my morning sickness was literally so bad. But, anyways, we're we're losing the plot here. So let me reel it back in. So two years ago, I decided to go fully sober because I was like, you know what, this is not even worth it on this special occasion. That summer, like, so I decided to quit in April, um, two years ago when I started training for my first half marathon because I was like, you know what, summertime is coming up. I know I get a little bit more lax in the summer, and I want to make sure that I'm sharp get training for this race, and so I just completely gave it up. And then I ran the half marathon in October. We had a friend's wedding in September. I ended up having two drinks because I was like, oh, my summer sober thing is over. I don't even remember what I called it. I think I just called it sober summer. I was like, it's over their wedding. It was September 1st, so it was like perfect timing. I had two drinks at the wedding, I didn't even get a buzz, and I felt like I was dying the next day. And that's when I was like, nope, we're just done with this completely. So yeah, now here we are, and I'm curious to know what has your relationship with alcohol looked like over the years. Like, can anybody relate to this upbringing and like seeing your mom or your dad or your parents drink? And like, was it something that was normalized for you? Or do you feel like it was something that became part of your routine later in life? I'm curious. And again, I'm probably gonna say this a million times throughout this episode, but I'm not here to tell you that you can never drink again or shame you. But if you're somebody who feels like you're doing a lot of the right things to lose weight and you are drinking, maybe it's not every day, maybe it's every single weekend, maybe it's a few times throughout the month. Alcohol could be a piece of the puzzle that we want to look at if you feel like I'm not making progress and I should be. So I find this fascinating, and I heard this recently, but more recent research is showing that there's actually no completely safe levels of alcohol when it comes to overall health. And for a long time, even we were told that things like a glass of red wine every night was actually good for us. You probably may have heard, you know, that it's heart healthy or it has antioxidants. I mean, it's the same thing with cigarettes back in the day, right? But what researchers have found over the years is that the potential benefits were really overstated. And when we zoom out and we look at alcohol as a whole, even small amounts can have really negative effects on the body. And I actually read the other day as well that alcohol has been classified as a group one carcinogen by the World Health Organization, which means it's in the same category as things like tobacco when it comes to cancer risk. That is crazy. And that doesn't mean that like one drink is going to give you cancer, obviously. I think that we know that here, but it does mean that the idea of something like alcohol actually being harmless or even healthy, it's not accurate, right? For moms, especially, we're trying to lose weight, we're trying to improve our energy, get rid of inflammation, get rid of bloating, sleep better as much as we can with little kids at home, feeling better in our clothes, maybe fitting in our pre-pregnancy jeans, all these things that we really want. We want to feel good. We want to look good. And adding alcohol into our routine can really sabotage our chances of actually reaching those goals. So think about it. Like, how often would you say in a 30-day cycle, out of how many of those days do you drink? Is it every week? Is it something you do intentionally? Is it just out of habit? You really want to ask yourself these questions because if it is a part of your routine, we need to find a way to minimize it or at least be more conscious of it. And when we think about our weight loss goals in specific, you need to understand that the body prioritizes metabolizing alcohol before anything else. And so what happens is when you have a drink, let's say you have like a white claw, for example, when that white claw enters your system, your body immediately treats it like a toxin because it is. So now instead of burning carbs or fat, your body has to shift its entire focus to metabolizing the alcohol first. What does this mean? This means that fat burning gets put on pause. It's the body's like, hold on, I need to focus on metabolizing this. Now we're not burning fat until the alcohol has processed. And so, simply put, if you are in a fat loss journey and your priority is fat loss right now, you have to do whatever it's gonna take to make your body feel supported in losing that fat. If your goal is important to you, like you say it is, if it is a priority like you say it is, then start treating things that way. Right? If we know that our body really prioritizes processing this substance before it can do the process of having to burn the fat, does that change the way you think about drinking when you're actively trying to lose weight? Because it absolutely does for me. And the other