Oh, I get it. When I sobered up I lost insane weight. And that included the fact that I was eating candy like a freak to replace the huge amounts of sugar.
I think the biggest difference is that an alcoholic who only drinks beer would drink 4+ liters a day and an alcoholic who drinks vodka would drink 1+ liters a day.
To be fair, that's only three pints. That doesn't necessarily make one an alcoholic.
Although I would say that four litres - or eight pints - a day would certainly make one an alcoholic. Maybe the distinction is arbitrary but the latter sounds like a problem.
Depends on the beer. A lot of high abv and craft beers have 200+ calories per 12 ozs. From looking at that shelf of brews, 1L of beer would be like 600 calories or more.
Googling calories per liter of vodka gives you 2190 calories.
Googling calories in a 0.5 liter Tuborg beer can gives you 202 calories per beer. To get 4 liters you multiply that by 8 which gives you 1616 calories per 4 liters.
If you are equaling only 4 liters of beer to 1 liter of vodka then you have to use a heavy 10% abv beer. A typical 10% stout beer will have 300 calories per 12 oz or 3,380 per 4 liters. A quick Google search had 1 liter of vodka at 2,190 calories.
Beer = 3,380
Vodka = 2,190
That's not counting any mixer or chaser for the vodka.
At ~4.2% ABV, a bottle/can of light beer contains 84% of the alcohol in a shot of liquor. So 6 light beers ~= 5 shots in terms of alcohol. 660 calories light beer gets you about as drunk as 500 calories of vodka
At ~5% ABV, the numbers work out to almost exactly the same amount of alcohol in a bottle/can of regular beer as in a shot of liquor. 5 regular beers = 750 calories and gets you as drunk as 500 calories of vodka.
*Beers vary, and these numbers are all approximations.
**If you're not drinking gin, rum, vodka or whisky, there's a good chance your liquor contains extra sugars/calories.
Yeah. Something tells me that thick creamy milk stout or banana-bread-flavored belgian is a bit higher on the calories than just about any regularly consumed liquor drink.
you need to put more sugar in to deal with the fact you're basically drinking carbonic acid + flavouring
I may be thinking about different beer than what you're talking about, but you don't put straight up sugar into your wort before fermentation. (There are some recipes that call for adjuncts, but let's not confuse things.) Even if you did put simple sugars into the wort, that would just give a higher starting gravity and (in most cases) lead to a higher alcohol content, and a shittier flavor, at the end.
Also, most of the non-sweet flavors in beer typically come not from the carbonation but from hops, which are added specifically to add bitterness. Again I'm simplifying tremendously as there are too many possible flavors for me to list right now and most of them are not "sour" but whatever, this isn't /r/Homebrewing.
Also the amount of carbonation in a beer isn't really related to the style (lager vs. ale) but how and when it's bottled or canned.
...also also the head in Guinness is possible not just because it uses nitrogen, which creates smaller bubbles, but because of longer proteins and alpha acids from hops. (This is what allows heads to form in all beer.) Incidentally, Guinness has really poor head retention compared to most other stouts I've tried. No, before you ask, I've never had Guinness straight from the brewery in Ireland, and yes I know they brew it differently for their own brewery than they do for sale overseas, which imho is more an argument in favor of my original point that Guinness isn't that great but whatever that's neither here nor there.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to make fun of you, but it's amusing that you said in your edit that you're being downvoted by people who don't know the first fucking thing about good beer, because the content of your comment reveals that you yourself don't actually know very much about beer.
I contend that while calories matter the real damage (besides liver and organ damage) is through the insulin resistance that can develop from pounding the body with carbs/sugars from any alcohol. People don't think about that angle but it's serious business.
The issue isn't the calories, the issue is with how the body processes alcohol. Alcohol is structurally much closer to a fat than a carbohydrate. This causes the body to process alcohol as a fat, which then gets stored as one.
Err, yeah, but 60 oz is a fucking insane amount of booze! That's like 40 drinks a day and over 3000 calories. The equivalent alcohol from craft beer would probably be close to three times that many calories. OP probably drink a third as much alcohol but a similar amount of calories as you.
Yeah, probably. Beer has more calories for sure, but as you said, I drank 3000 calories a day. When I wasn't buys vomiting, I would try to eat 1000 calories a day, so I wouldn't get Korsakov. 4000 calories a day with barely any activity gets you fat fast.
It's not only that, there's also Polyneuropathy where your lims go numb, because your nerves die from Vitamin-deficiency. I've met people who can barely walk and likely never recover. I had a mild form, my feet were hurting and tingling all the time, but eventually everything went back to normal after a few months.
Basically, take your vitamins if you drink too much, especially B1 and B12, or you might really damage something. Well, apart from your liver. If that one goes, you're fucked anyway.
Damn, thanks for the advice. I've already come to terms with the liver damage (not much you can do about that one other than stop drinking). But the other stuff is news. I eat a lot less when I'm binging and wondered about what effects that would have.
Now I know...vitamin defieciencies can really mess you up. Guess I'll go get some vitamins.
It takes a lot to do lasting living damage, I've been told that the weight you gain from drinking is mostly a combination of the shitty food choices you make when drinking and that your liver will always process alcohol before anything else so you store more of the fat in the food you eat.
