Alcohol and your weight
"I only have a couple of beers in the evening — is that what's stopping me?" Possibly, and for a plainer reason than most people expect.
The arithmetic
Alcohol carries seven kilocalories per gram — the factor fixed for food labels, between carbohydrate at four and fat at nine — and the drink around it often carries more: the sugar in wine and cocktails, the carbohydrate in beer. It brings almost no satiety, so it is added to the day's food rather than replacing any of it. And it is the item most often missing from a food diary: people log the dinner and forget the bottle that went with it. Two large beers can be four hundred kilocalories that were never counted — which, against a five-hundred-kilocalorie deficit, is most of the deficit.
What the studies show
The prospective studies are messier than the arithmetic. Light to moderate drinking is not consistently associated with weight gain in the observational data; heavy drinking and binge drinking are. The reviews read this as an effect that runs through total intake — how much the drinking adds on top, and what is eaten alongside it — rather than through anything special alcohol does to fat. Those are observational data with the usual confounding, so the honest conclusion is modest: alcohol is not "free", and it is not uniquely fattening either. It is energy, mostly unlogged, usually eaten with something salty.
The mechanism, honestly
The body oxidises alcohol before other fuels, so while it is being cleared, fat burning is temporarily lower. This is true and it is temporary — hours, not "days of stopped fat burning" as the folklore has it. A portion of alcohol's energy is also spent digesting it, a larger share than for fat or carbohydrate; that is a small mercy, not a loophole.
What to do
- Log it. Every drink, with the size. Most of the effect disappears once it is visible.
- Choose the lighter version when the drink is the point: a smaller measure, a dry wine over a sweet one, a spirit with a sugar-free mixer.
- Do not compensate with fasting or a cut target the next day; the bad-day page explains why that backfires.
- Watch the food around it. The nuts, the chips, the late kebab are often the larger number.
When it is a different question
If cutting down turns out to be hard, that is not a weight question and this site is the wrong place for it. Help exists, without judgement; a doctor is the first door.
In the app
Drinks go into the diary as free text or as a catalogue product, and they count toward the day like any other food. There is no separate "cheat" category, on purpose.