You're at dinner and someone keeps topping up your glass before it's empty. By dessert you know exactly what you drank — a red, the one with the bird on the label — and you have no idea how much of it.
It's the same problem as not knowing the portion, except the plate stays the same size and the glass doesn't. A drink is easy to name. Nearly all the uncertainty is in the pour, and the pour is the one thing nobody measures.
The drink is the easy part
Database entries for drinks are built around a standard pour. Every figure here is USDA data:
- A glass of red wine, at the standard 5 fl oz — about 125 calories, at 0g fat · 4g carbs · 0g protein
- A can of regular beer, 12 fl oz — about 153 calories
- A shot of gin, vodka, rum or whiskey, 1.5 fl oz at 80 proof — about 97 calories
Those are fine numbers. The trouble is that what you actually drank often isn't that size, and the pour can matter more than the drink. White wine comes in at about the same as red. A bigger pour of the same red doesn't.
Wine: count the bottle, not the glass
If you've never poured a measured 5 fl oz into one of your own glasses, try it once. Then pour what you'd normally pour, and measure that. If yours comes out at 8 fl oz, it's about 200 calories, at 0g fat · 6g carbs · 0g protein. Same wine, same glass, 75 calories apart.
And at a dinner like the one above, nobody is counting glasses anyway. Glasses don't empty, they get topped up.
So count the thing that does have a fixed size: the bottle. A standard 750 ml bottle of red is about 634 calories, at 0g fat · 19g carbs · 1g protein. That's just over five standard glasses. If two of you split it, your share is about 317 calories, whatever size the glasses were and however many times they got filled. If four of you opened two bottles, it's the same arithmetic.
It's the pot of chili again. You don't know your portion, but you know the container, and splitting a container you know is much easier than guessing a portion you don't.
Beer: the can is honest, the glass isn't
Cans and bottles are the easy case, because the size is printed on them. A 12 fl oz can is a 12 fl oz can.
The glass at a bar is where it gets loose. A US pint is 16 fl oz, about 204 calories of regular beer, a third more than the can. If you had three pints and logged three cans, you're about 153 calories short.
The bigger variable with beer isn't the pour, though. It's the strength. The USDA figure for regular beer describes an ordinary beer at around 5% alcohol, and nearly two thirds of its calories come from the alcohol rather than the carbs. So a stronger beer carries more, and the percentage on the can tells you more than the style does. If it's well above 5, log it as that beer rather than as "a beer". Light beer runs the other way: about 103 calories a can.
Mixed drinks: two pours, not one
A mixed drink has two things you didn't measure: the spirit and the mixer.
Take a gin and tonic with a standard 1.5 fl oz of gin and 4 fl oz of tonic. That's about 138 calories: 97 from the gin, about 41 from the tonic, and 11g of carbs, all of them from the tonic. Make it at home with a heavy hand, 2.5 fl oz of gin and the same tonic, and it's about 203 calories.
The mixer can move as much as the spirit. Diet tonic takes nearly all of the tonic's share out. Swap the tonic for cola or juice, or make it a double, and you're logging a different drink.
If you lost count
Sometimes you just don't know, and that's fine. You can still do better than a blind guess.
Count what you can count. Bottles opened, cans in the recycling, rounds you bought. The container usually survives the evening even when your memory of the glasses doesn't.
Bound it, then take the middle. "At least two glasses, no more than four" is a real answer. Log three, and say that's what you assumed. A middle guess is the one least likely to be far off in either direction, and writing down what you assumed is what lets you fix it if someone tells you the next day that you opened a third bottle.
Pick a default and keep it. If you have a glass of wine most nights and never measure it, decide what your glass is and log it the same way every time. A drink you have every week should come out the same number every week. Your trend needs that consistency more than it needs any one night to be exact.
Why a drink's numbers look strange
If you check a drink's macros against its calories, they won't come close. The red wine above has 4g of carbs and about 125 calories, which is nowhere near what 4g of carbs can account for. The rest is alcohol, which carries its own calories and isn't fat, carbs or protein, so it's in none of the three. That's a whole post, and it's the reason a drink's calories have to be taken as given.
What Graham does with this
Tell Graham you had "two big glasses of red" or "half a bottle between us" and he'll log it the way you said it. A drink with alcohol in it goes in flagged as one, which switches off the check that makes a food's calories and macros agree, because on a drink they can't. Half a bottle can go in as half a bottle. He doesn't need to turn it into glasses first.
If the pour was a guess, the log can stay a guess. You can fix it in one message later ("it was more like three glasses"), and in the meantime a rough number counts toward your week like any other. The drinks that cost you accuracy are the ones that never get logged at all, and the less work logging takes, the fewer of those there are.
— Ryan