Your Guide To Enjoying Summer Cocktails While Building The Body You Want
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Ever wondered how you can enjoy your favorite summer cocktails without derailing your health and fitness goals? In this episode, I will teach you practical strategies to manage alcohol consumption, tackle common concerns about weight gain, and understand how alcohol influences your eating habits.
Discover how to seamlessly incorporate alcohol into your daily macro budget, allowing you to savor those refreshing drinks guilt-free. From the impact of alcohol on your body to debunking myths about drinking and fitness, you'll gain valuable insights to help you stay on track.
I also discuss…
(00:37) Understanding Alcohol and Macros
(06:20) Flexible Approach to Macro Tracking
(10:57) Personal Preference in Nutritional Choices
(16:04) Alcohol Macros Review and Tool Request
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Macro Counting Made Simple Online Academy: https://www.macrocountingmadesimple.com/
Website: www.juliealedbetter.com
Get my eBook: FREE Macro Counting Ebook
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Transcript:
00:00:00] Hey there, beautiful human you're listening to Embrace Your Real With Me, Julie Ledbetter, a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned. If you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get it. Let's go. [00:00:21][21.0]
[00:00:28] Hello and welcome back to another episode on the Embrace Trail podcast. The summer is in full swing, and I'm sure so many of you guys are enjoying all of the summer things, whether that is barbecue time at the pool time at the beach, time at the lake, and of course, for a lot of you, that does include refreshing summer cocktails. While some of you guys might be wanting them, a lot of you guys have so many questions. And this is because I have talked to so many people over the years of like, you know, you have goals in terms of your health and fitness goals, but you also want to have some fun and you want to have a beer, you want to have a cocktail, you want to have some alcohol during the summer. And the questions that are most frequently asked are, does drinking alcohol make you fat? Should you not be drinking alcohol? If you have health and fitness goals, is drinking alcohol going to undo kind of all of the hard work that you've done? And the answer to all of these questions is yes and no. It really does depend on your approach. And so that's why in today's episode, I kind of just want to teach you how to calculate alcohol in terms of macros. So if you want to have a drink and if you want to just be more educated in terms of how you would track that, if you are tracking protein, carbs and fats, or at the very least, if you're being mindful of that this summer, you can do so without feeling guilty, without feeling like you have FOMO, or that you have to punish yourself afterwards. So before we dive into today's episode, I do want to share this review that comes from JT Shay. She gave a five star review and said encouraging. I love listening to these podcasts. I look forward to them every week. Julie keeps it real. This podcast has changed my perspective on health and fitness and food for the better. I always feel so encouraged after listening and she makes things so easy to understand and follow. Such an amazing lesson! If you're looking to boost your confidence, feel good in your own skin, and get motivated to honor your body. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to send in that review. I really appreciate every single one of your guys's videos and taking time out of your day to do so, because I do know that your time is valuable, and so thank you for doing so. If you could scooch over to Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review, that would mean so, so much to me and our team. Just kind of know how this podcast is helping you, how, you know, a specific episode helped you or spoke to you in certain way. And it also helps people who stumble upon the podcast and it helps them understand or kind of see if it's something worth listening to themselves or not. So thank you in advance for doing that. Okay, let's dive into kind of how to drink alcohol while still working towards your health and fitness goals. So first of all we need to establish a base. So alcohol is high in calories right around seven calories per gram. But unlike protein and carbs, which is four calories per gram, it is a little bit less than fat, which is nine calories per gram. But alcohol itself offers minimal nutrients. Obviously, you can kind of look at alcohol similar to like soda. It's empty calories because they really aren't going to nourish you, but they will contribute to your overall calorie and carb intake or fat intake, depending on how you want to allotted. And this means that alcohol you know, can contribute to weight gain if not balanced by reducing your overall calorie, carb fat intake elsewhere. In fact, there really, though, hasn't been any studies been that have been proven to show that the link directly of drinking alcohol is with weight gain. The findings are really mixed. There's no clear results here, but for now, researchers can just agree that people who drink alcohol might experience weight gain due to other factors aka lifestyle habits that contribute to weight gain. So, for example, you know, alcohol can stimulate the appetite to lead you to overeat aka going over your protein carbon fat allotment for the day. Alcohol can also cloud your judgment, which leads to kind of overindulging, triggering you to overeat and go over your macros for the day. Alcohol can be filled with other ingredients that are, you know, sugar and carb heavy, which can lead you to go to obviously overall carb calorie allotment for the day. So basically, alcohol itself might not necessarily lead to weight gain, but the fact that you are going over your daily allotment of protein, carbs and fats, your alcohol or your macros on a daily basis due to alcohol, that is what has been and will be linked to overall weight gain, just in general. And I understand that not everybody wants to cut it out 100% out of your day today, or your week to week, or just your life in general, and that's totally fine. So if that is you, if you are wanting to still have a drink here, there, still have some alcoholic drinks during the summer or just year round, you can absolutely do that. And so kind of fitting alcoholic drinks into your daily allotment, it can be super easy, especially when you do it more. Just like anything, you know, finding the rhythm and learning something and then just creating that habit, creating that routine. And you guys, if you've been tuning