During the holidays, everyone drinks more.

It’s just inevitable, with holiday parties at work, seasonal soirees with friends and multiple family occasions—almost every night is another opportunity to socialize and celebrate, cocktail in hand.

The stress of the season doesn’t help, either. Long lines and crowded stores, your rapidly decreasing account balance, and hours spent with grouchy relatives who love to talk politics will drive anyone to throw back a hot toddy…or five.

And while it seems intuitive that health-minded individuals would be less likely to reach for the booze, the opposite may be true.

“People who are weight-conscious tend to hold back on the food and go for the drinks as an alternative,” said Lisa Cohn, a registered dietician and the founder of Park Avenue Nutrition on the Upper East Side.

It makes sense—if you have to pass on something, it may seem like a healthier choice to skip dessert and sip a martini. But overdrinking can seriously impact your physical and mental health, causing negative side effects like weight gain and depression.

Don’t worry; becoming a teetotaler is not your only option.

“A celebratory toast with glass in hand can actually enhance your healthy eating,” said Cohn. Allowing yourself occasional pleasures and partaking in socially enjoyable activities will have positive effects on your health.

You just have to do it right.

Here are some of Cohn’s easy tips for toasting your health without compromising it.

Pay attention to calories
Don’t become obsessive about adding them up on your iPhone calculator, but be aware that many drinks you indulge in could be adding empty calories to your already holiday-stressed diet.

The caloric danger is often not in the alcohol but in the mixer. “Avoid heavily sugared and highly salted mixers and creamy, rich options that are high in fats and sugars,” said Cohn.

Here are some handy calorie count estimates for standard servings of popular holiday beverages. The numbers are approximations—they can vary depending on the type and brand of the alcohol, on the bartender’s recipes and serving sizes.

Red wine (5 oz. glass): 125

Bailey’s Irish Cream (1.3 oz. on the rocks): 94

Eggnog (8 oz. glass): 224

Hot Toddy (6 oz. glass): 150

Scotch (1 oz.): 69

Irish Coffee: 100–200 (This is a hard one to peg. Some people make it with whiskey, some with Baileys, and the addition of creamer or whipped cream makes a huge difference.)

Make better choices

You can take avoiding fatty mixers one step further by opting for drinks that have health benefits built in. Red wine, for example, has antioxidants like resveratrol, a polyphenol that has been shown to reduce heart disease risk factors in mice.

Practice moderation
No matter what you’re drinking, the amount you imbibe is key. Cohn suggests aiming for no more than two to four drinks per 24 hours.

Keep portion sizes in mind when drinking as well—12 ounces of a winter lager is not the same thing as 12 ounces of whiskey.

Counteract with healthy habits
Drinking taxes your liver and your brain, but there are lots of things you can do to help reduce its effects. Cohn says that staying hydrated is the most important; she recommends matching every ounce of alcohol with 16 ounces of water.

And the whole eating-instead-of-drinking thing? Forget it. It’s a bad idea to drink on an empty stomach, and it will seriously mess with your already strained digestive system. Snack on lean, healthy holiday foods like shrimp cocktail, roasted vegetables and turkey.

Speaking of your digestive system, it’s going to need some help to deal with all of that acid you’re adding. “Eat foods that are soothing,” Cohn suggests. “Blueberries, ginger tea, aloe beverages and coconut water can be helpful.”

If you’re unsuccessful and the holiday mania drives you to go a little overboard, don’t sleep all day (and don’t fall for the hair-of-the-dog approach). “Hydrate yourself and take a light walk to get the system moving,” Cohn said.

If nothing else, comfort yourself with the fact that it will all be over soon and you’ll be back to your healthy routine. “It may look dramatic,” said Cohn, “but in reality it’s just temporary.”

By Patrick Egan

You want to lose weight. You understand the basic principle: burn more energy, measured in calories, than you take in. It’s math, pure and simple. The consumption numbers are easy to find—on food packaging, in nutrition books, even on some menus. Nailing down the calories you burn, though, is a more elusive task.

Fitness-equipment manufacturers understand your desires. They add tools to their gear that they say will help you reach your goals. But just because those calorie numbers are digital, bright red and flashing doesn’t mean you should trust them. Some experts question whether tracking calories burned is even worthwhile.

