Drinking alcohol can ruin a diet and lead to weight gain if you're not careful. With forethought and self-control, however, you can still enjoy a drink or two even when you're working to lose weight. By understanding how alcohol affects your body, making wise choices in your drink selections, using moderation and only drinking occasionally, alcohol won't hinder your dieting efforts and may even benefit them.
Calories
Alcoholic beverages can cause weight gain primarily because they contain calories. Although it's easy to view liquid items as less fattening than solid foods, the calories will affect your body in the same way. Even a simple drink contains at least 100 calories, and some drinks contain more than 500. If you drink alcohol while dieting, choose the drinks with the fewest calories. Fat counts, amounts of alcohol and healthiness of mixers don't directly influence the drink's impact on your weight; it's the calories that count.
Other Factors
Alcohol affects your body's metabolism and digestion in three ways. First, because alcohol contains no nutrients, your body processes it as fat and, if you ingest more calories than you burn, stores it as fat. Second, alcohol provides an ineffective fuel for your body, meaning that your metabolism slows and burns less fat. Third, alcohol has a sedative effect, which means you will become less energetic and hence might burn fewer calories.
On the other hand, some studies show that light or moderate alcohol intake might help you maintain your weight. A study in the "Archives of Internal Medicine," for example, reports that women who drink lightly a few times a week are more likely to avoid weight gain or to gain less weight than women who don't drink at all.
Alcohol and Food
Because booze doesn't satisfy hunger, it seldom replaces another source of calories. To keep the alcohol from adding to your waistline, consider the calories in your drink and compensate by eating less or lower-calorie foods. If you'll have a glass of wine with dinner, then skip the appetizers; if you want a daiquiri, skip your dessert. Don't skip a healthy, filling dinner -- drinking alcohol on an empty stomach endangers your safety, slows your metabolism and increases the chance that you'll overeat later.
Best Choices
Five oz. of wine contains about 100 calories, and dry white wine can even contain less than 100 per serving. A bottle of light beer contains a bit more than 100 calories, depending on the brand. If you want a mixed drink, choose a simple one with sugar-free mixers, or no mixers, and with low alcohol content. A rum and coke with diet cola and one shot of rum contains 100 calories -- whereas if you used 8 oz. of normal cola and two shots of rum, then the calories would triple. For about 100 calories per one-shot drink, try a gin and diet tonic, a whisky and soda water or a vodka in ginger ale. If you want a margarita, have it the old-fashioned way -- with just tequila, lime juice and triple sec -- for about 150 calories.
References
- "Archives of Internal Medicine"; Alcohol Consumption, Weight Gain, and Risk of Becoming Overweight...; Lu Wang, et al.; March 2010
- Alcohol Problems and Solutions; Alcohol, Calories & Weight; David J. Hanson
- College Drinking -- Changing the Culture: Alcohol Calorie Calculator
- UC San Diego Student Health Service; How Alcohol Affects Nutrition and Endurance; Gina Firth, et al.; 2007
- University of Rochester, University Health Service: Caloric Values of Alcoholic Beverages
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