 We've been studying and analyzing the data for our own body for about three years on what affects alcohol consumption or abstention has on either weight gain or weight loss. If you don't want to stick around for the rest of our analysis here, our current conclusion is that we cannot find, at this point in time, any correlation between alcohol consumption and alcohol abstention and weight gain or weight loss. If you want to see my analysis and thoughts behind what's happening here, please watch the video. Hey there, NJRoot22.com here with another kind of a low-carb keto carnivore chat. And today, this is, I've been working on this for three years. I've been tracking my alcohol consumption as well as my weight. It's not a scientific process. I'm not measuring lipids and all sorts of blood levels. This is just, you know, almost anecdotal, but I've kept track of my weight and when I drink, what days I drink and how much most of the time. Let me give you a little background here first. Back when, over 10 years ago, when I was, I had the standard American diet, we were extremely high carb. My favorite foods were pizza, burgers, french fries, you know, white castles. I was, I was all over the map and over the course of my life, as I went from adolescence to adulthood and beyond, I don't know if you can go beyond adulthood, but you know, I may have had a beer belly and our choice of booze as we were, you know, socializing and living our lives as adults was beer. Beer. I liked my coronas. I liked my guineases. I drank a lot of beer. I guess you could say I have beer belly. And in our case, we, when we drank alcohol and I believe this is the reason why many people gain weight and they attribute it to alcohol is because after I went out with my friends and it was like three in the morning, we'd go stumble home, literally, and I would stop at the pizza place that was open till 4 a.m. and I would get five slices of pizza or garlic knots or empanadas. I would get home and I would sit on the sofa and I would eat pizza and I would pass out like a disgusting fat slob. I may have been at one point in my life 300 pounds. That's that's land monster status for sure. I never saw it on the scale, but I remember being close to that, very close. So what happened a little over a decade ago, I became low carb. I started learning about the blood sugar and and insulin and ketosis and all this other stuff and you know, I would just raw, very vague general knowledge. I lost about 75 pounds very quickly. I think I got down to about two and a quarter and you know, I was still drinking beer here and there and this and that, but you know five, six, seven years into the low carb, I switched to red wine and I stopped drinking beer because beer to me was gassy and it was kind of impeding my weight loss and I even did a cheap wine vlog here because I even just a couple years ago I was still drinking red wine, but like I said, we got down to about two and a quarter and my goal was around 180. I'm six foot four. You can't tell from this video, but I'm six foot four. So and then about two years ago, I discovered the zero carb slash carnivore plan and I lost about, very gradually, I lost another 25 pounds and I got down to about 200 pounds and maybe at one point even 195 and I was very happy and and I still drank alcohol almost every day, red wine every day and I was losing weight, you know, pretty consistently. But we reached this point in our life, you know, we're not spring chickens and if you have enjoyed alcohol recreationally for decades, a couple decades here and there, it was starting to have an effect on our body and you would feel it in your, you can't feel your liver, but my pancreas, maybe my gallbladder, I wasn't feeling right. And in the last six months or so, we gained about 10 pounds. So we got back up to around 210 and it wasn't changing. So I decided I'm gonna start monitoring like almost hyper-intensively. I was monitoring my alcohol and mainly because I wanted to heal this. Not for weight loss. I didn't really care or I wasn't thinking about it. I wanted to get rid of this pain in my side. But, you know, a byproduct of this experimentation with abstention from alcohol was also to see if it had any effect on our weight. So my first phase, this is kind of hard to explain, but about six months ago, well, maybe seven or eight months ago, I said, okay, you know, I looked at my data and I think at one point I think I drank 90 straight days in a row. Not a lot. Maybe a glass or two of wine with dinner. And sometimes a bottle or two. But I didn't, I never got smashingly drunk. Maybe once, once a month I had a little pain the next day and it'll hang over. But I enjoyed alcohol mainly because it helped me go to sleep and that's what a lot of people use it for. It's like a little crutch to get to sleep. So my first phase was like I'm gonna start take consciously taking days off even though I wanted to drink. I said I'm gonna take some time off from drinking and the first phase was about four months long and I was taking about 15% of the time off from drinking doesn't it? It sounds like a lot, but it's really not. It was like every, you know, two or three two times a week I would stop drinking if that one or two times a week just to have a break to give my liver a rest or my pancreas, what have you. And while that happened, there's kind of a timeline here because I did this at the end of the last summer. And while I did this, you know, pause in drinking or just an occasional day off, I gained about 10 pounds. And I did a video about doing this weight gain and I wasn't sure if it was just less activity from the summer or if I dabbled into this low carb ice cream nonsense. And I don't know, and the alcohol, I was wondering what it was that