Calorie Counting Tips and the Calories in Alcohol

Losing weight through calorie counting is about monitoring the calories you burn and the calories you consume. To lose weight, it is fairly widely recommended you should aim to consume about 500 to 1000 calories per day less than you burn until the point a healthy weight is reached. This should result in approximately 1lb to 2lb of weight loss a week.

In order to determine the calories you are consuming and the calories you burn, there are a number of helpful tools available such as calorie calculators that give an indication of the calories you burn a day and the calories burned in various exercises and activities. You can also find various online calorie counters to search for calories and nutritional content of different types of foods.

Another helpful process is to track you calorie consumption and exercise. This allows you to see how your weight loss or gain is responding to your current calorie consumption and exercise, and allows you to modify your diet and exercise routine in response to how your weight loss is going. If you have trouble keeping up with journaling your exercise and diet program, there is software available that is very helpful for this purpose.

When monitoring your calorie intake, be sure to monitor both the calories you eat and those that you drink. Some people will be disappointed to know that fat, protein and carbohydrates are not the only source of calories, but alcohol contains calories too.

Alcohol has approximately 7 calories for each gram and this comes in second only to fat which has 9 calories for each gram. Protein and carbohydrates both contain approximately 4 calories per gram.

If you intend to have a few drinks while counting calories it is useful to know how many calories are in various alcoholic beverages. For red wine, while the calories vary for the type of wine, you may be looking at 125 calories per serving of 5 fl oz while for the same serving of white wine, you would be looking at around 121 calories.

One can of regular beer contains around 153 calories and 12.6 grams of carbs while a can of light beer contains about 103 calories and 5.8 grams of carbs. A jigger (1.5 fl oz) of 90 proof gin, rum, vodka or whiskey contains around 110 calories with virtually no fat, carbohydrates or protein. Keep in mind though, when mixing these drinks, you will need to count the calories of the beverage you are mixing them with as well.

This calorie information is accessible and readily available via the United States Department of Agriculture (also referred to as USDA) National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. It is also important to consult your doctor about your weight loss plans as they will be able to give you any advice that may be specific to your situation. For more information on calorie counting and the nutritional content of alcohol, take a look at the calories in wine or the calories in beer.