in for any length of time, you guys know that I talk about macro counting like budgeting, right? You have a daily budget of macros. You can spend that budget however you'd like. So let's say, you know, you want to have pizza every Friday night or you want to have ice cream. On a daily basis, which oftentimes is higher in carbs and fats, you would simply just keep your carbon fat allotment lower throughout the day, or at the very least, you would track it in your macro tracking app or track it first thing, and then you kind of build your day around the rest of the remaining carbs, fats, and proteins that you have, right? So similar to budgeting, like you have something that you want to purchase, you only have a certain amount of money you want to purchase, that you're going to build your budget around that. If that is something that you're going to prioritize, if not, you're going to save towards, you know, a certain time when you are going to purchase it. And drinking alcohol is pretty much the same, like leaving room in your budget for alcohol. So you know, you want to go out to dinner or some, have some drinks with some girls after work. You're going to plan for it, you know, you're going to a barbecue on Saturday, or you're going to the lake or going to the beach, and you're going to have a few drinks. You're going to plan for it. And of course, again, it's just about planning ahead. And of course, life's going to happen. There's going to be things that pop up and that's okay. And this is where I just want to stress that macro accounting should not be this black or white thing. Right. It's going there's going to be times where you go over your macros and that's totally fine. This is a lifestyle. This is something that I want you to be sustainable. I want it to be sustainable for you. And the only way that it's going to be sustainable is by just trial and error, and life is going to happen. Right? One thing on that, though, I do want to kind of share, is that there's a little bit of a twist that I do want you to know about, and that is that most common. And the most common mistake that I see people make in terms of trying to track macros and alcohol, is that they just look at the nutritional label and they think that's what they track. Right. And there are two reasons why I want to encourage you to kind of rethink that. So reason number one is that alcohol is not regulated by the FDA. So it is not really subjected to the same rules as food labels. And reason number two is that alcohol does not provide nutrition like protein, carbs and fats. And like I mentioned earlier, it has seven calories per gram, unlike carbs and protein. So what do you do instead? Well, simply looking at the label might seem correct. In reality, what you actually need to do is you need to look at the total caloric value and then break it down into either all carbs, either all fats, or a combination of both. And I know that might sound confusing, so let me kind of give you an example so that I can break it down for you. And this is going to be a great time. If you have a note section on your phone or where you're sitting by pen and paper, or just stop what you're doing and really just try to conceptualize this so that you can understand, because once you get this basic knowledge, it is going to be with you forever, and it's going to be something that is easy for you to understand. So let me give you an example. Right. You want to drink, let's say a light calorie beer like Michelob Ultra. Okay. One 12 ounce can has around 95 calories. There's a couple ways that you can track that 95 calories. You can track all of it in carbs, or you can track all of it as fat. Or you can do a combination of both. Option number one, you're going to track it like carbs, right? All carbs. So the 95 calories are all going to go to carbs. So you would divide the 95 calories by four calories per gram because all carbs contain four calories per gram, which equals 24g of carbs. And then you'd enter in your beer into your macro tracking app or counter simply as zero grams of protein, zero grams of fat, or 24g of carbs. Option number two you could follow a similar formula, but you want to track it all as fat. Since fat contains nine calories per gram, you would do the following. You would do 95 calories for that can of beer. The 12oz of Michelob Ultra by nine calories per gram. Because you're tracking this all is fat, which will give you 11g of fat. And then you'd enter that into your macro tracking app, your macro counter as this. All right, the 12oz of beer that I'm going to track today is zero grams of protein, zero grams of carbs, 11g of fat or the last option and stick with me again. This is something that you can rewind, and I promise you. It might sound confusing at first, but when you really break it down, once you get the concept, that concept will stick with you. The last option is to do a combination of both, and here's where it can get a little bit tricky, but still not too tricky, right? So first of all, you're going to divide if you want to do half and half, half carbs, half fat. And the reason people do this is they just they don't want to take all of their fat, so they don't want to take all of their carbs from one thing because, you know, you might just have one beer, but maybe you have 2 or 3 beers that's going to add up, right? If it's 24g of carbs, that's easily going to be if you have two beers, it's going to be 48g of carbs, or if you have two cans and you want to track it all this fat, that's going to be 22g of fat. So there's a reason why some people do half and half. And here's what you would do if you want to track it. Half is carbs and half is fat. Okay, so you still have the same 12 ounce, 95 calorie Michelob Ultra. You're going to divide that by two, which is 47.5. Then from there you're going to. Follow the same formulas that I just mentioned. Right? So you'll divide 47.5 divided by four and to calculate your carbs. And that is going to be 12g of carbs. And then you're going to divide 47.5 by nine for your fats. And that's going to be five grams of fat. So what you would do if you want to do the combination of carbs and fats for that 12 ounce can of Michelob Ultra is you would track zero grams of protein, 12g of carbs, and five grams of fat. All right. You might be like, I totally get it. I'm on your page. I understand it now. Like, which of these three options is best? And honestly, it really depends on you. Like there are some people that they just naturally gravitate towards higher fat foods. So they want to have the bank of fat to pull from for actual foods throughout the day. There's other people that naturally gravitate towards carb carbohydrate foods, so they'd rather pull