Ah, a thread close to my liquor-loving heart!
I've had to severely cut back on the whiskey, which upsets me more than having had to cut back on the pizza, in all honesty! Haha. I'm already eating a fairly low amount of calories. I found I couldn't give my body all it needs nutritionally when I routinely sacrificed an additional couple of hundred calories to Jack Daniels. Plus, like already mentioned, there's the bloating issue
and the alcohol = increased hunger issue. Blah. It's tough, vodka-buddy
I still drink occasionally, but it's probably twice a month now.
Re: your plateau...you mention you're a calorie counter -- are you totally sure you're counting the calories in the alcohol correctly? I only mention this because, a couple of months ago, I found myself in the same boat you're describing: I had lost some weight, was working out a lot, and, I
thought, keeping an accurate list of my calories...when, suddenly, there I was, "mysteriously" plateaued. Yeah, totally the alcohol.
So I've always heard that, typically, hard liquor is about 70 calories per shot; however, I didn't stop to consider that my shot glass, like a lot of shot glasses, holds about a shot and a half. Really silly mistake that had me hugely underestimating my calories and, therefore, maintaining, rather than losing, for about a solid month. If you're anything like me, you could easily be taking in nearly 300 calories with those two cocktails, which, if not factored correctly into daily totals, could result in what seems like a plateau.