Beer and wine Affects on Calorie burn and weight

[Woostigger]

I have been noticing, lately I have been having a beer in the evening usually an hour before I start my exercise.  Maybe its just me, but it seems my heart rate runs higher.  I have been observing the exercise activities off my surge after and the calorie burns seemed to increase from the lower 400s to the 500s.  I have drank quite a bit of water and am maintaining my 64 ounces a day or more.

I am wondering, could drinking beer affect the way the body burns calories or change the way the heart beats increase to calorie burn ratio?

If so, I am wondering, should fitbit consider allowing us to track things like alcohol to create calorie correction factors.  I meant to research more on this but figured I would ask the group what their thoughts were on the subject.

Recently it seems my weight is going backwards even though I am still aggressively logging my intake calories and have a goal of a 500 calorie delta between calories burned and calories gained.  I went up the next day after my first beer, then stayed about the same the next day, finally starting to see it drop closer to the weight I was 10 days ago.

One other thought I had is, maybe beer bloats you for a few days and you have to be beer free to stabilize water weight.  Something I will keep investigating for the next few weeks.  I am thinking water retention is part of it.  I just don't know if the increase in calorie burn after drinking beer before my runs is real.

Maybe I should continue my diet ensuring I have a beer every evening for consistency.  🙂  I'll either eventually start losing weight again, or it will prove that the calorie counts are off, either my fault or on the surge calculations.

[Sundancepilot]

I'm no expert on physiology and calorie burning vs beer consumption, but I have seen the bottoms of a few brown bottles in my day....  That being said, I know that after a couple of beers my heart will beat faster whether I'm exercising or not.  That phenomenon has been more noticible as I've gotten older, and I think it's just a function of the body trying to rid itself of the alcohol by cycling blood through the liver faster.  I don't know that you're burning any more calories than normal--perhaps a few more just through the faster heart rate, but I think that would be more than offset by the calorie intake from the beer.  Kind of like my father in law driving ten miles to save five cents a gallon on gas.  He burns more than he saves, or, in your case, your body saves more than it burns.

As far as the weight gain the next day goes, did you eat anything with a lot of salt the day you drank the beer?  That could be the reason for some water retention.

Maybe there's someone out there with some real medical knowledge that can shed some light on my theories.  Until such time as someone comes forward, I think we should carefully research the subject and report our findings.  

[Woostigger]

@Sundancepilot Thanks for the response.  It sounds like you see the same thing I was wondering too.

The main reason I started the thread was to ask the question if alcohol does increase heart rate as a rule.

If it does and calorie burn doesn't reflect it, I wonder if fitbit could increase accuracy of the calories burned by allowing us to log our drinks, so they can use that info into the algorithms that determine calorie burn.  Lets say, If a beer impacts heart rate by 5 percent at resting, and 10 percent for exercises with no change in calorie burn for the hour after the beer, that could be something fitbit can correlate to be that much more solid for calorie burn.

I suppose the same could be logged for Coffee and other items that could shift the heart rate and throw off calorie burn.  They could do this for various foods known to create an adjustment.  For those foods and drinks, I am thinking knowing what hour in time they were ingested would be important.

My use case, I love food.  I basically work out to eat.  If I can get my calorie burn as close as possible to what it should be based on my environment, I can keep my intake and burn margins closer.  I am trying to think of all the items out there that will help push fitbit to the next level of optimization so that it can be that much more personal to my needs.

[loveabull]

Science and stats aren't my strong points but I've read that caffeine before exercise can enhance your workout and up your heart rate. Alcohol in any form is a depressive that slows your heart rate but can also up your blood pressure. Beer also has a goodly number of calories compared to say the clear spirits.

I would say in moderation though it shouldn't blow your whole calorie count.

[Heybales]

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@Woostigger wrote:

I have been noticing, lately I have been having a beer in the evening usually an hour before I start my exercise.  Maybe its just me, but it seems my heart rate runs higher.  I have been observing the exercise activities off my surge after and the calorie burns seemed to increase from the lower 400s to the 500s.  I have drank quite a bit of water and am maintaining my 64 ounces a day or more.

I am wondering, could drinking beer affect the way the body burns calories or change the way the heart beats increase to calorie burn ratio?

If so, I am wondering, should fitbit consider allowing us to track things like alcohol to create calorie correction factors.  I meant to research more on this but figured I would ask the group what their thoughts were on the subject.

Recently it seems my weight is going backwards even though I am still aggressively logging my intake calories and have a goal of a 500 calorie delta between calories burned and calories gained.  I went up the next day after my first beer, then stayed about the same the next day, finally starting to see it drop closer to the weight I was 10 days ago.

One other thought I had is, maybe beer bloats you for a few days and you have to be beer free to stabilize water weight.  Something I will keep investigating for the next few weeks.  I am thinking water retention is part of it.  I just don't know if the increase in calorie burn after drinking beer before my runs is real.

Maybe I should continue my diet ensuring I have a beer every evening for consistency.  🙂  I'll either eventually start losing weight again, or it will prove that the calorie counts are off, either my fault or on the surge calculations.

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Your body is working overtime already to get rid of what has amounted to poison in your system, that's first priority. So extra free calorie burn there. Not enough to wipe out the calories of the drink, but oh well.

