Coffee may aid your weight loss efforts in the following ways.
It Revs Up Your Metabolism
Coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant that blocks adenosine receptors in the brain, enhancing wakefulness and alertness.
Caffeine also affects your body’s physiology in ways that may support a healthy weight. “Coffee increases metabolism because its main component, caffeine, is a stimulant that enhances your metabolic thermogenesis, which is the process by which the body generates heat from digested food substances,” says Daniel Boyer, MD, a medical researcher in Des Moines, Iowa, who focuses on molecular biology and pharmacology, among other subjects, and is associated with the Farr Institute.
A fast metabolism means you’ll burn more calories during the day, whether you’re moving or at rest.
“This means a faster metabolic rate promotes a quicker weight loss than a slower metabolic rate,” Dr. Boyer says.
It Suppresses Your Appetite
For some people, drinking coffee promotes a feeling of fullness.
That could affect your weight, since if you’re not reaching for extra meals and snacks throughout the day, you may consume fewer calories overall. Excess calorie intake is a major contributor to weight gain, Boyer says.
Research has found that study participants who consumed caffeine 30 minutes to 4 hours before mealtime ate less.
Other studies haven’t confirmed this link, though.
It’s Associated With Reduced Body Fat
In a study of women, those who regularly drank higher amounts of coffee had a lower body fat percentage compared with those who drank less coffee. But the effects were found to be age dependent. Among women ages 20 to 44, those who regularly drank two or three cups of coffee per day had less total body fat compared with those who didn’t drink coffee. The same was true for women ages 45 to 69 who drank four or more cups per day. The researchers point out that there are likely bioactive compounds in coffee other than caffeine that may help regulate weight.
Coffee consumed before a workout may also boost your body’s fat-burning process, Boyer says. A study of 15 men who didn’t habitually drink coffee found that a strong dose of caffeine 30 minutes before aerobic exercise — about 200 milligrams for a 154-pound person, which is about what you’d find in a tall Starbucks coffee — increased fat burning.
Even in many popular eating plans that limit or eliminate foods or food groups, such as Whole30 (which limits added sugar, alcohol, legumes, dairy, and grains), coffee is rarely off-limits.
Some diets actually encourage drinking coffee. The ketogenic diet, for instance, promotes bulletproof coffee, which mixes coffee with butter and a supplement called MCT oil.
WW, which uses a point system to track what you eat each day, allocates zero points to black coffee, meaning there is no limit on how much you can drink.
