I’ve got to stop putting “wellness influencer” in inverted commas. These are real people; we have to accept that they have influence. Wellness is, incontrovertibly, a real thing, since “health” is a bit too neutral to be illness’s opposite. So, anyway, a wellness influencer has posted on TikTok the number of alcoholic drinks you have to down before you’ll gain 1lb (450g) in weight. I know for an absolute fact that this isn’t how the human body works. The calories-in-calories-out mechanical understanding, where all calories have a like effect and every body is the same, has been debunked from every which way. Even if we were to agree that 37.5 flutes of prosecco should add 1lb of body weight, uniformly, to any drinker, we’d know immediately that circumstances would move the dial. What if you drank them all in one go? You could make yourself so ill that you actually lost weight.
The list was a kind of homage to the great mysteries of alcohol: how on earth is lager more calorific than Guinness? Whose bright idea was the strawberry and lime Rekorderlig, a Swedish cider that packs more energy in nine bottles than Corona can in 25? But the list also joined the canon of “self-hate for the annual self-indulgence” that I’m not sure is any more real than Santa.
