Drinking and weight-loss don't mix advises Total Body Fitness

The first thing nearly all weight-loss plans require is that you stop drinking. This is because alcoholic beverages give you calories with no other nutrition, and they also may loosen your resolve to lose weight and make you eat without thinking. Beer goes with peanuts, wine with cheese. Also, alcohol itself is high in calories—7 calories per gram, almost as much as fat (9 calories per gram) and more than carbs or protein (about 4 per gram). Here are some things you should know about alcohol and nutrition—facts that run counter to what many people believe:
Alcoholic beverages all contain calories, and most of the calories come from the alcohol. (We are speaking about straight spirits, wine, or beer—not mixed drinks made with added ingredients, which can bring calories to, well, staggering levels.)
• Alcohol is not a carbohydrate.
• Your body processes alcohol first, before fat, protein, or carbs. Thus drinking slows down the burning of fat. This could account for the weight gain seen in some studies.
• Hard liquor is distilled and thus contains no carbohydrates. The current “Zero Carb” campaign for vodka and whiskey is baloney and may encourage mindless consumption. It’s like bragging that a candy bar is “cholesterol-free.”
• When grapes are made into wine, most of the fruit sugars (carbs) convert to alcohol, but a few carbs remain. A 5-ounce glass of wine typically contains 110 calories, 5 grams of carbohydrates, and about 13 grams of alcohol (which accounts for 91 of the calories). A 5-ounce glass of wine supplies roughly the same amount of alcohol and number of calories as a 12-ounce light beer or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof spirits.
• Beer, too, contains carbohydrates. The new low-carb beers are not new at all, though this type of beer does indeed have fewer carbs. Low-carb beers are simply the old light beers with a new label and ad campaign. The old Miller Lite has 96 calories and 3.2 grams of carbs in 12 ounces. The “low-carb” Michelob Ultra has 96 calories and 2.6 grams of carbs. Coors Lite has 102 calories and 5 grams of carbs. The differences are tiny—hardly worth mentioning. In contrast, a regular beer has 13 grams of carbs and 150 calories.
What it all boils down to
In spite of the strong implication that “low-carb” somehow means low-calorie, and that low-carb foods in general can help you lose weight—or, indeed, that they are “health foods”—there’s no evidence this is so, and particularly not when it comes to beer, wine, and liquor. Alcoholic beverages have calories because alcohol has a lot of calories—not because of carbs. The impli-cation that low-carb beers and wine or carb-free spirits are a boon on a weight-loss program is simply deceptive advertising.