Alcohol tends to confuse so many people when it comes to IIFYM. How the heck do you log it? When you look-up alcoholic beverages in My Fitness Pal or My Macros+ it will pull-up an entry with calories, but no fat, very few (if any) carbs, and no protein…awesome…we can have virtually unlimited amounts, right? Wrong.
You all know better than to think alcohol washes through our bodies like water. While it would be MUCH easier to reach your goals without drinking, that just isn’t realistic for most people. A big part of IIFYM and what I teach my clients is how to live a normal life while at the same time reaching / maintaining their goal body and most people like to drink from time to time.
There are a few different options when it comes to logging alcohol and fitting it into your day. You have the choice to either log it as carbohydrate, fat, or a mixture of the two. I recommend you take a few minutes and sit down with your food app so you can manually add in the alcohol you typically like to drink. Once you have done that you will already have it available to you to just pull-up and log when making plans for your night out. Yes, I do recommend you PRE-PLAN how many drinks you will be having because we all know that once you start drinking your judgement can go out the window and having a plan ahead of time is a much better way to ensure you successfully stick to your macros.
The macros you have available to you will determine whether you log your drinks as carbs, fats, or a mixture of the two and in order to be ready for that I recommend you manually add all three options for each alcohol you typically drink…that way each time you go out you can easily select drinks and fit them in based upon the macros you have available to you that particular day. For example, if you plan on having a steak that night you probably will not want to log your drink as fats (the steak will be using those), but if you plan on eating fish you will probably have extra room in your fats and can log your alcohol as fats.
Now for the actual calculations:
Your body treats alcohol like fats (9 cals) and carbs (4 cals). To reiterate, when recording alcohol in MFP or My Macros+you have the choice of recording it as fats, carbs, or a mixture of both. Here are some examples:
Red Wine – 5 oz.
- 5oz. red wine = 129 calories
- 129 / 4 = 32g carb
- 129 / 9 = 14g fat
- You could decide to record it ½ and ½ as 16g carb and 7g fat
White Wine – 5 oz.
- 5oz. white wine = 121 calories
- 121 / 4 = 30g carb
- 121 / 9 = 13g fat
- You could decide to record it ½ and ½ as 15g carb and 6.5g fat
Champagne – 5oz.
- 5oz. champagne – 98cal
- 98 / 4 = 24.5g carb
- 98 / 9 = 11g fat
- You could decide to record it ½ and ½ as 12g carb and 5.5g fat
Vodka – 90 proof 1.5 oz.
- 1 shot = 110 cals
- 110 / 4 = 28g carb
- 110 / 9 = 12g fat
- You could decide to record it ½ and ½ as 14g carb and 6g fat
Tequila – Petron 1.5 oz.
- 1 shot = 105 cals
- 105 / 4 = 26g carb
- 105 / 9 = 11.7g fat
- You could decide to record it ½ and ½ as 13g carb and 5.8g fat
Bud Light – 12 oz.
- 1 beer = 110 cals
- 110 / 4 = 28g carb
- 110 / 9 = 12g fat
- You could decide to record it ½ and ½ as 14g carb and 6g fat
Hopefully that helps clear-up the “how” when it comes to logging alcohol. Now that you know the formula you can apply it to all different types of alcoholic drinks. You will quickly figure out your go-tos as there are some drinks that are clearly a lot more macro friendly than others.
I’ll leave you with a link to a macro friendly margarita that the Ledbetter Team has made popular and may become your go-to…click HERE for that recipe (It’s the second recipe).