Weight Loss After You Stop Drinking: What to Expect

You're three weeks into drinking less, or not drinking at all. You've read that the weight falls off when you quit. You step on the scale and it has barely moved. Maybe it has gone up.

That happens to plenty of people, as the studies below show. Here is what the research found when people stopped, and why the first weeks can be disappointing on the scale even when everything else is improving.

How many calories you were drinking

Alcohol has 7 calories per gram, almost as many as fat, according to the NHS. NIAAA's calorie calculator gives these figures for common drinks:

• 12-ounce regular beer: 153 calories
• 5-ounce glass of red wine: 125 calories
• 1.5-ounce shot of gin, rum, vodka or whiskey: 97 calories
• Margarita: 168 calories
• Piña colada: 490 calories

Those add up fast. A bottle of wine holds about five of those glasses, which is roughly 625 calories by NIAAA's numbers. A bottle every night comes to more than 4,000 calories a week. In UK measures, the NHS says a pint of 5% beer can contain up to 222 calories. NIAAA notes that drinks supply calories but few nutrients.

To see your own figure, the savings calculator shows how many calories your drinking adds up to in a year, next to the money.

The food that comes with drinking

The drinks are only part of it. A review of 22 trials found that people eat more food after an alcoholic drink, and they don't eat less to make up for the calories they drank. So the evening's total is the drinks plus extra food on top.

Alcohol also changes what your body burns. In a lab study of eight men, adding alcohol to their diet cut the fat they burned over the day by about a third, and the drop came during the hours their bodies were processing the alcohol. The researchers concluded that drinking more than your body needs probably favours storing fat and gaining weight.

What the first month looks like

Some of the clearest data comes from studies of month-long breaks. In a UK study of 94 regular drinkers who stopped for a month, typical weight went from 81.1 kg to 79.5 kg, a drop of about 1.5%. The spread was wide. A quarter of them lost almost 3% or more, while another quarter lost less than half a percent.

The same study found bigger changes elsewhere. Insulin resistance fell by about a quarter and blood pressure came down. The researchers said those changes were too large to be explained by weight loss alone. So even if the scale barely moves, your body is responding.

If you drink heavily every day, stopping suddenly can be dangerous. Talk to a doctor first.

Why the scale doesn't always move

One likely reason is the sugar swap. In a German study of 222 people who had just been through alcohol detox, nearly four in five said they were having more coffee, cigarettes, chocolate or sweets than before. A later study followed 150 people after detox and found that craving for and eating chocolate went up, mostly in the first month. Both studies were in people treated for alcohol dependence, so it may look different if you drank less. Still, a box of biscuits in the evening can cancel out the calories you stopped drinking. Sugar cravings after you stop drinking explains why it happens and how to stop it becoming the new habit.

The second reason is how much you drank to begin with. A review of the research found that heavy drinking is more consistently linked to weight gain than light or moderate drinking. In a US weight-loss programme where most people drank low to moderate amounts, cutting down on alcohol was not linked to losing more weight overall. If you had a couple of glasses a week, stopping won't change much on the scale. If you had a couple a night, it can.

Realistic expectations over months

NIAAA recommends losing weight slowly, at about half a pound to two pounds a week. To lose a pound a week, you need to take in about 500 fewer calories a day than your body burns. Three glasses of wine a night is about 375 calories, so on paper that alone gets you a good part of the way.

In practice, weight responds more slowly than the arithmetic suggests. Researchers who model weight change have found that the body adapts as you eat less, and about half the eventual change shows up in the first year. The rest comes over the following years if you keep the change.

The heavier your drinking was, the more there is to gain. In a 12-month Finnish weight-loss programme, the heavier drinkers who cut down more lost more weight. You don't need to stop completely for it to count.

How to make the change show

• Know your number. Work out how many calories a week you were drinking. It tells you what's realistic.
• Plan the evening. The hour you used to drink is when snacking can creep in. Decide ahead what you'll have instead, whether that's a herbal tea or an alcohol-free drink you like.
• Move a bit more. NIAAA says it's best to combine eating and drinking less with being more physically active. Mornings without a hangover make that easier.
• Weigh yourself once a week at the same time, and look at the trend over a month.
• Go easy on yourself about sweets early on, and rein them in once the evenings feel normal again.

The scale is one measure among many

Weight is easy to measure, so it gets a lot of attention. It is also one of the slower things to change. In the month-long study above, insulin resistance and blood pressure changed more than weight did. If your belly feels smaller before the scale says so, some of that may be bloating going down, which alcohol bloating and the beer belly explains. For the rest of what a month off does, see what happens when you stop drinking for 30 days.