from their fat bank. So it really is a personal preference, and I can't really tell you which one is the best way to go. It's just kind of dependent on what you choose to have or what you are going to be having that day, or what you typically have on a regular basis. But again, there's you know, a lot of times it just comes down to like the personal preference of each person. I actually have a blog post that I created, which I will link and it is so cool. Joshua created a few years ago and it has been one of the top use resources in terms of macro counting on our website, and it's actually an alcohol calculator. And so it's super simple for you to figure out. And so all you do is like enter the numbers and it will calculate for you. So again I will link that it's completely free. It's on my website. And also if you're under time there's also some of like the top macro friendly drinks that really aren't that super high in terms of macros or calories that I recommend. And so again I will link that in the show notes. And that will be super easy for you and a great resource. Again, just so that you don't have to do all the math, because I don't know about you, but I do not love math. I'm not great at math. And so anytime someone suggests that I have to do math or something, I'm immediately like, no. Which is why having a macro calculator or having the macro tracking app like my macros or My Fitness Pal can be super helpful. But now some suggestions like let's say you want to drink some wine, I would opt for Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio, or if you want to kind of make like a wine seltzer, you want to actually get more drink without all of the calories. You can do like a half a glass of wine and then fill up the rest with a flavored or non flavored sparkling water. And that way it's refreshing. It gives you a little bit more, but with not any other additional calories. Or if you want to drink beer again, you can opt for something light like a michelob ultra, a seltzer like. Truly, there's literally tons of beers and seltzers that are on the market that are only 100 calories or less. And again, those can be delicious and something that is super easy for you to enjoy in the summertime. Or if you want a cocktail, you can, you know, make a cocktail with a sugar free mixer or something, like if you guys have had Xlvii before, it's a great alternative too. It's more of like a natural diet soda or the alley pop, which does have some calories, but it's a prebiotic soda. It's delicious. It actually has some fiber in there, and that's amazing. And you can mix that in with some hard liquor or whatever. So let's say, for example, you know, you want to have a Moscow mule. You could use a sugar free ginger ale and some fresh lime juice in there as well. So again, just getting creative there when it comes to cocktails and there are endless amounts of of recipes and ideas on Pinterest and TikTok. So just type in a Pinterest like, you know, lower calorie cocktail and you'll find tons of ideas that you likely have never even heard of. And you can try them out, and then you can figure out which one is your best. Or maybe you're at it at a restaurant. I don't know about you, but I love a good skinny margarita. Like I always just ask them, you know, if it is, if they do have a skinny margarita, or if they don't have a skinny margarita, they can ask them to make it with lime juice instead of the actual concentrate that they typically use. Or try a vodka soda or, you know, a vodka diet soda. Like there are tons and tons of different options. And you'll you'll be surprised at how many are delicious. And yet they cut the calories in, you know, by a third or by a half. And so just being mindful of that. But at the end of the day, just remember that it is totally possible to have health and fitness goals and still drink alcohol. You know, obviously, just like anything that I talk about, moderation is key here. So I don't want you to go out and have, you know, 5 or 6 drinks on a regular basis and then get frustrated when you're not seeing the health and fitness results that you want. So again, everything moderation here. But you can absolutely still have a couple drinks and still see results. Again, I will link that calculator that I have on my website. It's completely free. I think that that will be really helpful for you. And if you're genuinely curious in terms of macros, you know, you hear me talk about macros a lot on the. Guest, but you've never kind of dove into that. You want to know? All right, well, I'm curious now. I want to know what my protein, carbon fat allotment is based on where I'm at and what my goals are. I have a program for you. It's a step by step breakdown on really how to calculate macros, and I give you all the resources that you need to successfully build the body that you want. We show you step by step, how we calculated your macros so that you can feel empowered and educated so that you can walk away from the program not feeling that you have to rely on a coach for the rest of your life. But I will go ahead and link that it is macro counting made simple A.com again, that's macro counting made simple dot and you can learn all about that program there. If you love this episode, if you could do me a huge favor and leave a review. I know it sounds silly, but the growth of this show is so important and it helps us reach even more women's lives to help them, educate them, empower them, encourage them in some way, shape or form. That is the goal for every single episode. And again, I will link the alcohol macro calculator in the show notes so that you can check that out. As well as the Macro Academy. It's simple online academy, but I hope that this was helpful for you. This is an episode that you can stick in the back pocket. You can bookmark it that way, the next time you are about to have some alcohol, you can have this, the link for the blog. Or you can have the explanation that I have in today's episode readily available for you on how to figure out if you want to calculate it all as carbs, as fats, or a combination of both. But that is all that I have for today's episode. I love you so dang much. I mean it and I'll talk to you next one. [00:16:54]
[00:17:05] All right, sister, that's all I got for you today. But I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you're not already following me on the gram, be sure to do so. Julia Ledbetter. Yes, it's with a in the middle for that daily Post workout. Real talk, healthy tips and tricks, and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world, and I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface. So go out there and embrace it real because you're worth it. [00:17:05]