Last week, I showed you how to use coffee to supercharge your power nap. Well, this week I have another cool trick that involves coffee.
We’ve known seemingly forever that coffee can help with weight loss. It revs up your metabolism and decreases your sense of hunger.
Plus, just last year, one study found that coffee actually helps your body burn fat. It does so by stimulating brown adipose tissue (“brown fat”). This is the type of fat in your body that burns calories.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use coffee for weight loss.
The first thing you need to do is drink it at the right time. Since coffee is an appetite suppressant, drink it 30-60 minutes before a meal. It helps reduce your hunger, allowing you to eat less. And, yes, it really does work. I’ll show you the proof in a second.
The second thing you need to do is drink the right type of coffee. To find out what the best type is, researchers performed an interesting study. They took a group of overweight people and gave them one of four drinks. These drinks were either pure caffeine in water, caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, or plain water.
The researchers had the people try each of the drinks on different occasions. Then, after the people were done with the drink, the researchers measured their perceived sense of hunger and fullness.
The researchers also measured the hormone that the body makes in response to eating. This hormone is peptide YY (PYY). PYY is a hormone that tells the body that it’s had enough food. It basically turns off your appetite. What the researchers found was surprising.
The plain water and the caffeine in water had no effects on either hunger or PYY levels. This showed that caffeine by itself doesn’t work (and why you shouldn’t use energy drinks to lose weight).
The caffeinated coffee was different. The people who drank it had a decrease in their appetites and an increase in PYY as expected. But here’s the surprise.
The most effective drink turned out to be the decaffeinated coffee. It resulted in the highest levels of PYY and the most significant decrease in appetite. The levels of PYY stayed elevated for 90 minutes after drinking the decaffeinated coffee.
That means it’s the coffee that helps you lose weight – not the caffeine. And taking the caffeine out actually makes the coffee more effective.
This is great news for people who are sensitive to caffeine. You can still get all the weight-loss benefits of coffee without any of the negative side effects.
It’s also great news for anyone who has trouble curbing their appetite. It might be because the body does not produce PYY as well as it should.
If you’re in that group, you might find that taking a cup of decaffeinated coffee about 30-60 minutes before you eat is just what you need to lose weight.
One final note: Years ago, there were warnings about decaffeinated coffee. When they first began removing the caffeine from the beans, some of the methods they used posed some health risks. But today’s decaffeination processes don’t pose the same risks as earlier methods of caffeine-stripping. I personally prefer the Swiss Water Process.
But it’s more important to use organic coffee than to worry about the processing method. Non-organic coffee is loaded with pesticides. And those are worse for you than any of the processing methods.