Drink beer AND lose weight???

Sometime last year, my doctor told me I needed to lose weight. He said one of the best ways to lose weight is to cut your caloric intake from 2000 to 1500 a day. That meant I had to start counting calories, which made me worried about drinking beer. How do I know the number of calories in a beer?

Beer and liquor, unlike most food products, are not required to have nutritional info listed on the packaging. The exception is any beer that is considered a "light" beer is required to show the number of calories on the label. In the future, nutritional info may be required on all beer, but I needed something right away. After all, I couldn't exist on just drinking light beer. If that were the case, I'd almost rather not drink beer at all...

So, I started using my favorite tool - the internet. If you do a search for "calories in beer", you can find a lot of sites with "information." I put "information" in quotes because the info varies so much. You'll find vague descriptions like, "A typical beer has 120 calories." But, don't different breweries use different ingredients to make different beer? Last I checked, they sure do! So you can't just use a vague 120. Other sites list actual calorie counts for different beers, but the lists are for a limited number of beers and you can't be sure how accurate they are.

In all my searching, I did find 2 useful tools to help me keep track of beer calories:

1. I bought a book from Amazon called "Does My Butt Look Big in this Beer?" This book was written by Bob Skilnik, a man who had the same dilemma as I did: how do you count the calories in your beer? Except that, instead of just searching the net, he also called breweries and did additional research to discover how many calories were in his beer. The result: a book with the calorie counts AND Weight Watchers points for over 2,000 worldwide beers. This has been a very useful tool and it only cost me $10. Click on this link for the book.
2. I found this web page: http://www.simplybeer.com/blog/how-many-calories-are-in-my-beer/ This is very useful for roughly calculating calories in beers that are not in the book. Most of the calories in beer come from the alcohol. However, most beers have differences in the amount of unfermented sugars left in the beer. The chart on this site gives you a calorie range based upon the percent ABV of the beer. The range gets you in the ballpark, and you decide how many calories you actually count. I typically use the exact middle of the range.

Using these tools, I have been able to continue drinking very tasty beers while still keeping my daily caloric intake at 1500. And, since I started counting calories, I've lost 25 pounds!

So, you CAN drink beer AND lose weight! Good thing, because I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't drink tasty beer.