Nutrition After 40: Where Does Alcohol Fit in?
When I first met Teddy 25 years ago, we had a lot in common. Both in our mid-twenties, both newly married and recently hired into our first real jobs, we had moved into a new neighborhood of starter homes in the boomtown atmosphere that was Charlotte, NC of the mid-90’s.
Teddy sold insurance and I was in medical devices. Neither of us had much of a clue about what we were doing.
The custom amongst our more senior peers was to take an “office day” on Fridays to attend to the paperwork requirements of the job. The thing was, even if I stretched it out, my paperwork would take me a total of about 45 minutes. That left me with a lot of time on my hands on Fridays.
I’m guessing the same was true for Teddy, because shortly after noon on most Fridays, I could see him shooting hoops in his driveway from my office windows. Wasn’t long before I joined him.
We’d work ourselves into a sweaty mess playing one-on-one and HORSE in the blazing Carolina heat for a couple hours. To rehydrate, we would rip through a 30-pack of PBR’s. In the custom of that part of the world, we’d sit in lawn chairs in the driveway listening to George Jones and Randy Travis, crushing one PBR after another and occasionally getting back up for a desultory game of HORSE.
By the time our wives got home from work about 5 o’clock, we’d be in prime form.
The thing was, because of our 20-something metabolisms, we could consume just about anything and never worry about putting on weight. It’s such a shame that that doesn’t last forever!
Optimal nutrition after 40? It requires less sips and more steps.
Somewhere in our 30’s our burning hot metabolisms began to downshift a couple of gears. You know what I’m talking about: Tighter pants. Smaller shirts. Blazers that don’t quite button anymore.
Now, 25 years later, Teddy wants to shed 20 lbs.
As part of the fat loss and total body functional fitness plan we were developing for Ted here at our Westborough gym, we discussed how much alcohol he was consuming on a weekly basis. Lots of people are a bit sheepish when this subject comes up. Most underestimate and underreport how much they drink.
To Teddy’s credit, he was honest with himself, acknowledging that he drinks 3-4 nights per week, each night putting away 2-4 drinks. Occasionally, he’ll overindulge and his 2-4 becomes 6+.
Anticipating my coaching suggestions, he quickly added, “But Paulie, I switched to vodka because it’s ‘fat-free’ and better for me than beer, so we probably shouldn’t ‘count’ those calories in my weekly allowance. Right???”
Is vodka “fat free” and “better for me than beer?”
What do you think? How does the regular consumption of alcohol fit into our fat loss, fitness improvement, and nutrition plans? Should those calories “count”? Do clear liquids come with less calories??
Let’s dive in here and start to unpack some of this.
Before we begin, I want to assert that we neither encourage nor discourage the consumption of alcohol. We are completely agnostic on this subject. This can be a highly charged subject, and this essay is in no way intended to take a stance for or against drinking. Instead, let’s agree to use Teddy’s experience to illustrate how drinking can influence our efforts to maintain or lose weight.
Let’s begin by highlighting where Teddy is actually correct.
Is vodka “fat-free”? Yes, it is.
But, what Teddy actually meant by “fat-free” was low-carb. He’s been so conditioned by the fat-free rhetoric of the 80s and 90s that he mixes that up with low-carb. But I knew what he meant. Yes, he’s correct in that assumption as well. Vodka is very low-carb. In fact, it contains no carbohydrates.
While vodka contains zero fats or carbohydrates, it does have calories.
Alcohol contains more potential energy than either protein or carbohydrates. Each of those macronutrients contains only 4 calories per gram. Alcohol (ethanol) contains 7 calories per gram. By mass or volume, alcohol possesses more stored energy.
Unfortunately, especially for those of us over 40, the body stores unused or excess energy as fat.
One “drink” of vodka contains 65 calories. A measured drink is 1.5 ounces.
Where a lot of us go astray, and I’ll include Teddy in this group, is that we mistakenly underestimate the size of our pours. The massive tumblers and wine glasses that we commonly use don’t help. Very few of us strictly pour 1.5 ounces of vodka in our mixed drinks or 6 ounces of Merlot in the bucket-sized chalices that I see so many people drinking from.