caused me to gain this weight. But during this phase I had, you know, even taking a few days off, I gained 10 pounds. So I said, let me let me amp this up. So I went to phase two, which was I'm gonna increase my number of days I don't drink. And I went from about 15% of the time not drinking, and I doubled it to 30% of the time, which is I gave myself more days rest. Because I thought, you know, if I gave two or three days rest of my liver between drinking, then that would help. But it didn't make a damn bit of difference. I was exactly at 210 pounds during this phase two as well. I'm like, you know, my diet's the same. It's been consistent meat. And that's it. So then just recently I did phase three, which is where I'm gonna really bump up. I'm gonna double my time off from drinking again. I think I went, my abstention went to about 60% of the time I did not drink. I mean, to drink four out of 10 days still sounds like a lot. Most people drink one day a week or not even once a month. But I mean, I even took two weeks off in a row, which was it gets easier every time you go three days off. They take four days off and five days off. It gets easier. It becomes like your sleep doesn't get affected anymore. And you really don't have any stress about drinking. Although there are certain stressful things that happen in your life that make you just want a damn drink. So I did this phase three and I took more than 60% of the time off from drinking and I still didn't gain weight or lose weight. I was exactly the same. I'm like, what the F. So based on these, and I have three years of data here. So during this three years, my diet for all intents and purposes stayed the same. And when I drank a lot of alcohol, I actually lost weight. And when I cut my alcohol consumption down a lot, including a lot of consecutive days without drinking, I didn't have any significant weight loss whatsoever. So one of my first conclusions was that I guess these weights that I'm at are what my body's comfortable with. And I'm thinking that because in the summertime, there's three or five months during the summer where I'm spending a significant amount of time landscaping my yard. And that includes walking six miles a day and weed whacking and lugging wheelbarrows and debris. And I really do work up a huge sweat and I do it all by hand and manually most of the time. So I think that like during my active months, my weight goes down. And then during the winter and fall, winter and the beginning of spring, not nearly as active. I'm not like a sloth. I'm not sitting on the sofa all day, but I am relatively inactive. And we don't work out. I should mention that we don't go to the gym. We don't have time. If I had time to go to the gym, things would be a lot different. So those are my correlations. Alcohol abstention didn't cause me to lose weight. And the days where I drank 90 straight days, I lost weight and that all had to do with during the summer. So I really think activity is somewhat important here. But what I'm going to do next is I'm going to try. I don't know when I'm going to start this, but since I've already determined that alcohol consumption really doesn't make me gain weight and alcohol abstention doesn't make me lose weight, I'm going to try a different method now. I'm going to try a one on two off. Like one day I'll have a drink or five and then I'm going to try and take two days off in a row before I drink again. And then one day and I'm going to try very hard not to drink two days in a row. I'll do one on, two off, one on. That'll give me up to about 66% of the time I will not be drinking. So that's even more than my previous abstention method. And we'll see if that works. And then I'm going to even go even further than that, perhaps. Because I'm doing this mainly for my liver and pancreas and gallbladder. I don't think drinking every day is good for my body. And then if I go on, I may get to the point where I'm just drinking two days a week, which is only eight days out of 56 days, which is pushing 70% of the time not drinking. And then if possible, I may just switch to just the one day a week, like a Friday or Saturday, like a weekend enjoyment and then take the rest of the time off. And then I don't know, maybe it's possible I could just not drink at all. I know a lot of people have succeeded because there's no real upside to drinking alcohol at all. And I'm going to end this right now. By the way, just please hit the like and subscribe if you like my discussions. This is just honest talk from a real person. I'm not influenced by any medical corporations or sponsors. But what I want to talk about is I've always believed that your body cannot burn stored body fat when there's alcohol in the body. The alcohol processing has to be done first. Then you can go and burn stored body fat, which it doesn't really make sense to me because even with alcohol in my body, I was losing stored body fat. But I guess my point is maybe two weeks of not drinking is not enough. Maybe I need, you know, 90, 30, 60, 90 days or just complete abstention and giving up alcohol altogether before the effects, the negative effects of alcohol may actually come in. So like I said, two weeks had no impact on my body weight with the same exact diet. So activity and zero alcohol could turn me into a 6% body fat person. We're at, I don't know, 14%, 13, 14% right now. So that's it. Please again, hit the like and subscribe. This is just a discussion. I hope other people are going through these same things. And it's not just a polarized black and white drink or don't drink. I think there is people have to go through the motions to understand what works for them and experience what it's like. It's just not following. I'm going on and on. I'll see you next video.