Does alcohol cause weight gain?

Video Transcript

A major part of people's nutrition all over the world can be alcohol. And alcohol contains a lot of calories. Per gram it contains more calories than carbohydrate or protein. So some people might want to drink something like a beer. Or perhaps another person's particular favourite is something like wine. Maybe rather than wine you are the kind of person that prefers spirits. So you only need a small amount of spirits to get the same amount of alcohol as you do in a glass of wine or a beer. People have come up with standard measures. So there is a standard amount of alcohol in beer versus wine, versus spirits and interestingly when you go out to a restaurant and you are given 150ml of wine, or 100ml of wine we might look at that and think well that is not a typical glass of wine that we would have at home.

But the impact to our weight is really quite profound. And it doesn't matter whether you are having beer, wine or spirits a standard measure contains the same amount of alcohol so it contains the same number of calories. And typically that would be 120 calories. So imagine for a second that you have 3 beers a night and that is extra to your requirements to maintain your weight. Now 3 beers would be 360 calories a day and if you think about that across a year, 365 days, then it is about 131,000 calories extra that are spread out across the year. Now that doesn't matter whether you are having beer, wine or spirits, the number of calories are exactly the same. And to try to convert that to the number of kilos of fat that that is the equivalent to we divide it by 7000 because 7000 calories is what a kilo of fat is worth. So 131,000 calories of beer is the equivalent of 18 kilos in weight gain over the course of the year.
And that is just by having 3 standard measures of alcohol every single night. For many people if they want to lose weight and alcohol is a big component of their weight, then they need to decide either are they going to have a period of complete abstinence and not drink anything, perhaps for two or three months. Is another plan to decide that on two or three nights that is the only time you are allowed to drink and the rest of the week it is alcohol free. And the third option is to perhaps is to decide rather than having 3 beers maybe just 1 will do.
Either way 18 kilos a year is a tremendous amount of weight and if you can reduce that the benefits to your health are profound.

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