Relaxing with friends at a restaurant for a round of happy hour drinks can be the best way to end a hard day at work, but failing to pay attention to the calories you’re drinking may lead to unintentional weight gain. When embarking on a diet or attempting to create a healthy menu for maintaining your weight, it is easy to forget the liquid portion of a diet and end the day with significantly more calories consumed than you intended.
Just as you might replace a soda at lunch with a diet version or drink low fat milk at breakfast instead of a higher-fat alternatives, alcoholic drinks, too, can be chosen with an eye toward calorie consumption. This is crucial in order to keep your diet in check.
Beer
A popular option during happy hour is beer, and a single glass of beer won’t necessarily doom your diet. Many brewers provide a low-calorie version of their drink as a healthier alternative. Generally, the darker a beer is, the more calories that beer will contain; just a few bottles of dark beer can actually come in at a hefty 500 calories. A limited consumption of dark beers is recommended if you are trying to keep your calorie intake in check, and a healthier alternative is always light beer.
Mixed Drinks
When considering mixed drinks, it can be rather difficult to remember how many calories are in each of the great number of liquors and liqueurs used in popular drink creations. Generally speaking, the more complicated a drink, the more calories it will sport due to a high variety of liquors used. For example, a Long Island Iced Tea, which combines many liquors with coke and sweet and sour mix, is quite possibly one of the highest calorie drinks available on any bartender’s menu.
Wine
If your options include wine, you may find it difficult to find accurate information on calorie content, as many wine manufacturers with facilities outside the United States are not required to provide nutritional information for their alcoholic creations. High calorie options you may want to avoid include port, vermouth and sherry, which all tend to contain at least 140 calories per glass.
A general rule of thumb for consuming wine is that white zinfandel tends to be one of the best low calorie options, with an average of 80 calories per 4 ounce glass. In addition, a glass of chardonnay will offer only around 90 calories per glass. Alcohol-free wine, although it may be an acquired taste if you are a wine connoisseur, will cost you only 40 calories per glass.
