Let’s face a simple fact – alcohol and dieting have a symbiotic relationship. Basically, you cannot diet to lose weight if you continue to drink alcohol regularly.
As many of us aim to lose weight in the New Year, we often see food as our only foe and forget about the secret enemy of alcohol. I mean there is no fat in booze, right?
For alcohol, which many of us seem to regard as being blissfully calorie-free – indeed, research earlier this year showed two out of three of us haven’t a clue what the calorific value is of our favorite tipple – is the devil in the ointment when it comes to battling the bulge.
Alcohol awareness charity DrinkAware, which carried out the research, also claimed that while many people view themselves as being on a sensible diet to lose weight, only one in ten even considered the possibility of cutting down on alcohol.
Take a glass of red wine – a small 175ml one at that – with roughly the same calorie values as a slice of sponge cake.
You don’t even have to be a particularly big drinker for the calories to quickly add up: drinking seven glasses of beer a week adds up to a massive 44,200 calories over a year, equivalent to eating 221 pastries.
Add that to our increasingly sedentary lifestyle and it’s perhaps no wonder that more than a quarter of adults from Scotland are obese, never mind the damage the booze does to our bodies.
If you want to lose weight, you have to lay off the alcohol.