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It's a common myth, and I'm not sure where it started. But no, booze doesn't metabolize into sugar. It gets broken down into something more like a fatty acid if I remember correctly.
Perhaps the myth is because blood sugar levels can spike while drinking. The liver will prioritize metabolizing alcohol over maintaining blood sugar levels.
I absolutely do not remember enough biochemistry from medical school to know off hand, but a brief lit review gave me these:
"Alcohol has a high energy content, and this energy is utilized by the body as efficiently as the energy in normal food. Ethanol has such good properties as a substrate for energy production that we are faced with the problem of explaining, not why it is consumed, but why it is not consumed in still larger quantities by nonalcoholic humans or by animals. When alcohol is consumed by animals, the intake of food decreases in relation to the caloric content of the alcohol; if a choice of macronutrients is possible, alcohol decreases the consumption of carbohydrates most."
"Step 3 Much of the acetate produced by the oxidation of acetaldehyde leaves the liver and circulates to peripheral tissues where it is activated to a key Acetyl CoA. Acetyl CoA is also the key metabolite produced form all major nutrients- carbohydrate, fat and excess protein. Thus, carbon atoms from alcohol wind up as the same products produced from the oxidation of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, including CO2, fatty acids, ketone bodies, and cholesterol; which products are formed depends on the energy state and the nutritional and hormonal conditions."
My main recollection is that it's shockingly energy dense but I don't remember which form of metabolism it most mimics. The above implies probably none of them, with the "it becomes sugar" perhaps being related to the carb's bit in the first quote, or the way it can absolutely fuck you up with hyperglycemia (which does not necessarily require pure sugar intake).
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Interesting. I didn't know that and had just absorbed the myth.
This makes me wonder about weight less after alcohol cessation. I wonder if it has more to do with poor eating habits that often come with drinking and, perhaps, some sort of digestive disruption.
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My guess is that the myth started the way that @cjet79 mentioned below - the majority of alcoholic drinks that have been consumed do have quite a bit of sugar (or simple carbs that are readily converted to sugar in the case of beers). If you're drinking cran-vodka or wine or beer in any appreciable quantity, you're getting quite a bit of sugar with it. The calories from the ethanol itself are obviously not going to help either.
If someone doesn't want to change their total EtOH intake but does want to cut the sugars and even maintain a keto diet, they can switch over to sipping neat whiskeys instead of pounding beers. I would also say that for anyone that isn't into alcoholism territory, this will tend to downregulate the amount of alcohol consumed pretty naturally. It's so, so easy to just sit there and drink 4 IPAs over the course of 4 hours watching TV shows and doing nothing. Pouring up four whiskeys feels weird in a completely different way. The high alcohol content makes the whole thing seem much more clear and intentional rather than it blending into the background and feeling the same as just drinking some tasty soda that happens to have alcohol. So, yeah, this one weird trick will tend to cut a lot of drink calories out of people's diet - just drink hard booze neat.
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Weight loss from stopping drinking shouldn't be too surprising, what you mentioned, plus: Plenty of alcoholic mixed drinks and cocktails are filled with sugar. And most beers are heavy on the carbs. Some wines are sugary (usually cheaper wines that add sugar, and dessert/port wines). Basically some people are probably drinking the equivalent of half a soda can per alcoholic drink. College kids gaining weight makes a lot of sense to me.
I heavily changed my alcohol consumption habits as part of the diet changes. On most days I'm doing a 12 hour fasting window, and some days an 18 hour fast so that helps with giving my body time for digestion (I keep any drinking within the eating window). I switched away from heavy beers and sugary cocktails to low carb beers and straight liquor.
The sugar and snacks and late night eating also impact hangovers. I went from bad half day long hangovers to basically not getting them. Which is part of why I think I started drinking more, there wasn't as much of an immediate next day cost as there used to be. Very frustrating to make progress in one area of my health, only for the slack I created to be used to degrade my health habits in other areas.
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Ethanol itself is 7cal/g in theory, but it's not fully metabolized in practice. So a pint of Guinness (4.2% abv) contains 210 calories according to the label. If you have three, it's 610 extra calories, enough to ensure a caloric surplus for that day. But you probably drink it with snacks, and it's easy to double or triple the calories with crisps, cheese sticks and wings.
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