If you've vowed to go on a post-holiday diet, then make sure you give up that daily glass of wine or two along with the chocolates and baked goods, because alcohol is brimming with sneaky calories.

Nearly 40 percent of people break their New Year's resolutions within two weeks and a paltry one in 11 sticks to those resolutions until the six-month mark, the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) found.

The organisation believes that cutting out alcohol from your diet could not only help you lose weight but reduce your cancer risk. It has produced an online alcohol-calorie calculator which translates the amount of calories in a drink by comparing it to high fat chocolate digestive biscuits.  

A pint (568ml) of beer has approximately the same amount of calories as three chocolate biscuits and would take about 53 minutes of fast walking to burn off, while a glass of bubbly, followed by two standard glasses of wine (248 calories) would take an hour 15 minutes to burn off. The calculator illustrates how easy is to forget how easily the calories in alcohol can hinder your weight loss efforts.

"The calories in alcoholic drinks account for a significant proportion of a drinker's calorie consumption while providing little, if any, nutritional benefit. Cutting down on drinking can have a big effect on weight loss or maintaining a healthy weight," Kate Mendoza, head of health information at WCRF was quoted as saying.

According to Mendonza, reports show that many people don't include alcohol in their daily calorie count and seem to be oblivious to the amount of calories alcohol carries.

"This is important from a cancer perspective because, after smoking, being overweight or obese is the biggest risk factor. While fat contains nine calories per gram, few people know that pure alcohol comes a close second with seven calories per gram."

Go to World Cancer Research Fund website to use the online alcohol calculator.