You may not know how to fit alcohol into your diet, while still allowing you to get the results you want. For many, a glass of wine with dinner or a cold beer on a summer afternoon is one of life’s simple pleasures. But in our health-conscious world, many people do forgo these pleasures in favour of pursuing their health and fitness goals. While there is certainly no reason to start including alcohol in your diet, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a part of a health-focused diet. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to strike a balance between indulging in your favourite alcoholic beverages and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In this article, we are going to show you how to fit alcohol into your diet, while still getting the results you are looking for. Of course, learning how to fit alcohol into your diet is only one part of the nutrition puzzle, and for a more comprehensive understanding of nutrition, we recommend that you learn how to set up your baseline nutrition.
How To Fit Alcohol Into Your DietÂ
At Triage, we understand that people have social lives and that they want to be able to incorporate alcohol, but they also have health and fitness goals that they don’t want to completely sacrifice just for the purpose of drinking alcohol. So when we are coaching someone, we generally just try to show them how they can make healthier choices with their alcohol intake, and how to structure their overall week, to allow for their alcohol consumption. Now, Irish drinking culture is not the healthiest, but we can help people make choices where possible. I’d rather people be informed and know how to manage this stuff a little bit better than basically just having no information and just being told “just drink as little as possible” because that’s not going to be the realistic outcome for a lot of people. A lot of us do enjoy having a social drink, and as I said, it does tend to support social interactions which are also a very important part of a healthy diet.
So we need to consider a few key questions. What is actually the issue with fitting alcohol in the diet? How does it actually cause problems? How does it slow down our progress? These are the things I want to go into, because I think people maybe have the idea, that it is purely a calorie thing. They understand that alcohol contains calories, and if I drink a lot of alcohol, then I’m racking up a lot of calories. And that is true, but it is only part of this discussion. If you go out and have, say, six pints, that is about a thousand calories (depending on what exact beer you’re drinking and what the alcoholic strength of it is) but the calories are not the only thing we need to think about.
There are also the adjacent behaviours related to drinking as they relate to food and maybe even exercise, right? So if you can imagine the kebab or the McDonald’s or something like that on the way home from a night out, you know, you’ve been out for several hours, you haven’t eaten in quite a while in a lot of cases, maybe you have dinner and then go out, or maybe you’re having dinner out, but usually there’s quite a lot of time that elapses between when you’ve had your last meal and then you go drinking, and then it’s time to go home, right?
So it could easily be five or six hours since you’ve actually eaten, which is reasonably long, and you’re likely going to be a bit hungrier, and the alcohol also will make you a bit hungrier too. As a result, you end up going in for the chipper, the kebab or whatever it is, right? Which can clock up quite a lot of calories, it’s right there at the end of the evening as well. Then the next day, people end up hungover, they don’t feel like cooking, maybe don’t have that much food prepared, are barely able to get out of bed or get off the couch depending on how much they had to drink, and overall they don’t feel great. This then facilitates eating takeaways, getting pizza or whatever the case may be. They end up having another very high-calorie day, adding on an excess of calories to the previous evening’s excess of calories.
You can see how this is all clocking up to maybe be detrimental to say, body composition goals, for example. And if you’re also in a pretty bad way after the night out, you probably don’t feel like going and doing any exercise. You probably don’t feel like going even out for a walk or anything like that, and you may just end up very sedentary for that whole day as a result. This is obviously not good for your overall activity levels, and thus calorie expenditure for that day.
Another issue that comes in here as well is when you’re out drinking, your inhibitions are naturally lowered, and it just means that you’re a bit more impulsive around food and other decisions potentially. And it makes it more likely that you might engage in eating behaviours that don’t really fit your goals. Because the fast food certainly becomes very, very attractive, very, very tasty, very, very appealing, and because you’re that bit more disinhibited, it’s harder to have that little dialogue with yourself of, “Okay, do I want to have this? Does this fit with my goals?”, and thus you tend to make poorer choices.
In some cases, people may not even have any concept of the decisions that they’re making, depending on how much alcohol they have consumed. So those are the main things I think people need to be aware of broadly in terms of incorporating alcohol into the diet. So it’s not just the alcohol, but it’s also the adjacent food behaviours, the impact on activity levels, and that can actually extend into subsequent days too.
If you go out on a Saturday night you might feel pretty bad on Sunday, but even Monday, maybe even Tuesday, you’re still a little bit more lethargic. You haven’t been sleeping well after the night out, you’re a bit more tired, you’re a bit more depleted from it, and you may not end up doing your intended training sessions, which obviously has knock-on effects to your overall goals, depending on what they are.
Fitting Alcohol In The Diet
With all that said, let’s actually show you how to fit alcohol into your diet. Now, of course, a good option is always going to be to just drink less alcohol, have fewer drinks total, and of course, you can consider in this the availability of zero percentage alcohol or very, very low percentage alcohol drinks, which are more widely available these days.
Zero or low percentage alcohol drinks are good options, but let’s look at the actual alcoholic beverages so that you have an idea of how to manage this stuff when you’re going out for some drinks. Generally, the best option from a caloric point of view is going to be the spirit plus a low-calorie or zero-calorie mixer of some sort. An example of this would be a gin and Slimline tonic, a vodka and zero calorie Sprite, a vodka and Coke Zero, a whiskey and Coke Zero, those kinds of drinks. Quite low in calories, they may only clock up about 100 calories.