Knowing my friend Teddy as I do, his 2-4 drinks per night may in fact be closer to 3-6 drinks in actual volume.
If we give him the benefit of the doubt and use the lower end of that range (3 drinks), that represents 195 calories on the days he has a few. On the higher end of that range (6 drinks), he’s consuming 390 calories.
Based on the daily plan that we constructed, by which he would burn 1 lb of fat per week using a caloric deficit of 500 calories per day, his daily calorie target was 2100 calories. If 195-390 of those come from his vodka, he’s now limited to from 1710-1905 calories per day of food (click here if you’d like to learn how we put together Teddy’s plan).
So, what do you think? Will he be hungry on those days? How many of us stay disciplined when we become hungry? How many of us remain disciplined when we are hungry and drinking? Can you guess what the likely outcome of this plan will be unless we agree to take a hard look at how much and how often Teddy is consuming alcohol?
Of course, the answers to those questions are blindingly obvious. Our carefully constructed plan will fail, and Teddy will become discouraged and probably quit. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Yeah, that’s the most common outcome of about 90% of the diets and nutrition plans ever attempted.
How much does alcohol affect weight loss in your middle years?
When we calculate the weekly caloric intake from the alcohol at the low end of Teddy’s guesstimate for a week’s consumption, he’s drinking at least 585 calories per week.
If not compensated for with exercise or calorie restriction elsewhere in his diet, that’s an excess of over 30,000 calories per year or 9 lbs of fat added yearly.
So, you can see how sneaky a “couple of drinks” can be and how they will add up over 10-20 years. No wonder so many of us find ourselves approaching 50 and wondering how it could be possible that we’ve put on 50 pounds or more.
There’s one other aspect of alcohol that I’d like to point out. Our bodies metabolize it first, in the liver, before metabolizing fats and carbohydrates. Depending on how active we are, that can result in the excess energy from those macronutrients being stored as fat.
So, while alcohol contains no fat, and hard spirits have low or no carbs, it does have calories and bumps the metabolism of key macronutrients down in the order of priority, which could result in us putting on weight.
On top of all that, we know that alcohol increases appetite in some people. In a similar way, it also suppresses our sense of satiety. To make matters even worse, it lowers our inhibitions and undermines self-control. And that’s the last thing you want when you’re on a healthy eating plan. The cravings are hard enough to deal with, without alcohol doubling them!
So, maybe we have a couple cocktails, or a couple more than a couple. We get the munchies, grab a bag of ranch-flavored Doritos, power through the full bag and a jar of queso, don’t feel full from that, so we tear into some chocolate chip cookies, and rather than enjoying one, we snarfle up half a dozen before we even realize how far off the rails we’ve gone. Sound familiar?
I don’t even want to begin trying to calculate the caloric bomb that the above scenario totals up to. No doubt though, an evening like that will certainly set us back in our efforts to control our weight.
The bottom line is this: Even “fat-free” vodka can derail the best-laid fat loss plans.
After thinking this through, what are your thoughts about Teddy’s switch from PBRs to vodka? Does that move help him to better control his weight? Will his level of alcohol consumption serve his goals of shedding the desired 20 lbs?
Yeah, Teddy came to the same conclusion. Faced with the facts and really looking deep at why he wants to lose weight, he decided to rein in his consumption considerably. He decided to limit his weekly total to just six drinks. It has been several months since that decision and, so far, he’s been really disciplined.
Sure, there has been a week or two when he has exceeded his self-imposed limit, like when he went on a cruise. But, he has also ramped up his activity on those days, thereby compensating for the surplus calories from the alcohol.
While there is so much more that I can share about the impact of alcohol on weight loss, let’s pause here for now. Suffice to say, for a great many of us, regular alcohol consumption, even if it’s within the sphere of what anybody would consider as “moderate”, will add substantial calories to our diet. We delude ourselves and by doing so, derail our efforts to lose weight, when we pretend that those calories “don’t count”.
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