How do I track my alcohol
How can I include alcohol in my macros?
Part of the beauty of macro tracking is your ability to adapt your diet to your lifestyle. Rather than giving up on your day because you want to have a drink or two you should plan ahead for your beverage(s).
How can you replace an alcohol drink with carbs? Every gram of carbs has roughly 4 calories. So if you take an alcoholic beverage that contains 80 calories, it would mean reducing your carbohydrate intake by 20 grams for the day. Sounds easy, right?
You may, alternatively, reduce the alcohol calories from your daily fat consumption (if you have a great deal of fat in your diet). By using the same equation for an alcoholic beverage containing 80 calorie, it only makes sense to reduce your daily fat intake by 9 grams. Fat has 9 calories per gram, so by dividing 80 by 9, we get 8.88. So for simplicity, we round up to 9.
If, your fat total is 70 grams daily, you would simply reduce your fat intake to 61 grams to make up for the 80 calories of alcohol you drank.
You may substitute alcohol for a combination of carbs and fat instead of substituting for just one of them.
So, here’s the math:
Alcohol contains 7 calories in each gram. So, it is very dense when compared to the major macronutrients:
For each gram,
Carbs contain 4 calories;
Fats contain 9 calories
Alcohol contains 7 calories
Note :Alcohol cannot be substituted for protein.
To track alcohol, we will be distributing these calories to carbs and/or fats.
Also, it is important for you to know that when using a “mix” in your drink that contains carbohydrate or fat in it, you will have to track that first. And then using the calories remaining from the alcohol, you do the math:
To track as:
Carb: divide the total amount of calories in your alcoholic drink by 4.
Fat: divide the total amount of calories in your alcoholic drink by 9.
Alternatively, you can split between the two by any ratio you choose.
For instance, if a beer has 200 calories, you could track as:
Carbs 200/4 = 50 grams of carbs
Fats 200/9= 22.2 grams of fat
Both (splitting) 100/4= 25 grams of carbs
100/9= 11.1 grams of fats
