Alcohol and Macros

It’s Friday and seems like the perfect time to post again how to track alcohol and stay within in your macros

Yes, alcohol is one of the 4 macronutrients, but we don’t track alcohol. But alcohol itself has calories and needs accounted for. We track carbs, protein and fats

So when I was in a major calorie deficit (1500 calories) I needed all the food I could get so I was unwilling to swap food for alcohol. Alcohol obviously has zero nutritional value and in my case makes me want to binge eat and also sleep terrible so it wasn’t something I drank very often or at all

But I also understand there is reality and it is holiday season and if you are trying to stay somewhat on track or you are in maintenance/surplus and have plenty of carbs/fats to spare then here is how you do it

To track alcohol we take it away from our daily carb and/or fat allowance. So say this glass of red wine is 125 calories. To take from carbs we take 125 and divide by 4 (4 calories in 1 carb gram) to get 31.25g so just round that to 32g. So if your if your carb allotment for day is 200g, you take away 32g to account for that and now have 168g of carbs to eat

If you would like to take from fats (9 calories per gram). Take 125 calories divide by 9 to get 14 grams (rounded). Now you eat 14 grams less of fat for the day. To make it even more of a math problem you can take from both carb and fat by dividing your calories in half and doing same as above for both. So even if you are drinking an alcohol that has zero carbs/fat you are still tracking this way. Alcohol itself has calories so when tracking macros it has to be accounted for somewhere, it is not a free for all.

I tried to make that as simple as possible 🤷🏼‍♀️. Let me know if have questions! There is also an app I’ve found helpful called “WAG alcohol calculator” that you can enter the amount of alcohol calories you drink and it splits it between carbs and fat for you. I’ll post a picture of the app in my story. Cheers to a great weekend! ❤️SC