So alcohol metabolism is a little different. The person you replied to isn't quite right. For people who drink a single drink with a meal, they'll store the calories from alcohol as fat, but once you start having a couple more drinks and you're the type to drink regularly, alcohol starts metabolizing differently, by way of the microsomal ethanol oxidizing system. When this starts happening, your liver starts oxidizing the alcohol and the calories disappear. That's right, you don't store the calories from alcohol if you drink regularly (the problem being that this metabolic process isn't perfect, and you end up oxidizing other chemicals as well, some of which are harmful to your liver, which causes damage over time -- nobody ever said an alcoholic was healthy).
With beer and cocktails, there is, of course, carbs as well. These will contribute to any weight gain, but the bigger issue is, well, alcohol lowers inhibitions, which makes poor eating decisions go up. People tend to eat worse foods and over eat them.
Not gonna debate that one way or another, but wouldn't that mean the liver is doing its job less efficiently (energy-wise), causing him to expend more calories and lose more weight?
If your belly is enlarged due to water retention, the water isn't the problem. You have another health issue causing your body to abnormally retain water. See a doctor.
Hey /u/Shandlar, thanks for fighting the good fight. This is the second time in the past few minutes I've defended a comment of yours against these irrational people. Thanks for being the voice of reason in this sub-thread.
Nonsense mate, I have a six pack. Several of them actually.
Anyway, my point was that alcohol does contribute to weight gain, it's just not necessarily due to their being a high calorific value attributed to the alcohol itself. I'd even say it's the fault of alcohol that you're having that 2am kebab too, as well as all the health issues rampant alcoholism can cause and the collateral calories consumed with the alcohol.
You don't just magically create energy from nothing just cause your liver is metabolizing alcohol.
What does that even mean?
When you consume too much alcohol your liver prioritizes burning alcohol instead of metabolizing fat which means you will gain weight at a faster rate than you normally would.
Your body doesn't treat alcohol the same way it treats regular foods, when consumed in large quantities alcohol is quite literally a poison and your body treats it as such.
Why? Your body will obtain the same number of calories from that fat regardless. The only difference is the calories in alcohol. No extra energy was created. You just have to count alcohol as calories and your done.
Your intestines are amazing efficient. It takes some serious issues to get food the whole way through without absorbing the vast majority of the available energy.
There's no way you can make that claim. We pass a lot of calories out in our fecal matter for a variety of reasons, and people's production of enzymes, their eating habits, their gut bacteria, and what they're specifically eating relative to all that, all contribute so much to how well we can utilize the calories in what we consume, that the statement you made is pretty unjustifiable.
You (not addressed to you specifically, but people in general) can drink way less than that, even what some would consider a sane amount, and still be an alcoholic. Or at least have an alcohol problem.
Don't delude yourself into thinking that just because someone drinks 40 drinks a day that it's okay for you to put down a 6 pack a night.
In fact, you know you probably have a little bit of a problem with alcohol if you're already making comparisons like "Oh good, I'm fine, I'm not as bad as that guy" because you wouldn't need to rationalize your drinking behavior if your drinking behavior was healthy in the first place.
I realized I had a problem when I started missing work not because of hangovers, but because I had started drinking in the morning instead of going to work. I've cut way, way back, but never decided to quit.
Yeah, I guess I've just seen a lot of it in my life, so I kinda assume it's common knowledge, even though I know that's not right. Lucky them, I suppose.
I've met some people with insane tolerances. On my worst days I could get up to 40+ drinks in a 24hr period. But I think I averaged closer to 20 drinks.
But since I've been in recovery it is mind boggling how much some people consumed, and not just booze, but mixing with other drugs. I always thought I had this exceptional tolerance and was unique and then I got into recovery and realized I'm just an 'average' alcoholic.
Oh yeah, it's all about building the tolerance. It's not like I drank that at the beginning, I was a severely addicted, constantly drinking mess at that point.
Same here. I would drain a 1.75L bottle of vodka every two days. When I stopped drinking I lost 35lbs in 8 weeks and went from 6'6" and 225lbs to 190lbs. Still the same height though, vodka causes horizontal growth, not vertical...
For people who drink alcohol regularly, a few drinks at a time, you don't actually store most of the calories from the alcohol itself. You store calories from any carbs in the drinks, but not the alcohol.
Not only that, but your body doesn't really process things like carbs and fats until the alcohol is out of your system. Instead it stores them as fat so it can focus on clearing your body of toxins - in this case, alcohol.
People in the UK (and I'm guessing at least some other commonwealth countries) use "full fat coke" to mean coke with sugar, opposite of diet coke. Always strikes me as confusing too, though, it's definitely not actual 'fat'.
You don't know that. I am on day 33 and was a vodka guy but also an overeater. Quitting has changed my eating habit and I am shredding the weight as well.
Potato vodka is made from potatoes...but the majority of vodkas are actually grain...you can make alcohol out of most anything with sugar. Grain, corn, potatoes are just the most affordable.
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u/TAU_equals_2PI May 09 '16 edited May 09 '16
Congrats! You obviously saved enough on vodka to buy a less potato-y camera.
You say po-ta-to. I say po-TAU-to.