Lose 2-5 Pounds in 1 Night With Red Wine
I just had this conversation with a client who has recently lost close to 30 pounds in about 6 months. She's crushing it! But she recently hit a plateau, or so she thought. And here's what I had to say about that:
Her: "Nate, I've lost 30 pounds in 6 months. I was losing a little over 1 pound per month every week but for the past 3 weeks I've been stuck at the same weight. I'm wondering if I need to add in more cardio or drop my calories lower."
Me: "Have you been doing anything different over the last 3 weeks compared to 1+ month ago? Are you eating more? I know you're still working out so that hasn't changed."
Her: "I haven't changed anything! I'm still eating 1,600 Calories every day just like I was before. I just wonder if I need to drop my calories or workout more."
Me: "You definitely do NOT want to drop calories lower and you don't need to workout more. Instead, I want you to drink one glass of red wine tonight. Just one! And tell me what the scale does in the morning."
The next day I got this text...
"Update: The wine worked! I'm down 3 pounds!"
Little moments like this just get me so fired up and make me feel good about myself lol. I'm not surprised the wine worked, but it's honestly a crazy "trick" I learned about 6 years ago and it's always been faithful to me.
Let me tell you what's going on so you can try this out if you ever get stuck in a similar situation.
Fat loss is a relatively straight-forward process. Once you figure out the calories you need AND once you hit that calorie goal every day you'll be losing fat at a pretty dang consistent pace.
And let's say you're eating the right amount of calories to lose 1 pound per week...you'll keep losing 1 pound per week for a LONG time as long as you keep hitting that calorie goal.
It IS true that your "metabolism will slow down" when you lose weight. A smaller body requires fewer calories per day to sustain itself. But the drop in number of calories burned isn't that significant.
Which means there is no way, (provided you're still hitting your calorie goal...), you can be losing 1+ pound every week and then all of a sudden stall/plateau. It just doesn't work like that.
BUT something interesting can happen.
Sometimes, and I'm not sure anyone knows exactly why this happen, when you lose a lot of fat over a long period of time your body will start to fill the fat cells with water. The body can hold onto this water for days and even weeks at a time.
Eventually the retained water will leave the body, but until it does the scale won't show your fat loss progress. Despite still continuing to lose fat consistently!
If you just keep doing what you're doing, you can be confident that eventually the scale will show the weight lost. It has to. And it always does...eventually.
But we all know 80% of the road to losing weight involves winning the mental game. And plateaus can be very discouraging.
In comes Red Wine.
Alcohol is a mild diuretic which means it makes you flush water out of your system! A red wine specifically, without any sugar, is the key to flushing that water out.
I'd say at least 90% of the time, when a client in this situation tries 1 glass of red wine at night, they notice a significant drop on the scale the next day.
In Summary, it's very common to retain water while losing weight. It will eventually come out of your body and it'll show up on the scale. BUT if you don't want to wait for that to happen, try a glass of red wine!
Just remember, the wine isn't actually burning fat. It's just flushing water out. So don't go thinking a daily glass or red wine or even multiple glasses of wine are the key to losing weight fast lol. Definitely NOT the case!