If you're looking to lose weight and you love coffee, the coffee diet for weight loss might sound like the perfect solution. This bean brew promises to increase your metabolism, decrease your appetite, and burn fat.
Intrigued? Before you use the Keurig, here's what you need to know.
How the Coffee Diet Works
The coffee diet is a new diet that became popular because of a book written by medical doctor Bob Arnot in 2017. In the text, Dr. Arnot claims that three cups of light roast coffee a day, along with a diet rich in fiber, are key to losing weight.
There is no one specific coffee that will miraculously help you lose weight. The coffee diet plan is generally safe for most people though, and it does encourage you to make healthier food choices overall. There is no consistent evidence to show that coffee helps with weight loss, and the plan may be difficult to stick with long enough to see results.
Dr. Arnot believes that light roast coffee is superior to dark roast coffee because it contains more polyphenols. Polyphenols are antioxidants that scavenge harmful free radicals, thus protecting our cells from damage. A study in Phytochemical Analysis showed that darker and slow-roasted coffees have a lower antioxidant capacity than lighter brews. Most likely, this is because the antioxidants break down during the heat of the roasting process.
You can drink as much coffee as you like as long as you have at least three cups a day. Both caffeinated and decaf coffee are allowed.
Dr. Arnot also suggests eating foods high in fiber. The diet is similar to the Mediterranean diet in that it focuses on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, plant proteins, lean sources of animal protein, and healthy fats. Examples of healthy fats include olive oil, nuts, seeds, avocado, and fish.
The diet provides approximately 1,500 calories per day and restricts processed foods. A low-calorie intake may help with weight loss, but it may not give some people enough energy (which we'll talk about more later).
Does Coffee Promote Weight Loss?
There is no consistent research on coffee and weight loss. The research that does exist uses many different methods, making it difficult to compare. Additionally, some research only looks at specific aspects of coffee, like caffeine, rather than the drink as a whole, making it challenging to compare studies.
Coffee may have an impact on our weight in both direct and indirect ways. For example, it may affect our metabolism and also our sleep patterns. We will investigate the research for each potential way that coffee affects our weight to decide if the theories are supported.
Coffee and Our Metabolism
A study found that people who consume caffeine have lower body weight, BMI, and body fat. Some scientists argue that caffeine's effect on weight is due to its ability to increase our metabolism.
The amount of energy we burn when we are not doing anything is our resting metabolic rate. Some energy is required for thinking, breathing, and other basic processes. This is our RMR.
Caffeine may help to increase our metabolism by increasing the amount of brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brown fat, that we have. Body fat that produces heat and increases metabolism is known as BAT.
looked at the impact of caffeine on BAT. Roughly the equivalent of a weak cup of coffee was found to stimulate fat browning in nine human participants. Although the results of this study show promise, there are not enough participants to draw any firm conclusions.
The review above demonstrates that there is significantly more weight loss in the caffeine group compared to the control group, however the average weight loss of the caffeine group was less than 2kg over the course of four weeks. This suggests that any weight loss resulting from caffeine consumption is minimal.
Plus, the studies mentioned are all short-term. As regular coffee drinkers, we are familiar with many of its effects. This may extend to any potential effects coffee has on our metabolism. This means that even though caffeine might make us lose weight temporarily, we probably won't continue to lose weight if we keep taking caffeine.
Coffee Tricks to Lose Weight
Coffee is a good drink to have if you are trying to lose weight because it has no calories. If you add milk, sugar, or other mix-ins to your coffee, it will increase the total number of calories.
But per Kaiser Permanente, here are a few tricks to help you make more diet-friendly coffee drinks:
- Drink it black
- Swap out higher-fat milk and creamers for unsweetened plant-based milk like oat, almond, or soy milk
- Skip sweeteners and instead add flavor by mixing cinnamon, nutmeg, cacao, or ginger to your brew
Possible Benefits of the Coffee Diet
According to Dr. Arnot, coffee can help you lose weight naturally by suppressing your appetite and increasing your metabolism. But the research around these claims is conflicting. Here's what the science says about some of those potential perks:
Coffee May Suppress Your Appetite
A study conducted in 2013 found that moderate coffee consumption before breakfast resulted in reduced calorie intake for people who were overweight or obese.
A small study that was done in December 2014 found that there were no significant effects of coffee on how much energy somebody takes in or how quickly food leaves their stomach.
The timing of when you eat may be the key factor in determining the health benefits or drawbacks of the food, according to a December 2017 review in the International Journal of Food Science Nutrition. A study found that coffee may reduce calorie intake if it is drunk 30 minutes to 4 hours before a meal. However, coffee drunk 3 to 4.5 hours before a meal has minimal influence on the amount of food eaten.
Overall, the research on coffee's ability to decrease food intake is not extensive and does not provide a clear answer.
Coffee Is Linked to Increased Metabolism
Research suggests that coffee may be able to speed up your metabolism.