The value of a calorie counter can be described much like a workout: The more you put in, the better it’ll be. “The machines that ask for height, age, weight, gender, the more data points it will have, the truer readout of calories you’ll get,” says Gregory Florez, a spokesman for the nonprofit American College of Exercise and the chief executive of FitAdvisor.com.

But he estimates that even the best machines are likely to be 5 to 10 percent off for the average user. “It’s a hard, dodgy number to pin down,” says Florez. That’s because exercise equipment can’t read a person’s lung capacity or tell how much a person sweats or know what kind of fitness level he or she brings to the machine.

Some companies say their machines get close to accurate numbers. Life Fitness treadmills, cross-trainers and bicycles can be found in gyms and health clubs across the world. Bob Quast, vice president of branding, says the company has a team of scientists in a lab to build and calibrate the calorie counters on Life Fitness machines. With each new product, or significant overhaul of current equipment, the company will test 50 to 100 people of varying ages, heights, weights and fitness levels using V02 max. That’s a cool name for a system that measures the maximal volume of oxygen a person can use when exercising at peak levels.

With all that information, Life Fitness programs its machines with proprietary algorithms. “It’s a little bit of a secret sauce,” says Quast. When a person steps on one of their machines and punches in personal information, the secret sauce spits out a calorie number.

Sometimes there doesn’t appear to be much science to keep secret. Tony Little’s Gazelle is a fitness product widely advertised on television. The top model comes with a calorie counter and heart rate monitor. A customer-service representative directed inquiries about the device to the manufacturer, FitnessQuest.

At FitnessQuest, customer-service supervisor Chris Hackney said the Gazelle’s counter was calibrated for a 150-pound person. She said that more than one 150-pound person—without specifying how many more—used the Gazelle at an outside lab. Those tests created the readout numbers that Gazelle users see. Someone who is not 150 pounds has to adjust the calorie readout—more calories for heavier people, fewer for lighter. The owner’s manual doesn’t mention this adjustment or how to make it.

“Consumers really need to be careful about products they see on infomercials,” says Henry Williford, a professor of exercise science at Auburn University, in Montgomery, Ala. He chairs the consumer information committee for the American College of Sports Medicine. “If it’s a piece of equipment where you don’t sweat or do a lot of work, you’re probably not getting benefit.”

That’s pretty close to the message some personal trainers are trying to communicate to their clients. Ideally, these trainers would like clients to worry less about specific numbers and focus on more simple things. “You’re not doing enough and you’re eating too much food,” says Roy Taylor, a nationally certified personal trainer in Tampa, Fla., describing the plight of most overweight people. The calorie counters, he says, “can be useful. But most people are barking up the wrong tree.” The right tree, he said, is simply exercising hard, at least four or five times a week, so that a body feels it.

“Most beginners need the distraction” of a calorie counter, says David Cascia, who owns Elite Training and Fitness in Brooklyn. “It engages them in the machine.” But Cascia sees problems, too. “People get so in their heads about how much they burn.” He says they then go out and eat what they think they burned. Cascia says that when people get in shape, they tend to eat better as a result. Regular exercisers are more attuned to what’s going into their bodies.

“Calories are somewhat of an inexact science. They don’t give you any indication of the quality of those calories,” says Kristie Salzar, a nutritionist. When she started in her profession 25 years ago, most nutritionists focused on the amount of calories their clients consumed, and Salzar simply didn’t see results. She’s telling her clients to move more—whether it’s exercise or simply doing physical activities—and getting them to use intuition. “We’re all born to know when we’re hungry and when we’re not,” she says, pointing to a baby’s crying as the simplest sign. But adults, she says, eat for many reasons, often psychological, that don’t have anything to do with being hungry.

Kari Viste works out at the Downtown Brooklyn YMCA. While she doesn’t consider herself a “calorie counter,” she pays enough attention to know how many calories she burns on the elliptical machine. Identical 40-minute workouts allegedly burn 420 calories on the newer Life Fitness model but only 350 calories on the older machine. She hopes the newer model is more accurate.

“I don’t think they’re very reliable,” says Viste of calorie counters. So why pay attention? She says it’s “more of a game” that helps her reach her goals. But she doesn’t use the number to rationalize what she should or should not eat. “I eat pizza no matter what.”