Many members ask if they can continue to drink alcohol while on Stronger U. The best answer? It depends.
Some of our members see success while including and tracking alcohol and other members see the most success by choosing to reduce or eliminate alcohol completely. Talk to your coach to help decide if drinking while on the program is the best path for you and review these guidelines so you understand the impact drinking alcohol may have on your progress.
Click here or on the image below to view more information about this topic.
Tracking Alcohol:
Since alcohol is not a macronutrient, nutrition labels on popular alcoholic beverages can be confusing and misleading for someone who is tracking macros. For example, if you looked at the label on a 12oz hard seltzer, you might see that it has 0f, 0p and 2c. It’s easy to fall into advertising and our own thinking that 2g of carbs is practically nothing! But 2g of carbohydrate is 8 calories and the label informs you the drink has 100 calories (technically 98, but they round up to 100). This means that 90 of the calories come from alcohol. If you scan the barcode, those calories will not affect your macronutrients on food trackers. Because we are most often tracking macronutrients at Stronger U, we want to make sure we quantify the alcohol so that you can fit it within the framework of your daily macros.
This is why we have created our own Stronger U Alcohol entries in both our SU food tracker and My Fitness Pal, so that if you decide to include some alcohol in your life, you can feel confident that you’ve accounted for those alcohol calories in your daily macros budget.
Tracking Alcohol Using the SU Food Tracker:
- Click on your Meal Log
- Click “Add Meal” to open the Food Finder
- Click “My foods” (just below the search bar) to open an alphabetical database of all the foods you’ve eaten and tracked in the past as well as a few items we have added to the database:
- Select the pre-programmed Stronger U alcohol entry that most closely matches the drink you’re planning to have and click on it. This will open a scroll wheel that will allow you to enter exactly how many ounces you drink (for example, Red Wine):
-In this example I selected 5oz of red wine, the standard serving size, 130 calories.
- Click Add and you’re done, you’ve tracked your alcohol in the Stronger U way, with 10g of fat standing in for the calories from alcohol within the wine.
Tracking Alcohol Using MFP:
- Select Diary from the bottom of your dashboard
- Select “Add Food” from the meal you want to plan alcohol with
-Use the search bar feature to search for “Stronger U wine,” which will take you to a screen of choices:
-If you see an entry with the year 2022 in the title, that is our most current entry, please use those!
- Make your selection, edit the servings size if necessary, and then click the checkmark in the top right corner of the screen to add this item to your meal:
-Once you hit that check mark, you’re done, you’ve successfully tracked your alcohol the Stronger U Way!