Alcohol and Other Beverages
Take the Pledge: No More Mixers
When people first hear about Drink Your Carbs, they get excited. The idea that it is possible to lose weight without eliminating alcohol is so revolutionary that it can inspire temporary insanity. This is particularly true when starting out on the diet. We’ve seen perfectly well-adjusted people happily turn away the breadbasket, swap out the side of potatoes for steamed veggies, and simultaneously undo all that good work by gulping down a 500 calorie banana daiquiri.
Before you kick back and celebrate your new diet with a mudslide or a couple of Margaritas, there is some bad news: as an adherent to Drink Your Carbs, there are some drinks you simply can no longer have. The even worse news is that it’s not a small list. Most of the drinks on the “Specialty Drinks” list at your local Applebee’s clone are off limits. Toss out most liqueurs, flavored malt beverages and sweet wines. The reason comes back to, once again, calories in versus calories out.
Before you kick back and celebrate your new diet with a mudslide or a couple of Margaritas, there is some bad news: as an adherent to Drink Your Carbs, there are some drinks you simply can no longer have. The even worse news is that it’s not a small list. Most of the drinks on the “Specialty Drinks” list at your local Applebee’s clone are off limits. Toss out most liqueurs, flavored malt beverages and sweet wines. The reason comes back to, once again, calories in versus calories out.
Fact: Not all alcohol is created equal.[Check our math and you’ll find most published calorie totals for the drinks named are half of what we say they are. The reason is that most mixed drink recipes are calculated to a serving size of four to four and a half ounces. Unless you deliberately insult the bartender, you will never be served a drink this small. Most bars serve fruity drinks that average six to 12 ounces. Some bars use pint glasses that clock in at 16 ounces. Trader Vic’s, a West Coast Tiki Bar made famous by Warren Zevon, serves some of their fruitiest drinks in a “Tiki Bowl” which is the size of a fishbowl and likely contains more calories than a large man should consume in a day.]
- Mixers can turn a 69-calorie shot of Patron Silver tequila into a 400-calorie frozen strawberry margarita.
- Without mixers, the 500-calorie piña colada or 550-calorie mudslide would not be possible. You would have to drink a tumbler lled with rum to come close to those caloric numbers.
- Transforming a glass of red wine into sangria easily doubles the calories with the addition of fruit juice and sweet brandy.
- Adding two tablespoons of simple syrup to your drink increases your calorie intake by roughly the same amount as if you were to dump six packets of white, granulated sugar directly on to your dinner.
Pre-bottled, syrupy-sweet cocktail mixers, such as Grenadine, Rosie’s Lime and Electric-Green Margarita mix should be avoided as a matter of course. Mixers that advertise themselves as “lower calorie” are no better. Even small amounts of added sugars should be avoided. They might seem insignificant in a single drink, but as a habit, they add up to an enormous calorie load over the course of weeks and months. The addition of just 10 extra calories a day translates to over 3,500 additional calories in a year. According to some experts, 3,500 calories is the magic number that will add a pound to the average person’s frame. Whether or not this continues to be true - diet advice from the PhD crowd changes hourly - it is a good idea to avoid adding calories when you just don’t have to. It takes some time for your palate to adjust, but you will learn to enjoy unsweetened cocktails or, better yet, your drinks straight up.
Tonic water is less obvious, but equally problematic. A can of tonic water adds about 135 calories to a drink. A can of pre-made Bloody Mary mix rings in at around 80 calories. Both of these choices are superior to a rum and Coke, but neither is a good choice for the drinker who is trying to cut enough calories to lose weight.
As far as we are concerned, sweet wines and sweet liquors are one in the same. The flavor in sweet liquor invariably comes from added sugar. Sometimes sugar is added in the form of fruit juice instead of simple syrup. There are no exceptions for sweeteners – no matter the source. They are similar enough to be effectively the same.
We realize this this categorization is not entirely fair to sweet wines. The sugar in sweet wine occurs naturally. It is the product of incomplete fermentation. Wine makers simply kill off the yeast before the fermentation is complete and the result is a wine with residual sugar. Unfortunately for dessert wines – at least in the Drink Your Carbs plan - this process also leaves them 30 percent to 50 percent higher in calories than a glass of traditional dry red or white wine. More importantly, these wines are sweet; we strongly believe that consuming anything sweet increases sugar cravings. If you insist on an after dinner drink, you are far better off ordering a glass of Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, or any other dry wine off the dinner menu.
There is a new trend in upscale bars to create specialty drinks that are equal parts unique and pretentious. These new drinks purport to quite literally brim with health. They are organic, natural, locally sourced, filled with anti-oxidants, vitamin enhanced, sustainably harvested, hand-picked, shade-grown, pre-prohibition and fair trade.