thing is that the calories add up fast. We have to talk about that because obviously, you know, when you're losing fat, you have to be in a calorie deficit. You need to be intaking less calories than you are burning in a day. And alcohol adds up quickly and has zero nutritional benefit. So depending on the drink, it can range anywhere from like most common like 100 to 250 calories. And most people aren't having just one drink, they're having two or three. If you are somebody who does like to occasionally drink, I'm curious if you've ever actually added up the calories from drinks over the course of a night or a weekend. If you try to actually like log those and see how they affect your day, because I find that when people do that for the first time, it's pretty eye-opening. So while I'm sitting here telling you that there's no safe levels of alcohol, alcohol is not good for your goals. If you do want to drink, there are things that we can do, like choosing lower calorie options, um, like a seltzer, a vodka soda, those are the two coming to mind because I don't drink, I don't really know anything about drink selections. Also, if you do choose to drink, just like I said, make sure you're tracking it and accounting for it so you can make sure that you're still in that calorie deficit. Because the things that affect our calories, they're not just food. It's everything we drink too. And so we need to make sure that if we are drinking, we are accounting for it. The other thing I want us to think about, because I'm thinking about like we're talking about extra calories and how you need to be in the calorie deficit. Drinking alcohol really impacts your decision making. This is something that I really experienced when I drank, is like also during this time when I was binge drinking, I was doing all the diets. I would even do like where I wouldn't eat for a day, and then I would binge shrink at night, which is probably also why I was getting blacked out. Um, so you know, you I would have a few drinks, and then suddenly the food decisions like went out the window. Inhibitions were up. It was like, I don't care. Let's go get Taco Bell or let's order a pizza or let's eat all the snacks. And so we have to set those boundaries and those limits if we are going to drink. Because if we're just getting like sloppy and our inhibitions are just up, then our food choices might look different. And so not only now are we adding the extra calories from the alcohol, but now the food is also impacting us as well. Also, when I think about this time in my life, I think about not only the calories that were adding up from what I was drinking and the decisions I was making after, but also how I would sleep that night. I would usually get broken sleep, I would wake up feeling so dehydrated, feeling sick. And then the next morning, usually you have a hangover, even if it's just a little one, and you're like, I need hangover food. So then you're getting a breakfast sandwich and a hash brown at McDonald's, you're eating like crap all day, you're not moving your body. I remember I would also wake up really anxious and tired and depressed and just not good feelings. Feelings I never want to feel again if I can help it, which is why I don't drink anymore. And so again, it ties back to we're making it really hard for our body to do what it needs to do to lose body fat. We are literally sabotaging in multiple ways here. Also, we can add inflammation into the conversation, our recovery, our energy, our cravings, like it truly affects everything. And I want you to get thinking about this as we head into the summer months because we also need to figure out what our triggers are, right? And two main ones I see number one, the time of year. With summer coming, like I said, that's usually a time where alcohol intake tends to increase. So we think about like pool days, barbecues, fourth of July, vacations, patio drinks, it adds up in the summer. I don't know about you, but I know I when I used to drink, I was way more lax in the summer. Even if I didn't necessarily have a problem with it, you know, summers past, I still it it still added up, especially if I was focusing on a fat loss goal. Like it was just easier not to have that as part of the equation. So the first trigger I see is time of year, and then the second one is that like end-of-day reward mindset. So I know for a lot of moms, it's like it's less about the alcohol and more of what it represents. So it's kind of this signal that the day is over, right? The kids are asleep. We made it through another chaotic day, we broke up 10 fights, we cleaned the kitchen, and we're sitting on the couch with our glass of wine, and it's that moment of peace at the end of the day. But guys, we can include that peace in other ways that don't involve drinking alcohol. We can have other rituals that signal to our brain that the day is over and we're winding down. Maybe you do a sparkling water with lime in a fancy glass, or in the cold winter months, if you live somewhere that's cold, I love doing hot chocolate. I do the no sugar added hot chocolate with whipped cream. Maybe you