Then exercise on top of that.

But it can be done in better order perhaps.

http://www.leangains.com/2010/07/truth-about-alcohol-fat-loss-and-muscle.html

"If we throw alcohol into the mix, it gets immediate priority in the in the substrate hierarchy: alcohol puts the breaks on fat oxidation, but also suppresses carb and protein oxidation.

This makes sense considering that the metabolic by-product of alcohol, acetate, is toxic. Metabolizing it takes precedence over everything else. This quote sums up the metabolic fate of alcohol nicely:

"Ethanol (alcohol) is converted in the liver to acetate; an unknown portion is then activated to acetyl-CoA, but only a small portion is converted to fatty acids.
Most of the acetate is released into the circulation, where it affects peripheral tissue metabolism; adipocyte release of nonesterified fatty acids is decreased and acetate replaces lipid in the fuel mixture.""

[Woostigger]

@Heybales 

Thanks for coming up with the link.

Last night I went to a party and had a few drinks.  Also did a lot of walking around as well so can't say for sure if the considerable higher calorie calculation, from the increase average heart rate of 15, was due to alcohol or just general moving around.  I am leaning on a bit of both.

What I thought was interesting about the discussion is the point that there is an extra calorie burn by subjecting the body to clean the toxins that are introduced to the body.  That could imply the heart rate increase is legitimate and the calorie burn could be closer than I thought.

Factors I am trying to keep track of is:

1.  Making sure for the intake of alcohol, and we are talking one or 2 drinks at most say an hour before the run, is including more water to go with to avoid hydration issues throwing the heart rate higher.

2.  Be mindful of bloating or other things that may be triggered by increased amount of foods and other things I may do that could throw the data off.

3.  Trend the pattern of weigh ins on both high weight mornings and low weight mornings and make sure I am comparing high mornings to high mornings and low mornings to low mornings.  This way I can validate that calories calculated in vs Burn reported by fitbit are making sense.

Bottom line, I dont care about nutrition here, what I do care about is knowing that if I eat or drink one thing, I can expect that I will need to work out to some point to balance it out.  My goal is to reduce calorie intake to burn by 500 calories a day.  Nice and slow.  I also want to make sure that there is no correction factor needed to maintain that depending on what I ingest.

This diet I am trying to maintain is meant to essentially allow me to choose to eat what I want, and respond to what I need to null it out.   I work out so I can eat and drink what I want.  🙂

Thanks again for the feedback.  If others have more thoughts to weigh in on this subject, please do.  Its going to take a few months for me to really point one way or the other.  I will be watching it carefully and my journey to lose weight continues.  Already I am down 9 lbs and have 20 more to go.  I always consider the first 10 are easy.  The surge is going to show its accuracy more as we get down closer to the weight gain goal.  Equally so, I need to stay on top of the calorie intake.  From experience, I stay very aggressive on the calorie intake.  I dont want to cheat myself.

[Woostigger]

I thought I would share some of my experiences with the comparison between alcohol in my diet and without.

to start, I do a 14 day average with my weight, calorie intake, and calorie burn.  Using that spreadsheet has made me very happy with the results, since it removes the hydration and other random data points that occur with weight.

The last week, I went on vacation, drank two glasses a wine on average a night or even a beer with it.  It was probably 5 fold more alcohol in my diet than normal.  On that point, I tracked every ounce I could.  I did lots of activities and my calorie burn ont the fitbit surge was getting over 3000 for a lot of the vacation.  I am sure some of that at least is real, I was running, clam digging, and even swimming (without wearing watch).  I was also doing a lot of walking on the beach and shopping at stores.

The resting heart rate went up 10 points during this time frame as well.  My thought is, this is the alcohols doing to raise up my resting heart rate as my body is now having to deal with purging out the toxins.  From what I can tell, my daily walking around and such also had a higher than normal heart rate causing a calorie burn calculation that was not true and allowed me to eat more food than I should have been doing based on the surges results.

All in all.  according to my calculations I should have lost a lb during the vacation, when it looks like I actually gained about 1/2 lb.  

I think there might be some correction factors to consider when alcohol is introduced to make the fitbit that much better.  splitting hairs, maybe, but I do like my food and I do like my weight loss, and I do like my wine and beer  🙂

[fenderolp2]

I know this is an old thread, but I can definitely corroborate these findings. Because of the elevated HR during drinking, and the next day, it definitely overestimates the calorie burn. I've had days after a night of drinking where I've barely left my bed, and it estimated that I burned 600 calories for exercise (via the MyFitnessPal integration). This is the same amount of calories i show being burned for a non drinking related day with 10000 steps and a trip to the gym. 

Because the FitBit HR uses heart rate to estimate your activity level, it thinks you were running around all day, even if you were sitting on the couch. This is especially problematic, given the fact that the FitBit calorie burn estimate is over inflated to begin with. FitBit estimates that I burn 2700 calories a day on average. If I consumed that much every day, I'd have a nice gut. 

[Vnguyen1213]

Fitbit includes your BMR in the calories burned for the day. That’s why your number is so high. 

[desert_eag1e]

Hi everyone! Thanks for your advices!