Cans of hard seltzers tend to be quite low in calories, those are usually vodka-based, and they could be 80, 90, or 100 calories per can. So these are quite low-calorie when we’re considering the different options that you have available in terms of choosing alcoholic beverages. Bottles of light beer are also reasonably good. They tend to come in at around the 100-calorie mark.
Bottles are generally preferable to pints of beer because they’re lower in calories. This is not because there’s something special about the fact that it’s bottled, it’s the same product whether it’s in the pint or it’s in the bottle. However, a bottle is smaller. Generally, 330 mL versus close to 600 mL for a pint. It just means that drink for drink, you could end up consuming less if you choose to go for bottles. So, if you’re in a situation where you’re with people, you’re getting rounds in, if you choose a bottle every round, you’ll end up drinking about half as much as if you’re going for pints every round. This applies to a lot of foods too. You could get a multi-pack of chocolate bars and they’re pre-portioned for you. As a result, you could end up eating less of those versus say just a big block of chocolate, that you break off and portion for yourself.
Then when it comes to actual pints and glasses of wine, those are kind of middle-of-the-road where calories are concerned. They’ll come in at around 200 calories, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, depending on the alcohol percentage. Higher percentage alcohol is going to be more calories, so for example, craft beers can be quite a high percentage alcohol, maybe up to like eight percent, and those ones will be higher in calories than say your standard five percent lager. Then when we’re looking at wine, there are about 160 calories in a glass of wine, that’s assuming that it’s four glasses in a 750 mL bottle. This doesn’t apply to those giant wine glasses that can take a whole bottle of wine, right? That’s not going to be a 160-calorie glass, unfortunately.
Then within cocktails, there’s quite a lot of diversity naturally because there can be such an array of ingredients that goes into a cocktail. Some of these are quite okay options and are kind of in that middle-of-the-road category. They’re not super high-calorie as far as alcoholic beverages go, and they’re also not the lowest. Things in this category might be things like mojitos, margaritas, you know, they’re not super high in calories. Whiskey sours as well, and the ones I just mentioned all come in at around 150 calories. The worst choices generally are going to be the heavier cocktails, things like a white Russian, for example, a pina colada because these can have sort of high-fat and high-sugar ingredients in them as well, and that tends to drive the calories up. So it all really comes down to what’s actually going into the cocktail that you’re choosing. For example, are there creams or coconut milk or things like that in it? Is there a lot of sugars and syrups and things like that in it? All those things will accumulate more calories going into your beverage.
Bailey’s is also reasonably calorie-dense because it’s a cream liqueur. So I think that probably gives it away, the fact that it’s going to be fairly rich. That’s about 160 calories per 50 mL serving of that.
Then some of the alcopops also tend to be high in calories, things like blue WKD and Smirnoff Ice, because there’s so much sugar in them. They might come in around 250 calories in a smaller bottle, not even the big bottle.
So those are the best and worst options when it comes to selecting alcoholic beverages based on their caloric contribution, which when you’re trying to manage nutrition, body composition, and health, is an important consideration. However, you do have to take into account other factors like how fast do I drink certain drinks. I could say to you a measure of vodka is not that high in calories, but if you just take that as a shot, then you’ve consumed that in a few seconds. So it’s definitely not a great way to pace yourself, and you may end up overconsuming alcohol and/or calories by selecting options that have you drinking more quickly or more often through the night. A good way of pacing yourself is to include non-alcoholic beverages amongst your alcoholic drinks on the night. For example, you could just alternate having a zero-alcohol beer with a regular beer. Some of the non-alcoholic beers do still have some carbohydrates in them, so they won’t be very low in calories or zero calories necessarily, but they are a lot less than the full alcohol version, so they are an option.
Alternatively, you can just have water in between regular drinks. You could have whatever the beverage of choice is, then a water, and repeat this alternating pattern. In doing so, you’ll end up probably drinking about half as much, which is always a win because as I said at the start, there’s no real health benefits to alcohol consumption, and there can be quite a lot of negatives that come with alcohol consumption.
So, there are some of the ways in which you can fit alcohol into your diet. Hopefully this article has helped answer your questions about how to fit alcohol into the diet, and you are now better prepared to deal with alcohol in the diet. If you enjoyed this article and video, and you want to stay up to date with the content we create, then we recommend subscribing to our email newsletter. We do also have online nutrition coaching spaces available if you need more specific help with your nutrition. We also produce a lot of content on YouTube, if you generally prefer to watch video content. For those of you who are interested in learning more about how to coach nutrition, we also have a nutrition coaching certification program!
Brian OhAonghusa
Hey I’m Brian O'hAonghusa, nutrition coach at Triage.
I have a bachelors degree in Human Nutrition & I’m currently doing a masters degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy (cognitive behavioural modalities). I have coached a wide variety of clients since 2017 and in particular I love to help people to transform their health & their relationship with food for the better.
I enjoy lifting weights, BJJ, basketball, reading, eating and spending time in nature with my dog, Kodi.