could do a tea in your favorite mug or a zero calorie soda, whatever it is, you can still romanticize that moment without needing alcohol to be a part of the equation. And again, I know I've said this multiple times, but I'm not here to tell you that you have to deprive yourself of anything. We need to have that balance. We need to have that moderation. Again, if it's something that's happening every single weekend, well, one, you're making it hard for your body to do what it needs to do to lose fat. And number two, it's gonna be really hard if you have a fat loss goal to stay in your calorie deficit because you are drinking empty calories from alcohol that quite honestly you need to be consuming food in replacement of that for you to feel satisfied, for you to feel full, for the process to feel easy and enjoyable. And so when we think about summer coming up specifically, going back to the first trigger point for people, which is the time of year, again, can we use the same kind of concept that we talk about with our wind down routine? Can we romanticize the moment and still have fun, especially in those social situations, without needing to drink just for it to be fun or whatever? Because I know for me, again, this goes back to like in a social situation, I would have to be drinking. It was like literally the only way that I would in my head I was convinced that I would have fun or whatever. But now I'm like, that is not fun. That is not my definition of fun now. So again, we can do the zero calorie drinks. I think about my client who similar upbringing alcohol was very normalized, and then she became an adult and she came into that. And like every time her family gets together, it's them having fun. And part of that social process is drinking. And so when we started working together, that was something that we really had to work through because it was like, well, if we're not seeing the progress we want to see, but we're drinking multiple times throughout the month, we need to get real about where the gap is, where we are, and where we want to be, because we need to treat our goals like the priority we say they are, which that might sound kind of harsh, but that's the truth of it, guys. If you're not willing to do what it's gonna take, then you're gonna continue to stay stuck and unhappy in the same place. And nobody can want that for you but you. You have to get sick enough of your own shit. But, anyways, it was hard enough, it was hard for her to kind of go against the grain because her family's like, oh, you're not drinking. Like it would seem weird to not drink, and that's something that we've had to work on. And she would bring zero calorie drink, different drink options with her that weren't alcohol, or she would let herself have the one beer, but she would set that boundary, she would set that limit, and now she's at the point where oh my gosh, she has progressed in so many ways. I'm so proud of this woman. I almost called her a girl, she's not a girl, she's a woman. But now that she's changed her habits and built a lifestyle change, when she does drink on the one-off occasion, she's told me like that wasn't even worth it. I feel terrible today. I honestly wish I didn't even do that. Like the few times that she has drank in the last few months, it's not even worth it. And that's kind of where I got to when I started to see how good I felt without it. And then when I would have it randomly, like here and there, I'm like, uh this is not even worth it to me. And I'm gonna say this one last time in case you missed it one of the hundred times that I said it throughout this episode. But I'm not here to shame you, and I'm not here to tell you that you have to deprive yourself of anything. If you know me, if you know anything about my coaching philosophy, I am all about balance, moderation, not depriving yourself of things. But I think we also need to look at the facts. And I think that at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, is this really worth it? We can have it on occasion, but again, if it's something that is happening frequently and I consider frequently, honestly, more than once a month, I would consider frequently. We have to take an honest look at the situation and ask ourselves, am I really being mindful and honest on how this is impacting my goals? So if fat loss really feels harder than it should be, if your cravings feel out of control, if you feel exhausted all the time, and you drink even just a few times a month, this might really be worth taking a closer look at. If you need help creating this habit change, building a lifestyle change that sticks, that allows you to both live your life, not feel restricted, enjoy the process. That is exactly what we do together inside my one-on-one coaching program. Feel free to send me a DM over on Instagram anytime. I'm happy to help if there's something specific that you are struggling with. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode resonated, I'd love for you to share it or leave a review. It helps this message reach even more women who need it. Until next time, keep becoming stronger with it.