Does alcohol stop weight loss? How to fit drinks into a calorie deficit

Does alcohol stop weight loss?

Not by itself. Weight loss depends on eating fewer calories than you burn over weeks, and alcohol is one more source of calories. It has 7 calories per gram, nearly as many as fat, so drinks add up quickly. If they fit inside your target, you can drink and still lose weight.

The catch is that alcohol rarely arrives alone. It brings mixers, snacks and weaker resolve, and in studies of people trying to lose weight, heavier drinking goes along with smaller results. In the Look AHEAD trial of adults with type 2 diabetes, people in the lifestyle program who did not drink had lost 5.1 percent of their weight after four years, compared with 2.4 percent for consistent heavy drinkers.

How many calories are in alcohol?

A US standard drink holds 14 grams of pure alcohol: 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof spirits. At 7 calories per gram, that is about 100 calories from the alcohol before anything else is added. Sugar in the drink and the mixer add the rest.

Pours at home and in bars are often bigger than standard, and many cocktails hold more than one standard drink. The figures below are typical servings from USDA data.

Why drinking makes it harder to eat less

Alcohol tends to add food on top of its own calories. A review of 22 studies found that people did not eat less to make up for the calories in a drink. Pooling 12 of them, food intake was about 80 calories higher and total intake about 260 calories higher with alcohol than with a non-alcoholic drink. The studies were in adults aged 18 to 37, and the effect varied between them.

In a weight loss program of 283 adults, people who drank more at the end of treatment also ate more food, not counting the drinks. Cutting back on alcohol was linked to more weight loss in people who scored high on impulsivity, who may be the most likely to overeat once they have been drinking.

There is a practical side too. Drinks often come with salty snacks, they make a plan easier to forget, and a late night out often ends with food you would not have chosen at dinner.

Does your body stop burning fat when you drink?

For a few hours, it burns less of it. Your body treats alcohol as a fuel to clear first. In a small study of eight men given 24 grams of alcohol, about 1.7 standard drinks, the body's use of fat for fuel fell by 73 percent in the hours afterward. Very little of the alcohol was turned into fat; most was converted to acetate, which the body burned in place of fat.

In practice, fat from the food you eat with a drink is more likely to be stored that evening. Over a week, though, the total still decides the result. If your intake, drinks included, stays below what you burn, that stored fat gets used later. That is why counting the drinks matters more than avoiding them on principle.

How to fit alcohol into a calorie deficit

You do not have to give up drinking to lose weight. A few habits keep drinks inside your target.

• Budget for it. If you plan two glasses of wine on Saturday, set aside about 250 calories, and take them from snacks rather than from protein.
• Choose drinks with fewer calories: light beer, hard seltzer, a wine spritzer, or a spirit with soda water or a diet mixer.
• Alternate each drink with a glass of water or sparkling water.
• Eat a meal with protein first, so the snack table is less tempting.
• Pour your own drinks into a smaller glass, so you know the size.
• Set a time for your last drink of the evening.

How to log drinks accurately

Most mistakes in logging drinks come from pour size. A glass of wine poured at home is often bigger than 5 ounces, and a mixed drink can hold more than one shot: the USDA's typical gin and tonic contains about 1.4 standard drinks. Measure your usual glass once with a measuring cup, and you will know what you are really logging.

For cocktails, log the spirit and the mixer separately if there is no close match, or use the NIAAA's alcohol calorie calculator. Log drinks as you have them; by the end of a party, few people remember whether it was three or four. For more on drinks and other easy-to-miss extras, see our guide to hidden calories.

Should you stop drinking to lose weight?

You do not have to. In long-term studies, light to moderate drinking is not consistently linked to weight gain, while heavy drinking is. Cutting back still makes sense if drinks take up a large share of your calories, if drinking often leads to late-night eating, or if your weight loss has stalled and drinks are a regular part of your week.

Weight is not the only reason to think about it. If you are pregnant, take medication that interacts with alcohol, or have a health condition that alcohol affects, those come first, and your doctor is the right person to ask.

Count the drinks, then check the trend

The simplest test is your own data. Log every drink for two weeks, then compare your average calories and weight trend in weeks with more drinks and weeks with fewer. If your drinking weeks run several hundred calories higher once the food around the drinks is counted, that is a clear place to start.

In BiteTracker, describe drinks in a sentence, like 'two 6-ounce glasses of red wine', or scan the barcode on a can or bottle. The weekly report shows your average calories next to your weight trend, so you can see what the weekend's drinks cost.