Does alcohol really count the same as other calories?

Hornsby wrote: »

FatFreeFrolicking wrote: »

rbfdac wrote: »

I'm just wondering how you drink 10-12 beers on any given day and still function normally!

+1

I'm a professional. The beer is organic though so you should approve?

I too am a qualified tippler and make beer, mead and cider. All organic of course, as is the ethanol the little beasties work hard to produce.

Hornsby wrote: »

I guess I am curious because from what I have read, if you drink alcohol, that will be the first thing your body burns as it is the preferred source (Is that correct)? So if you have a high TDEE can you and burn say 150 calories per hour doing nothing, can you "beat the system" so to speak?

Alcohol metabolism is an interesting thing. From my understanding, you are correct, it would prioritize alcohol first in the stack of what it's going to use up. But there's no beating the system, really. There's the inevitable energy equation, and whatever energy is provided by the alcohol offsets the need for energy from everything else. And then everything else says, "Hey, if you don't need me right now I'm going to take a seat somewhere until you do." If you can pardon my personification of macronutrients.

I don't know, but what I do know is I used to drink a lot when I was at university (I'm British, it's what we do lol) and I finished university a lot slimmer than when I started. I drank the most during my year in France, and lost a lot that year. I doubt I'd have lost as much if I'd consumed French bread and cheese instead of wine

sardelsa wrote: »

This is so interesting @Hornsby... I feel like I am the exact same way! Sometimes I don't even track my alcohol consumption (gasp!) and it really makes no difference in the end.

I'll join this group too! admittedly, I don't drink all that often, maybe once every couple of months, but at least 4 to 5 glasses of prosecco a time, without making any extra room for it in my daily calorie allowance. Every time, I weigh at least a half pound less the next day and never put on an ounce of extra weight on that week.

Drinking alcohol does tend to send me running to the bathroom every 30 minutes though - maybe I don't even give it the chance to settle in my body or something, lol.

Interesting discussion. Maybe it is just negated by the fact that you get more activity. On a normal night I would go to bed around 10ish and prior to that I usually spend time reading or watching tv. When I go out drinking I'm up and about until 1-2ish probably moving/standing a lot more and walking from place to place as well as dancing. I suppose the extra activity and 3-4 hours of waking time would cancel out some of the drinking. Although on the flip side, after a night of drinking I often have a day of sleeping in, lying around and crappy food so maybe not so much

It wouldn't surprise me if something about heavy alcohol intake signaled adaptive thermogenesis to crank up the furnace, so to speak. "Lots of readily burnable fuel comin' in daily! Fire on all cylinders!" I know a lot of heavy drinkers and many claim that beer calories don't seem to count the same as food.

Alcohol = empty calories = you can have as much as you want and you won't gain weight

fearlessleader104 wrote: »

Alcohol = empty calories = you can have as much as you want and you won't gain weight

They call it a beer belly for a reason.