How to drink AND stay in shape with the "Slim John"

2 cocktails: 2 cl Campari, 3 cl Amaretto, 3 cl Cointreau, 6 cl rum, 6 cl sweet vermouth, ice.

Well, not with the "Slim John" you won't. This dude is anything but slim, calorie-wise, and so are practically all cocktails. The sugar, and more importantly, the alcohol in the average drink can easily add up to about 1000 kJ (kilo-Joules), or for those born a century ago, to about 240 kcal (kilo-calories). Two Slim Johns will not only make you smile mildly but they also provide the calorie equivalent of a full meal. One gram of alcohol contains about 29 kJ.

Moreover, the answer to the question in the title of this blog entry inevitably depends on what 'staying in shape' means to you. Are you thinking fitness, mental health, spiritual health or literally the shape of you waistline? The latter is the one I am guessing most are interested in. It's such a cliche. But, it is also a game of numbers, with facts borne out of science. This should be easy to answer. Not?

My understanding of weight gain? Overweight is not an exercise problem, it is mostly an input problem. Let's do some math to understand why. When burned, your typical candy bar gives off about 400 kJ (or 95 kcal). This is roughly what it would take to climb the Empire State Building, twice! This should illustrate why you can't possibly work off "a few" extra calories by exercise, if you plan to lead a normal life and not spend it in a gym. Eating less is far more efficient than exercising if you want to stay in shape.

Partly to blame is the fact that humans have evolved to be extremely energy efficient. Energy efficiency is an evolutionary prerequisite to being able to afford a brain which makes up for only about 2% of our body weight but consumes as much as 20% of our energy budget. Moreover, the body reduces its internal 'house-keeping' energy expenditures during physical exercise. Thus, as reported recently in the Scientific American, the energy budget of the extremely hard working indigenous Hadza people is roughly the same per body weight as that of the lazy European or North American.

The bottom line? I believe overweight is an input problem. Exercise won't fix it. If you want to drink AND stay in shape, you may want to drink in moderation or - if that is not your thing - cut back on meal sizes.

This reminds me of a few fun-facts related to alcohol having been an integral component of our daily diet in the past. Consider this: the land area used for cultivation of wine in medieval Germany was about 3 times of what it is today, but the population was only one-tenth. Also, as part of their compensation, servants and administrators of the prince-bishops of Wuerzburg, for example, received copious amounts of wine, of up to several litres a day. And lastly, even children would regularly eat an alcoholic and carbohydrate-rich type of beer soup - in the mornings!

I should stop rambling. Let's mix ingredients, pour and enjoy. Try "Don Papa" as our choice flavoured rum and Martini Rosso as vermouth. As mentioned above the Slim John is a heavy and dark drink, anything but slim.

To get back to the initial question, how to drink and stay in shape. Let me know if you have figured it out. The best, I guess, is to cut back on calories elsewhere. I thus like to think of a cocktail in terms of "vitamins", in a sense, the daily apple for my soul.

Zum Wohl, cheers, enjoy.