Foraged herbs and rare fruits responsibly sourced from remote jungles are used to create flavors that did not exist only six months ago. Perhaps our palates are not refined enough to distinguish the subtleties, but without guidance from the “mixologist” we might never know that we were supposed to taste black pepper, persimmons or bergamot rose. These lists can be tempting. After all, when will you have another opportunity to taste a Martini made with apricot, elderflower and spicy Indonesian curry? As an adherent to Drink Your Carbs, you must learn to resist.
Specialty cocktails are almost always sweetened, even if only slightly, with simple syrup or other juices. It is very rare that one of these drinks will be completely without added sweeteners. The bitterness of the increasingly large menu of things that were never put into drinks but now are, such as wasabi-aged jalapenos, muddled basil and watermelon rind, can only be cut by adding sugar. In our experience, even when sugar is not listed among the ingredients, it somehow sneaks into the final blend. We recently ordered a chili and cucumber martini after being assured that it was completely free of added sweeteners. The resulting drink tasted like Mountain Dew. There is little doubt the mixologist was lying when she insisted that we were “just tasting the natural sweetness of the cucumber.”
Specialty drinks are best avoided. The only time you should venture in is if you have a favorite bartender who understands your aversion to mixers and will not lie to you about ingredients, or when your favorite bar adds designated Drink Your Carbs cocktails to the Specialty Bar Menu.
Tonic water is less obvious, but equally problematic. A can of tonic water adds about 135 calories to a drink. A can of pre-made Bloody Mary mix rings in at around 80 calories. Both of these choices are superior to a rum and Coke, but neither is a good choice for the drinker who is trying to cut enough calories to lose weight.
As far as we are concerned, sweet wines and sweet liquors are one in the same. The flavor in sweet liquor invariably comes from added sugar. Sometimes sugar is added in the form of fruit juice instead of simple syrup. There are no exceptions for sweeteners – no matter the source. They are similar enough to be effectively the same.
We realize this this categorization is not entirely fair to sweet wines. The sugar in sweet wine occurs naturally. It is the product of incomplete fermentation. Wine makers simply kill off the yeast before the fermentation is complete and the result is a wine with residual sugar. Unfortunately for dessert wines – at least in the Drink Your Carbs plan - this process also leaves them 30 percent to 50 percent higher in calories than a glass of traditional dry red or white wine. More importantly, these wines are sweet; we strongly believe that consuming anything sweet increases sugar cravings. If you insist on an after dinner drink, you are far better off ordering a glass of Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, or any other dry wine off the dinner menu.
There is a new trend in upscale bars to create specialty drinks that are equal parts unique and pretentious. These new drinks purport to quite literally brim with health. They are organic, natural, locally sourced, filled with anti-oxidants, vitamin enhanced, sustainably harvested, hand-picked, shade-grown, pre-prohibition and fair trade.
Foraged herbs and rare fruits responsibly sourced from remote jungles are used to create flavors that did not exist only six months ago. Perhaps our palates are not refined enough to distinguish the subtleties, but without guidance from the “mixologist” we might never know that we were supposed to taste black pepper, persimmons or bergamot rose. These lists can be tempting. After all, when will you have another opportunity to taste a Martini made with apricot, elderflower and spicy Indonesian curry? As an adherent to Drink Your Carbs, you must learn to resist.
Specialty cocktails are almost always sweetened, even if only slightly, with simple syrup or other juices. It is very rare that one of these drinks will be completely without added sweeteners. The bitterness of the increasingly large menu of things that were never put into drinks but now are, such as wasabi-aged jalapenos, muddled basil and watermelon rind, can only be cut by adding sugar. In our experience, even when sugar is not listed among the ingredients, it somehow sneaks into the final blend. We recently ordered a chili and cucumber martini after being assured that it was completely free of added sweeteners. The resulting drink tasted like Mountain Dew. There is little doubt the mixologist was lying when she insisted that we were “just tasting the natural sweetness of the cucumber.”
Specialty drinks are best avoided. The only time you should venture in is if you have a favorite bartender who understands your aversion to mixers and will not lie to you about ingredients, or when your favorite bar adds designated Drink Your Carbs cocktails to the Specialty Bar Menu.
Fact: One of the best things you can do for your waistline is learn to love your coffee black and your alcohol straight up.
Acceptable Alcoholic Beverages on Drink Your Carbs:
Wine
- Dry red and white wines are both allowed and encouraged.
- Dry rosé is a good choice as well.
