Alcohol and Weight Loss: Calories in Every Drink, Whether It Slows Fat Burning and How Much You Can Drink

Calories in every drink: table by serving

The figures come from USDA FoodData Central, the food composition database of the United States Department of Agriculture, in its SR Legacy edition. USDA gives its data per 100 g; here they are converted to millilitres using the weight per fluid ounce in each entry and rounded, and the alcohol strength in brackets is the one that matches those data. Cava and vermouth have no SR Legacy entry, so they are calculated separately: the grams of alcohol come from the alcohol strength and count as 7 kcal per gram; the rest comes from the carbohydrates of a dry white wine for cava, and from the minimum sugar that EU rules require before a vermouth can be called “sweet”, 130 g per litre. If your drink is stronger, sweeter or poured larger, it will have more calories.

How many calories does alcohol have? About 7 per gram

One gram of alcohol provides about 7 kcal: less than a gram of fat (9 kcal) and quite a lot more than a gram of protein or carbohydrate (4 kcal). You can check it with spirits, which are almost only water and alcohol: in the USDA entry for 40% ABV gin, rum, vodka or whisky, 100 g provide 231 kcal and 33.4 g of alcohol, about 6.9 kcal per gram. To know how much alcohol any drink contains, its label is enough, because one millilitre of alcohol weighs 0.789 g. A 200 ml small beer at 5% contains 200 × 5 ÷ 100 × 0.789, about 8 g, which is about 55 kcal from the alcohol alone; the rest, up to 86, is the carbohydrate in the beer. In wine, almost nine out of ten calories come from the alcohol, and in beer, almost two thirds.

• Alcohol in grams = millilitres × alcohol strength ÷ 100 × 0.789.
• Calories from alcohol = grams × 7. On top of that come the sugars and carbohydrates of the drink and the mixer.
• A “standard drink” in the Global Burden of Disease analysis is 10 g of pure alcohol: using the table, a small beer is about 0.8; a glass of wine, about 1.5; and a mixed drink with 50 ml of spirit, about 1.6.

Which alcohol is least fattening?

Per serving, the lowest-calorie drinks in the table are a shot of spirit, the small beer, light beer, a spirit with soda water or a zero-sugar mixer and brut cava. But the serving size is misleading: a small beer has half the alcohol of a glass of wine, and two small beers already add up to more calories than the glass. What matters most is the total amount of alcohol and sugar over the evening, not the type of drink: three small beers are about 259 kcal and three large ones, about 648. Three rules help you compare: lower strength, smaller volume and no added sugar. A sweet wine, a red vermouth, a drink mixed with a regular soft drink or a liqueur add sugar to the calories from alcohol; for reference, the coffee liqueur in the USDA database has 336 kcal per 100 g. No alcoholic drink is “not fattening”: the lowest-calorie option still provides alcohol.

Does alcohol slow fat loss?

Yes, while your body is processing it. In a study of eight healthy men who drank 24 g of alcohol, roughly what three small beers in the table contain (Siler and colleagues, 1999), whole-body fat oxidation fell by 73% and the release of fatty acids from fat tissue by 53%. In contrast, very little new fat was made from the alcohol, less than 5% of the dose: 77% of the alcohol cleared from the blood was turned directly into acetate, and it is that acetate that holds back the use of fat as fuel. The review by Yeomans and colleagues (2003) also notes that alcohol suppresses fatty acid oxidation. In other words, alcohol does not turn into fat, but it jumps to the front of the fuel queue, and meanwhile your body burns less fat, both the fat you eat and the fat you already have.

Alcohol and appetite: why you end up eating more

The second route is what you eat when you drink. A systematic review with meta-analysis (Kwok and colleagues, 2019) pooled 22 trials with 701 participants, and in them people did not make up for the calories in the drink by eating less. In the meta-analysis, drinking alcohol increased the food eaten by about 82 kcal (343 kJ) and total energy intake, counting food and drink together, by about 256 kcal (1,072 kJ) compared with a non-alcoholic drink. The participants were 18 to 37 years old and some results were highly heterogeneous.

