I am one of those guys that is pretty dedicated to fitness but I absolutely refuse to give up certain things in my life. One of my great loves is beer, and I will exercise more in order to be able to have it but even though I would probably be in much better shape if I did get alcohol out of my system entirely, I want to enjoy my life and instead seek to find balance.
I have always avoided darker beers like Guinness, which I love, because I just assumed that because of its dark and creamy nature, that it was absolutely loaded with calories and carbs. Well a friend pointed out to me the other day that comparatively speaking, it isn't as bad as you think so well, I feel the need to rejoice a bit.
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I think that this is true with a lot of things. we just assume that the heavier stuff, the fancier stuff I could say, is going to be worse for you. But then I noticed one day that the people who drink Guinness on a regular basis in my area tended to be smaller than the people who drink, say Budweiser. I think there are many variables at play here but I dug into the nutritional information and was quite shocked.
For a bottle of Guinness, which I know is not the ideal way to consume it, the entire thing has 125 calories and less than 10 grams of carbs. This was shocking to me because I just assumed that it would be something like double that much. Now let's look at some popular drinks that are more commonly consumed at a bar.
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Whether or not you like Bud is not the point, most full-flavored lagers that are popular around the world have similar nutritional values as well.
A 12-oz Bud bottle has 145 calories and 11 grams of carbs, both of which are actually higher than the Guinness. This absolutely rocked my world to discover this and I was glad that I found it out. I think the reason why I was in the dark for so long about this fact is because in my country at least, somehow beer is exempted from putting nutritional information on the bottles and cans. I don't know how they get away with that but I presume it probably has something to do with government corruption.
So I am now transitioning to Guinness as my beer of choice on a night out. I have found that among my Guinness drinking friends and also with myself, that I am far less likely to over-indulge in Guinness than I am in your run-of-the-mill lager such as Bud, Miller, Coors, whatever because it just feels heavier so while on a big party day I can definitely drink 10 lagers, I think I would vomit if I had 10 Guinness. I don't know why this is but for some reason the drinkability of lager just encourages people to have too many of them. For me, a big night out with friends would incorporate having 3 Guinness and for me to work off those extra 450 calories is a very easy task.
So if you have been avoiding the dark stuff because you too thought it was chock-a-block with calories, just know that you too might have been wrong all this time. It is the random craft beers that you really need to be weary of, not the time-tested excellence that is Guinness.