Tracking Alcohol

Do I have to give up alcohol in order to lose weight?

NOPE!

BUT, you'll have to make sure you're factoring it into your macros appropriately . Here's the why and how.

Alcohol is almost like a fourth macro. It isn’t needed to sustain life, but it does provide calories and energy which are two of the main parameters of macronutrients. By itself, alcohol is not a carbohydrate, fat, or protein. There are actually about 7 calories per 1g of alcohol, Which isn't reflected on a bottle of booze. BUT from a calorie or energy perspective, it's half way between a fat (at 9 cal/gram) and a carb (both 4 cal/gram). Your body needs to breakdown the calories into energy just as it would a carb, protein or fat. Which is why we need to account for those calories in our daily macros. We do this by exchanging some of our carbs or fats for alcohol as shown above.

❓So how do we go about exchanging carbs or fats for alcohol❓

There are 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate and 9 per gram of fat. To factor alcohol into your macros, you'll need to take the total amount of calories in that particular beverage and divide them by 4 for carbs, or 9 for fats.

For example, let's take your Wednesday night glass of

🍷: 5oz of red wine has 105 calories. Let’s say you want to count that wine against your carb allotment. There’s 1g of carbohydrate per 4 calories, which means that a 105-calorie glass of wine will add 26g of carbs to your count (105 calories divided by 4g/cal =26g of alcohol as carbs).

Alternatively, let’s say you want to count the wine against your fat allotment with 1g of fat per 9 calories, that same 105-calorie glass of wine could add 12g of fat instead (105 calories divided by 9g/cal = 12g of alcohol as fat).

While it might seem time consuming at first, it get's pretty easy once you get the hang of it and it can make a huge difference in your results!