- Champagne/sparkling wine is also allowed with one major caveat. Last year, we received a note from a sommelier in Chicago kindly informing us that we knew nothing when it came to bubbly. These wines, it turns out, are o en quite high in residual sugar even though they taste very dry. “ ere is actually only one category of Champagne that contains 0 grams of sugar,” she wrote. ”It’s Ultra Brut, sometimes called Non-Dosage.” The best advice we can o er is: if you don’t like bone-dry bubbly, keep your consumption limited.
Beer
Until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decides to mandate nutritional labeling on beer, it will continue to be dificult to identify appropriate beer choices for Drink Your Carbs. For now, the best option we have found is a book by Bob Skilnik, Does my Butt Look Big in is Beer? The book lists the calories, carbs and Weight Watcher points for more than 2,000 beers from around the world. Bob spent hundreds of hour sifting through websites and emailing breweries so that we don’t have to. It is the perfect resource for the beer lover on Drink Your Carbs. Order it through your local bookstore for about $10.
- Beer is both allowed and encouraged. e only restrictions are that you should avoid sweet beers and try to stick to lower calorie beers overall.
Until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decides to mandate nutritional labeling on beer, it will continue to be dificult to identify appropriate beer choices for Drink Your Carbs. For now, the best option we have found is a book by Bob Skilnik, Does my Butt Look Big in is Beer? The book lists the calories, carbs and Weight Watcher points for more than 2,000 beers from around the world. Bob spent hundreds of hour sifting through websites and emailing breweries so that we don’t have to. It is the perfect resource for the beer lover on Drink Your Carbs. Order it through your local bookstore for about $10.
Hard Liquor
Avoid alcohol that has been dyed an unnatural color. We can’t think of a single example of a neon blue or re-engine red liquor that is not sweetened.
Avoid all mixers. We cannot repeat this o en enough. Mixers are the Boogeyman. Liqueurs are also out. As far as we are con- cerned, St. Germain, Hard Tea, etc., are just fancy mixers. Stay away from “diet” mixers as well. Artificial sweeteners are not allowed on Drink Your Carbs.
If you want to add something to your drink, try muddled fruit, pickled vegetables and/or fresh herbs and spices. If you do use muddled fruit, use the whole fruit. Do not accept a pre-sweetened mash. The best methodology for Drink Your Carbs is to crush whole fruit at the bottom of the drink. Spooning mashed fruit from a jar just increases the juice-to-fruit ratio. You can also try floating cut fruit or fresh berries in your drink. Blueberries or strawberries bobbing up and down in a martini glass make your drink downright tropical without blowing your diet.
When drinking a cocktail with fruit, make an effort to eat the fruit itself. The goal is not to siphon off the juice. The goal is to eat fresh fruit while enjoying your cocktail.
- Hard alcohol consumption is allowed and encouraged.
Avoid alcohol that has been dyed an unnatural color. We can’t think of a single example of a neon blue or re-engine red liquor that is not sweetened.
Avoid all mixers. We cannot repeat this o en enough. Mixers are the Boogeyman. Liqueurs are also out. As far as we are con- cerned, St. Germain, Hard Tea, etc., are just fancy mixers. Stay away from “diet” mixers as well. Artificial sweeteners are not allowed on Drink Your Carbs.
If you want to add something to your drink, try muddled fruit, pickled vegetables and/or fresh herbs and spices. If you do use muddled fruit, use the whole fruit. Do not accept a pre-sweetened mash. The best methodology for Drink Your Carbs is to crush whole fruit at the bottom of the drink. Spooning mashed fruit from a jar just increases the juice-to-fruit ratio. You can also try floating cut fruit or fresh berries in your drink. Blueberries or strawberries bobbing up and down in a martini glass make your drink downright tropical without blowing your diet.
When drinking a cocktail with fruit, make an effort to eat the fruit itself. The goal is not to siphon off the juice. The goal is to eat fresh fruit while enjoying your cocktail.
Before you get too excited, remember that Drink Your Carbs requires exercise. If you can’t get out of bed in the morning and fully commit to your workout, it is time to dial your drinking way back.
On Drink Your Carbs, exercise serves as barometer for reasonableness. The moment we skip a workout, we either stop drinking for a short time or reduce our drinking to a trickle. The exercise requirement is not optional. Exercise is necessary for both overall health and weight loss. Equally important is the fact that required exercise turns Drink Your Carbs into self-correcting system.
On Drink Your Carbs, exercise serves as barometer for reasonableness. The moment we skip a workout, we either stop drinking for a short time or reduce our drinking to a trickle. The exercise requirement is not optional. Exercise is necessary for both overall health and weight loss. Equally important is the fact that required exercise turns Drink Your Carbs into self-correcting system.