An October 2018 review in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition evaluated 13 studies with a total of 600 participants. The research found that people who drank more caffeine had lower body weight, BMI, and fat mass. As caffeine intake increased, the researchers noted that other measures decreased. Specifically, when participants doubled their caffeine intake, their Body Mass Index, weight, and fat mass decreased by 17 to 28 percent.
Coffee May Increase Calorie Burn
Caffeine consumption can result in a temporarily higher level of activity in your central nervous system, heart rate, and muscles. According to the Office of Dietary Supplements, getting 100 milligrams of caffeine a day, which is the amount found in 1 cup of coffee, may help you burn an extra 9 calories an hour.
Caffeine can also help you burn more calories right after a workout.
A small study done in 2016 with 12 people showed that taking a caffeine supplement improved their performance in sprint interval exercise by 30 minutes. Field et al. found that those who supplemented with caffeine before exercise had greater rates of fat oxidation and calorie burn during exercise than those who were given the placebo.
Caffeine may help with weight loss, but more research is needed to confirm this.
Tip
There is no research to suggest that coffee can help to reduce fat in one area of the body. If you're trying to lose weight by drinking coffee, it's not going to work because coffee doesn't target fat in any particular area of the body.
Coffee May Reduce Disease Risk
The hot beverage may have benefits beyond weight loss. Chan School of Public Health Drinking moderate amounts of coffee, up to 4 cups a day, may help reduce your risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, liver cancer, and Parkinson's disease, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Chan School of Public Health.
Is the Coffee Diet Healthy?
The coffee diet for weight loss is based on the Mediterranean diet, which emphasises whole foods. It is a good idea to focus on eating whole, natural foods, but it can be difficult to stick to a diet that eliminates all processed or convenience foods.
The diet plan only has 1500 calories a day which is not a lot and might not work in the long term for most people.
The research on coffee's ability to decrease appetite and burn fat is limited and still inconclusive, which means it's not a solution for weight loss. Coffee is high in antioxidants, but does not offer other nutritional benefits.
Coffee and Sleep
Sleep is one of the key things that can affect our weight. If you're not getting enough sleep, you may find yourself craving more unhealthy foods and have less energy to exercise.
Coffee has been shown to increase alertness and wakefulness due to the caffeine it contains. How coffee affects our sleep depends on how our body processes it, how much we drink, and how close to bedtime we drink it.
We know that caffeine has a half-life of six hours for the average adult, but this may vary. This means that it takes about six hours for your system to process and get rid of half the caffeine in your body.
This means that if you drink coffee at noon, half of the caffeine will still be in your system at 6 p.m., and a quarter will still be in your system at midnight. It is believed that it could take up to 36 hours for the caffeine from one coffee to leave your body entirely.
The caffeine that is still in your system can prevent you from sleeping, even though you may not realize it if you are used to having caffeine. While caffeine may not prevent people from falling asleep, it will negatively impact the quality of their sleep.
Some of us may have trouble sleeping after consuming caffeinated drinks, which can have a negative impact on our sleep.
Coffee and Our Appetite
There is not a lot of evidence yet about coffee and appetite or food intake because this is a new area of research.
One study looked at how coffee and caffeine affects people's hunger and how much they eat. Caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee, as well as caffeine tablets and placebo capsules, had no effect on appetite or food intake.
However, there were only twelve participants in this study. More extensive research with a greater number of individuals is necessary to verify that the findings apply to a larger population and aren't biased by individual variations.
The study found that overweight individuals were more likely to feel fatigue after eating a high-carbohydrate meal than their healthy counterparts. A study examining the impact of high-carbohydrate meals on fatigue found that overweight individuals were more likely to feel fatigued after eating such a meal than their healthy counterparts. The purpose of this study was to find out if adding different amounts of caffeine would have an effect on appetite. The study found that overweight people ate less when they had caffeine, but it had no effect on people who were a healthy weight. Neither group reported a change in appetite.
Both of these studies had a very small number of participants and only looked at the immediate effects of coffee or caffeine on hunger and how much food was eaten. More research is needed to explore the long-term effects of coffee on appetite before any conclusions can be drawn.
Coffee and Exercise
Caffeine has been shown to improve physical performance during exercise. The researchers found that people who don't regularly consume caffeine were more likely to experience this effect.
In addition to this, a study that was well-designed but small looked into the impact of a supplement that contained caffeine and polyphenols on the participants' metabolism and ability to burn fat after they did sprinting exercises, as well as on their physical performance.
Polyphenols are antioxidant chemicals found in plants. Coffee contains a large number of polyphenols. Caffeine and polyphenols are both substances found in coffee.
The results showed that individuals who took a caffeine and polyphenol supplement burned more fat and used more energy after sprinting exercises. There was no significant difference in the physical performance of the sprinting exercises, suggesting that there may be an effect of weight loss that is not due to any change in physical performance.
