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Comment by cainxinth | Hacker News Reader

You develop a sixth sense for how calorific foods are when you track calories consistently. I kept a meticulous food journal for about six months before I realized I didn’t really need to anymore because I had gotten so good at just estimating my totals.

Protip: most people underestimate the calories in alcohol

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> most people underestimate the calories in alcohol

Funny, I feel the other way around. I kept hearing about how much calories there are in alcohol, and then when I started calorie counting I didn't find it so high.

Like 6 shots of gin are ~550kcal and enough to get anyone pretty drunk. Unless one is a regular heavy drinker it's not that hard to once in a while budget calories during the day to be able to get a few shots when going out in the evening.

Obviously staying sober is the healthier option.

I definitely find it suprising that a shot of gin has as many calories as an apple.

I think when people are mentioning alcohol they typically mean beer or wine - a can of beer is ~150 calories, so have a few of those a night, which isn't at all uncommon in some households, and over a week you're up ~1 lbs.

Also, 150 calories is somewhere between cheap American beer and a nice IPA or stout. You can easily hit 200-300 calories per beer.

New Belgium "Juice Force IPA", I'm looking at you!

my favorite stout is 400 calories for 12oz

Sure six shots are 550 calories. But who drinks six shots of gin?

You need to also include all the mixers as well and they're usually all sugar

> But who drinks six shots of gin?

Haha, I'm from almost-eastern-europe, so pretty much all drinkers I know. (Actually "Borovička" is the most popular. It is not gin, but somewhat similar to gin.)

But I mean, when someone is trying to reduce calorie intake, they don't consume whatever they want to. They need to make some concessions. So instead of a fancy cocktail or a bottle of wine, you can drink some vodka (provided getting intoxicated is the goal).

Heh, Borovička is the most amazing thing ever. I need to find a source stateside :-)

For a G&T, you can get slimline tonic which tastes quite good.

The idea that a night out with 4-5 pints might clear my daily total requirement for calories was not something I had really considered until my late twenties.

In your early 20s your metabolism is that much higher as well that it can cope.

Oh so that's why college students famously gain weight when they go to college, they're too old to have a fast metabolism!

How much more would they weigh if they underwent the same changes at 40? It's faster metabolism, but it's not magic.

20s to 40s metabolism isn't that different. 4-5 pints is nearly 1000 calories, and basically nobody has a 1000 cal decline in base expenditure from 20 to 40.

A bigger change, generally, from someone in college and someone in their 40s is their activity levels. Even just considering the amount of walking most folks do on a college campus is a huge difference, compared to someone that gets in their car and drives to and from work.

That doesn't match my experience, or most of the stuff I've read. The number of calories I need to hit to lose weight has been pretty constant from my early twenties to late thirties.

That said, I didn't have to be as careful in my twenties because I did a lot more exercise. And that's because I had more free time and opportunity for sports, fewer energy demands, less money for food, and more incentive to walk or cycle places. So I agree it's probably easier for university students to be slim, but I suspect metabolism is not a primary reason.

Sure, that means that 6 shots of gin basically replaces one whole meal.

If 550kcal is one whole meal to you, then 6 shots of gin will get you absolutely blasted, probably black out too.

That's nonsense. A shot of spirits is one unit of alcohol. A pint of strong-ish beer like Stella Artois is 3 units. 550 calories is easily a dinner's worth for a woman of 70kg, or a man that's heavier but trying to gradually lose weight. Either of whom would normally not be too affected by two pints of Stella.

What is nonsense? Go to https://alcohol.org/bac-calculator/. Putting in the numbers for a 150lb woman drinking 6 shots over 2 hours gets you 0.21% BAC, which is plenty enough for black out drunk.

I see. That looks a lot like it's applying a Widmark-style model [0], which assumes that absorption is instantaneous, and that drinking starts in a fasted state unaccompanied by food or water. I guess that makes sense if we're literally talking about replacing a whole meal with alcohol. But normally I imagine cutting back on portion sizes so that I can have some drinks later. I don't know about other users but the idea that an 80kg man will have body control or speech impairments after 3 pints (60oz) of beer over 3 hours just feels wrong. Especially if they start after dinner and have a glass of water in the middle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content#By_intak...

Yeah good point. It’s saying a bottle of wine gets you to 0.3% which basically is close to dying, so it’s not realistic. Still six shots is equivalent to 6 beers or a bottle of wine, so it still affects you quite a lot.

I agree it's a fair amount of booze. Especially at 1.5oz per shot. In the UK a single is officially more like 1oz, so 6 UK shots is 4 US shots.

> A pint of strong-ish beer like Stella Artois is 3 units.

No it's not. Stella is 5.2% in the strongest form (some places sell a weaker version that is 4.6%). Both are roughly standard ABVs. At worst, a 20 oz 'pint' of Stella would be ~1.7 units. In most places in the US, a pint is 16 oz, so it would be ~1.4 units. Two pints at worst is slightly over 3 units total.

Maybe I'm misreading it (or it's just wrong) but this NHS webpage very clearly states that a "Pint of higher-strength lager/beer/cider (ABV 5.2%)" has 3 units:

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-advice/calculating-alco...

Ah, right. We're both getting it a bit wrong. A 'unit' (10 ml of pure ethanol) isn't actually equivalent to a 'drink'. One 'drink' is considered to be 12 oz of 5% beer, 5 oz of 12% wine, or one 1.5 oz 40% shot. None of those are actually '1 unit', they're all ~1.7 units (~17 ml of ethanol).

I think most folks think in 'drinks' and not 'units'.

So, back to the original comment: 6 shots at most establishments would be ~10 'units' of alcohol. Or, closer to 3.3 20oz pints of beer. 3.3 20oz beers would be enough to get most folks pretty intoxicated if drank quickly; the difference being that 3.3 20oz beers (66oz total!) is a lot harder to drink very quickly than 6 shots, purely by volume of liquid.

Thanks for the clarification. Though on a lighter personal note I'd definitely struggle to drink 6 shots of gin (or tequila for that matter) in the same day. Awful stuff!

Oddly, I think how you track can matter here. If you do it as a lookup of "I am eating this, and it says it was this many calories" then you are not likely to remember and develop a sense of how many calories things have. However, if you do it as "I am eating this, I think it has X calories, but looking it up I found it was Y" that can help remember.

I can try to find the studies, but basically, "guess and check" is ridiculously powerful in learning. Is part of what makes flash cards so strong. Just "ask and answer", not so much.

Extra light beer or shot 100

Light beer or wine 150

Regular beer 200

mixed drink 300

Trashy mixed drink 400

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