How To Track/Log Alcohol In Your Diet!

Did you know that you can actually accurately track alcohol?

Alcohol tends to be a timid subject for the fitness community, but the truth is that a lot of people like to partake in the occasional drink. This article will effectively tell you how to track your drink with confidence, to ensure that you are still on route to reaching your goals. Most people know the three major nutrients, protein, fats and carbs. What a lot of people don't know is that there is a fourth macro – alcohol. Alcohol is unique because it does in fact provide value as energy at seven calorie units per gram. The downfall with this energy is that the energy provided provides no fiber, vitamins or minerals. Therefore, although energy can be provided, it’s considered to be calorically empty.

The lack of benefit causes alcohol to not be mentioned or commonly tracked, because it is not encouraged. There are a lot of downsides to drinking on your fitness journey, like lack of inhibition to stick to the diet, stick to restrictions on your drinking and lastly and most importantly that the energy from food does not nourish your body. Nonetheless, if logged correctly, a drink here and there won’t sabotage your gains.

Steps to track alcohol:

First: To begin, you’re going to want to make sure to take a multivitamin either before or after drinking alcohol. Not only does alcohol not provide nutrients, it further does damage by removing the body of some. The multivitamin helps nourish the body and supplement some of the damage that may be done from the alcohol.

Second: Alcohol can be recorded as either carbs or fat to fit your macros. This doesn’t mean that you can use alcohol to fill the gaps to make your macros 100% perfect every night though!  

…but how does that work if carbs are four calories a gram and fats are nine calories a gram?

It’s not a perfect process, but to make it work, take the total caloric amount for the drink and divide that by (four for carbs and nine for fats) and custom log it in my fitness pal to whatever allocation you have for the day. Carbs have four calories per gram and fats have nine calories per gram, nice and easy!

Example: The Colossus Fitness drink of champions is a 300 calorie drink “yikes”…

Logging as fat: 300/9= 33g fat

Logging as carbs: 300/4=75g carbs

Live your social life and make fitness fit into it. Do what makes you happy, be safe, be responsible and still reach your goals with methods like this. Remember, you have to do this at a level where you are still focusing on a nutritional diet. Being controlled and logging helps keep you in check.