Booze causes problems with maintaining one's weight for a variety of reasons:
- Alcohol simply contains a bunch of calories (About 65 per 1 oz. hard liquor, about 140 per regular beer, and around 75-80 per 4 oz. of wine, etc.)
- Your body burns alcohol for fuel before it burns anything else.
- You're more likely to lose your resolve about dieting if you're tipsy.
- Alcohol affects the way your body controls its blood sugar levels. This is why you get the drunchies and overeat after drinking/think a McDouble and fries sounds like a good idea at 1 AM.
- Alcohol is a diuretic and dehydrates you which leads to water retention the morning after.
This is a pretty decent calorie-counter for alcohol. You can type in how much beer, wine, liquor, etc. you drink per week and find out your extra calories for the month and year. It is from a website called College Drinking Prevention so I was skeptical that the values might be inflated as a scare tactic, but I checked and it's all accurate.
(So, in a month, I'm taking in about 4,200 extra calories from wine because I have 2 glasses of wine a night. That's pretty gross, but on the other hand, I used to take in around the same amount of extra calories from alcohol in a week so it's an improvement.)
Basically, even moderate drinking (what most countries report as healthy for a woman is no more than 2 drinks per night) is not conducive to being skinny and most people I know don't drink moderately anyway.
I really like using the calorie counter to remind myself how many calories I'm saving by not drinking or not having that extra couple drinks at night. It's also good to remind myself how many extra calories I am taking in when I do drink.
I'm working on cutting down even more...it's a process. This post has gotten long enough as it is, so I'll be doing a list of my favorite low-calorie alcoholic drinks & tactics I use to curb drinking later.
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