You can enjoy plenty of beer without gaining weight but beer does contain calories so you have to look at the big picture of your lifestyle to understand how beer fits in, and to know when enough is enough.
Exercise helps, but the reality is, most of us beer folks are going to have to work really damn hard to offset (or even put a dent in) beer calories with physical activity. Sad but true; just look at how many calories are in your favorite DIPA, and compare that to how many calories you burn by running on a treadmill for 45 minutes (for example).
Thats why, regardless of whether you drink 1 beer per week or 1 case per week, the best way to make room for beer without getting fat is to take a good hard look at what you eat.
Ive no doubt that in many cases, the term beer belly is nothing more than a bad diet misidentified; that is, a food diet that contains too much sugar, too much processed junk, too much indiscriminate empty-calorie snacking, and too little attention to portion sizes at meals.
When it comes to weight management, its impossible to overstate the importance of having at least a basic understanding of the impacts of your food choices before you make them. That sounds obvious but I cant believe how few people seem to be able to, for example, tell the difference between a 400 calorie lunch and 1000+ calorie lunch. That 400 calories is not much but it does not require one to eat cabbage water and carrot sticksit can easily be achieved by filling a Tupperware container with leftovers from a previous nights healthy home-cooked dinner. The 1000 calorie option is going to get you on the express lane to Fatville and is pretty much what youre signing up for when you walk into Jimmy Johns and order one of those foot-long tubes of mayonnaise that they call a sub sandwich. Make it a combo with a big cookie or bag of chips, and thats several hundred more calories. Even without the cookie and chips, this illustrative example shows an additional 600 calories being consumed over and above what would be contained in a smart-but-still-reasonable lunch a difference which constitutes roughly 25% of a typical 40ish year-old adult males caloric budget for the entire day to maintain a healthy weight and thats just one of the days meals.
If you dont bother to learn how to read food labels and identify common calorie traps, youll be inclined to eat whatever gets thrown in your face or placed conveniently at arms length, without having any understanding of how its impacting your weight. And that is a bad situation to be in, because most profit-hungry purveyors of foodstuffs do not hold your health as a top priority when marketing and peddling their wares
shocking, I know, and yet another reason why its always best to prepare your own meals from whole foods whenever humanly possible so you know exactly what youre eating.
Oh, and if you are one who assumes that healthy food is synonymous with bland food, please get that idea out of your head because its not true.
starting the 27th ill be back at it. going to Russian River and a few other spots out in cali on the 1st. then its MI winter beer fest to ruin all my hard work.
