The Secret to a Low Cal Night Out: Vodka Shots and Tequila Shots
When you’re someone who leads a healthier lifestyle the majority of the time, a night out can pose a massive threat to your typical low calorie, low sugar diet and consistent workout routine. Nobody likes the feeling of working out on a Friday afternoon and going out that night feeling like the workout was a waste after drinking all of the calories back in beer, wine, or mixed drinks. As two former athletes who have always been extremely focused on our health and wellness routines, but never wanted to sacrifice our social life, we’ve found a few ways to minimize our calorie and sugar intake during a night out, which has also helped to minimize our hangovers the next day, leaving us workout ready on Sunday morning.
Shots vs Cocktails vs Beer vs Wine
As hard as it is to drink them, vodka shots and tequila shots are often the best option in terms of the lowest calorie and lowest sugar option. During a night out with your friends, you might go to dinner and have 1-2 cocktails or a couple glasses of wine, go to a friend’s apartment and have a couple seltzers or beers, and then you’ll most likely go out to a bar or club, where you might have a couple more mixed drinks. At about 200 calories per drink, you could easily be at 1,000 plus calories, just in drinks, by the end of the night. Not to mention the amount of sugar, especially in cocktails and wine, that will lead to a crazy hangover the next day. That’s why we started trading out a couple of those drinks for vodka shots or tequila shots, which are about half the calories and none of the sugar. Immediately, this change helped us to feel better by the end of the night and wake up less hungover the next morning.
Avoid Tonic Water and Soda
News flash: tonic water makes a great cocktail for a reason - it’s full of sugar. They might feel like a light cocktail option, but gin and tonics or whiskey cokes are sneakily full of sugar and calories, which will cause bloating, worsen your hangover, and increase your calorie intake during your night out. As a quick and easy alternative to these classic cocktails, you can always ask for diet tonic or diet sodas, or better yet, you can have a tequila soda or vodka soda with a squeeze of lime. This will immediately cut your calorie count in half and minimize your sugar intake completely.
Skinny Cocktail Making
While vodka shots and tequila sodas are the lowest calorie options for your night out, sometimes you still want to enjoy a good cocktail. We’ve found that a few ingredients are key to making skinny cocktails of any type, so here are a few of our secrets.
Salt, Salt, Salt!
Adding a pinch of salt into any of your cocktails, especially anything citrus or fruit based, will immediately enhance the flavors in your drink, allowing you to get more out of less. For example, you can mix soda water, lime, grapefruit, and tequila into a drink, and by adding a pinch of salt, you can enhance all of those flavors to help create a balanced taste without a ton of juice or sugar.
Complex Sugar
There’s no denying the fact that you do need a bit of sweetness for any good cocktail, but you can avoid cane sugar by using more complex sugars like agave nectar, honey, or maple syrup. The benefit of complex sugars is that your body is able to digest them slower, which minimizes any fast spikes in your blood sugar. As it is, alcohol tends to spike your blood sugar levels, which is partially what causes that nasty hangover, but you definitely don’t want to add to that by drinking a bunch of cane sugar on top of all the alcohol. Stick to natural sugar options and you’ll feel slightly better the next day!
Lower Calorie, Lower Sugar Juices
Lime juice and lemon juice are a girl's best friend when trying to make skinnier cocktails. Stronger citrus juices are great at masking the harsh flavors of alcohol and also come with much lower sugar content in comparison to sweeter juices like orange juice or pineapple juice. In addition to lime or lemon juice, you can try adding grapefruit juice, or cranberry juice, which with their stronger flavors, can add a lot to your drink with only a subtle splash.
Stronger Drinks
By making drinks stronger, meaning maybe pouring a double shot over ice with a splash of juice and a dash of agave, you can minimize your total liquid and calorie consumption over the course of a night. You can get the best of both worlds; you can feel like you're having a cocktail, but cut the calorie count down to something that is more similar to if you had been only taking straight vodka shots or tequila shots. This has always left us feeling less bloated, less hungover, and better about our night out! That’s why we created SimpleShots, which are double shots of vodka or tequila, a splash of juice, and a dash of agave nectar. In our tequila flavor, we have incorporated ginger juice (for its gut benefits), lime juice, cayenne pepper (for flavor), and agave nectar. For our vodka flavor, we used cranberry juice (for its detoxifying benefits), lemon juice, mint extract (for refreshing flavor), and agave nectar.
Ready to feel better on Sunday morning? Give SimpleShots a try!
