As a person that has to really be careful of how I eat,
drinking my rum has to be watched also.
There are more studies out there that tell you that you can or cannot
drink a lot if you want to lose of maintain your comfortable weight. Is it a good idea to scale back on how much
you drink when you are dieting? But there's a difference between hearing your
friend's cousin lost a bunch of weight after she stopped drinking beer and
knowing the actual science around weight and alcohol.
According to a
new study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, people
who drink heavily when they're younger have a higher risk of gaining excess
weight and becoming overweight or obese when they're older. People
who were heavy drinkers (which is defined by the Dietary Guidelines for
Americans as having four or more drinks on any day or eight or more drinks per
week for women) had a 41 percent higher risk of going from a normal weight BMI
to an overweight BMI when compared with people who weren't heavy drinkers, and
a 36 percent higher risk of going from an overweight BMI to an obese BMI by the
time they hit their mid-twenties. According to these findings, the researchers
concluded that heavy drinking should be part of the discussion when it comes to
talking about healthy eating and weight loss.
"It's
important to look at alcohol in terms of calories," says Fatima Cody
Stanford, M.D., instructor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School
and obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. Alcohol definitely has calories: According to
the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 12 ounces of regular beer can have about
150 calories, five ounces of wine might have about 120 calories, and a
seven-ounce rum and Coke has about 155 calories. And, if you're drinking a lot
of those in a week, it can add up. People
also tend to underestimate how much they're drinking. A
serving of wine, for example, is five ounces, but you probably pour more than
that when you're having a glass at home.
It's not just about the calories from alcohol itself: Drinking can lower
your inhibitions and sense of awareness, making you much more likely to mindlessly
eat when you have a buzz according to Alissa Rumsey, R.D., owner of Alissa
Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, "while you may be able to realize you are
full and stop after one slice of pizza when you are sober, it's harder to read
those fullness signals when you've had a few drinks.”
Taking all the
factors into consideration, it's easy to see how drinking heavily can cause you
to gain weight over time. That doesn't
mean you should totally swear off alcohol if you want to lose weight-you just
need to be smart about drinking.
Moderate drinking of alcohol if it is something that is important to you,
it would be best to reduce your drinking to try to lose weight, but this
usually does not work. Making better
choices about what you drink and what you mix your spirits with works better,
if you want to make lower your calorie intake from drinking. You can drink and still lose weight-just keep
it within moderate levels and you should be fine. The real question is not
"Whether alcohol calories do count" but "How much do alcohol
calories count?". There seems to be a large individual variability
according to the absolute amount of alcohol consumed, the drinking frequency as
well as genetic factors. Presently it can be said that alcohol calories count
more in moderate nondaily consumers than in daily (heavy) consumers. Further,
they count more in combination with a high-fat diet and in overweight and obese
subjects.
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