• A randomised trial with 20 lean women (Poppitt and colleagues, 1996) had already seen it: after an alcoholic drink they were no less hungry and did not eat less at the next meal.
• The review by Yeomans (2010) concludes that calories from alcohol add to those from the rest of the diet and that alcohol drunk before or with a meal tends to increase how much is eaten.
• The review by Caton and colleagues (2015) adds that, in people who are dieting, alcohol increases how much they eat, partly because it loosens their control over what they had planned.

What long-term studies say, and the “beer belly”

The fact that alcohol adds calories and stimulates appetite does not mean that everyone who drinks gains weight. Studies that follow many people for years give a more nuanced result, and they are best read knowing that they are observational: people who drink moderately may lead a healthier lifestyle overall, which makes it hard to attribute the effect to alcohol.

• A systematic review of 31 publications (Sayon-Orea and colleagues, 2011) found contradictory results; the link with weight gain appeared mainly at higher intakes.
• A later update (Traversy and Chaput, 2015) concluded that, in recent prospective studies, light-to-moderate drinking is not associated with gaining fat, while heavy drinking is more consistently linked to weight gain.
• On beer, a review with meta-analysis of 35 observational and 12 experimental studies (Bendsen and colleagues, 2013) found that more than 500 ml a day might be associated with more abdominal fat; below that, the data were not enough. In six studies in men, drinking alcoholic beer for 21 to 126 days was associated with 0.73 kg more weight than drinking low-alcohol beer, with low-quality data.
• In a 26-session weight loss programme with 283 adults with overweight or obesity (Kase and colleagues, 2016), those who drank cut down on alcohol. Overall, alcohol was not related to weight, but drinking more at the end of the programme went together with eating more, and in the most impulsive people drinking less was linked to losing a larger percentage of their weight.

Alcohol, muscle and sleep

If you train while you lose weight, there are two more effects worth knowing. The first is on muscle: in a crossover trial with eight active men (Parr and colleagues, 2014), drinking 1.5 g of alcohol per kilo of body weight after training, about 12 standard drinks, reduced muscle protein synthesis by 24% even when it was taken with 25 g of protein, and by 37% when it was taken with carbohydrates. That is a binge-drinking amount and the study does not measure what one beer does, but the authors conclude that drinking like that may impair recovery and adaptation to training. The second is sleep: a review of studies in healthy volunteers (Ebrahim and colleagues, 2013) describes how alcohol makes you fall asleep sooner and deepens the first half of the night, but increases disruptions in the second half and, at moderate or high doses, reduces REM sleep. It does not take away deep sleep: it disorganises it. For more on rest and weight, see how sleep affects your weight.

How much can you drink on a diet? Fitting it into your day

To lose weight you need a sustained calorie deficit, and alcohol makes it harder in two ways: its own calories and the extra food that tends to come with it. There is no number of “allowed” drinks: it depends on your daily calories, which you can estimate with the calorie calculator. With an example deficit of 500 kcal a day, one gin and tonic, about 179 kcal, takes up more than a third of it, and two rum and colas, about 392, almost 80%. If you are starting from scratch, read calorie deficit for beginners. If you decide to drink, this is what helps most:

• Count it like food and decide before you go out how many you will have: using the table, three small beers are about 259 kcal and two drinks with regular cola, about 392.
• Choose small servings without sugar: a small beer instead of a large one (about 130 kcal less), a mixed drink with soda water or a zero-sugar mixer instead of regular tonic or cola (66 to 87 kcal less) and fewer sweet wines, red vermouths and liqueurs.
• Eat before you drink. In a trial with nine healthy men (Jones and colleagues, 1997), the same amount of alcohol taken right after breakfast gave a peak blood alcohol level of 13 to 18 mg/dl, compared with 31 mg/dl on an empty stomach. Eating does not take a single calorie off the drink and the food counts too: plan it into your day instead of skipping it to “make room”.
• Alternate each drink with water or a sugar-free drink: you drink more slowly and, over the same time, have fewer drinks.
• Watch the nibbles that come with each round: in the trials, drinking alcohol increased how much people ate.
• The next day, go back to your normal routine instead of skipping meals to “make up for it”.

If you drink, do it with the numbers in front of you. Log your drinks in Renzy too and your weekly balance will show how much those liquid calories really weigh.