Continuing my quest to lose weight and become as fit as possible lead me to a shocking (at least to me) find;
that alcohol is heavily fattening and contains tons of calories. Drinking unfortunately isn’t perceived as one of the top contributors to your waistline but very likely is. To see the effects of alcohol, i compared it with the amount of exercise i’d have to do in order to burn the calories gained. Turns out that even for a casual two drinks of vodka or a large beer, you’ll have to run for ½ an hour to work it off; this amount is something which probably many of us regularly exceed without compensating for it and thus end up piling the pounds without even knowing. Here’s a doc with the full comparison. Also, another way to look at alcohol consumption is in terms of alcohol units. An alcohol unit is simply 10 ml of pure alcohol. An alcohol unit takes an average human 1 hour to process . Below is a video that explains the concept better.

The recommended upper limit for men is 3-4 units/day and for women is 2-3 units/day. Well you may reason that this means that staying sober during the week means you can gulp down 7x the daily limit on the weekends but that’s complete bollocks because binge drinking hurts you much more than drinking the same amount on different occasions. Of course, in terms of calories the effect would be the same but the adverse effects on health would be much worse.

Bottom-line: Filling up on alcohol like a tank will make you make you look like one, so be forewarned and forearmed.

Resources: An interactive graphic showing the adverse effects of alcohol on different parts of the body. A calorie calculator for different alcoholic beverages (also show equivalent amount of exercise). Alcoholic contents of different beverages.