According to the doctors I listen to, the idea of balancing calories intake and calories consumption is actually bogus. In the Western world we all tend to eat much more than what we "burn" in physical activities. We should actually work like mules to balance things out.
What happens is that a healthy organism is simply able to get rid of excess food just like it is able to get rid of excess water. You don't need to count calories just like you don't need to count liquids intake.
Which doesn't mean that you can eat whatever you want without measure and without getting fatter, but means that we should, generally speaking, obsess more with living a healthy life (which includes beer and wine naturally) and obsess less with balancing calories or doing calories counting. Doing exercise makes you slim not because you burn calories (you would never burn enough of them), but because that exercise makes you healthy and makes your body well-regulated.
My unscientific and unproved opinion is, also, that drinking wine with fat food* (and a good shot of grappa thereafter) will actually make you slimmer because it will help a lot the digestion of fats. Those fat people eating too much in AYCE restaurant and drinking diet coke are fat also because they drink diet coke instead of good old wine with their meal. They will thus stress their digestion/elimination capabilities uselessly. Alcohol is very good at "unmounting" fat molecules. It does to fat what enzymes do to the starches in our wort, basically.
This I cannot prove scientifically, but the suspect will come to your mind when you compare the number of fat people in the US with, say, the number of fat people in Italy, Greece of Spain. For a US tourist in Italy the lack of obese people, when compared to the US, must be immediately apparent**. All those obese people are "victims" not just of their bad habits, but also of this calories-counting method of controlling obesity.
* I mean, drinking whisky or wine separately from eating doesn't help digestion and is a bad idea in general.
** This is commonly attributed to the virtues of "mediterranean diet", but the fact is, nobody in the Mediterranean does Mediterranean diet since decades. We overeat in Italy just like anywhere else, pasta, pizza, meat and cheese. Maybe we eat some less fried food than other peoples, maybe.
i can meet all my nutritional need with 1,200 calories...so i usually say f'it let the beer flow!
