Coffee and Weight Loss – Does it Really Play a Role?
You may or may not be aware that coffee is one of the leading inhibitors of weight loss, but many studies confirm that your coffee intake may be preventing you from finding weight loss or success for both psychological and physiological reasons. This is true of both regular and decaffeinated coffee. Perhaps this is why popular weight loss programs, including Jenny CraigâÂ?¢, Physician’s Weight LossâÂ?¢, Weight WatchersâÂ?¢, and The ZoneâÂ?¢ all suggest you should limit your coffee intake.
Reason 1 – Coffee Gets On your Nerves
Coffee interrupts the activity of the brain chemical adenosine, which is responsible for calming you down. This added stimulation and nervousness that you get from coffee can make you feel edgy. This edgy feeling can often lead to a sense of hunger or cravings, causing you to eat more than you would normally.
Reason 2 – Coffee Is Seldom a Loner
Coffee intake, decaf or not, is often associated with social food intake activities such as breaks, snacks, and fast-food breakfasts. When someone asks you out for a “cup of coffee,” it is usually accompanied by a snack or even a meal that you would not have otherwise eaten. Therefore, for many people, coffee is an excuse to cheat and eat foods in greater quantity and of lesser quality.
Reason 3 – Coffee Is an Energy Crisis
Coffee puts extreme stress on your adrenal glands – the glands responsible for the release of stress hormones. What a cup of coffee causes in your body is a stress response similar to a shot of adrenaline. This “fight or flight” response causes the body to release sugar into the blood as muscle fuel. If you don’t use this sugar (who among us works out after a cup of coffee?), the sugar triggers a release of insulin, and before you know it, your blood sugar crashes and burns and these extreme fluctuations in your blood sugar can cause enormously powerful cravings – not to mention that many times the excess sugar released and not used can be turned directly to fat stores. Interestingly enough, when it comes to blood sugar fluctuations, “the decaffeinated contains the same acid oil, and is often no better than regular coffee,” so caffeine is not the only culprit.
Reason 4 – Coffee Sends Important Nutrients Down the Drain
Coffee is a powerful diuretic. For some who are battling weight, diuretics may seem like friendly allies, but in reality, harsh diuretics like coffee may do more harm than good. When you urinate too often, you lose magnesium, potassium, sodium, and Vitamin B1. These are vital nutrients that you probably aren’t getting enough of anyway, particularly if you are restricting your food intake.
Reason 5 – Coffee is a Toxic Waste
You may not realize it, but caffeinated coffee contains the same alkaloid group of chemical as morphine, cocaine, and strychnine. By the same token, regular and decaffeinated coffee are full of toxins. One researcher reports, “the coffee plant itself is a virtual repository for toxins such as pesticides and other harmful chemicals.” Coffee is the most heavily sprayed of all agricultural commodities. It is never wise to knowingly ingest toxic chemicals, but especially during a time when you are trying to lose weight because internal cleansing is so vitally important to your weight loss efforts.
Reason 6 – Coffee Causes a Fuel Shortage
Coffee raises your blood pressure and directly affects your metabolism. As explained previously, your body’s reaction to coffee is to produce extra insulin. This internal chemical reaction to caffeine hitting your system retards the burning of stored fat. This is because your body is “tricked” by the insulin and does not realize it could be using the excess fat for energy. For this reason, even overweight people feel excessively tired after the coffee wears off, even though they have excess stored fuel that could be burned off. It may be beneficial to mention hear that statistics show that Ã?¾ of the caffeine ingested in the U.S. comes directly from coffee, so there are a lot of folks doing a lot of bad things to their metabolisms with this treasured drink.
Reason 7 – Coffee Keeps you from Snoozing and Losing
The Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that “lack of sleep may enhance hunger and effect the body’s metabolism, making it much more difficult to lose weight.” Sleep is important to weight loss for many reasons. It affects the secretion of the appetite control hormone cortisol, it is necessary for the body to properly metabolize carbohydrates, and it insures that adequate amounts of growth hormone are released so that your body’s proportion of muscle and fat are balanced. Even if you drink coffee early in the day, the havoc it wreaks on your blood sugar, insulin production, and metabolism can prevent you from getting the restful, restorative sleep that your body needs to help it maintain a healthy weight.
Reason 8 – Coffee Prevents You from Housecleaning
“When you get up in the morning, your stomach and your whole system are in a cleansing process.” When caffeinated coffee gets moving into your blood and the endorphins begin to stimulate you, the natural daily cleansing process that your body has started for its own good stops immediately. You cannot lose weight or be healthy without proper cleansing, and coffee stops your body from being able to accomplish that important task as it is programmed to do.
Reason 9 – Coffee Dampens Your Spirits
Coffee directly affects your mood, mindset, emotional, and mental processes. Because we know that weight issues are often linked to emotional or mental issues, it is important to not repress or numb or ignore these issues. It has been said that “when you want to lose physical weight, you also need to lose mental weight.” Scientists project that coffee “can reduce cerebral flow by as much as 30%, which might be one of the reasons coffee prevents you from losing that “mental weight.”
Reason 10 – Coffee Elevates More than Your Heart Rate
Besides the effects of caffeine on the heart and entire nervous and cardiovascular systems, several of the oily components of coffee beans themselves, which eventually make their way into your breakfast beverage cup, can elevate a person’s blood cholesterol levels. Anyone with imbalanced cholesterol will find it more difficult to lose weight or maintain overall health.
Reason 11 – Coffee De-Livers You
Because coffee is so toxic, “long-term coffee drinkers often have a toxic, congested liver and impure blood.” A congested or toxic liver can lead to all sorts of dieter-unfriendly conditions, including protruded stomach, constipation, spastic colon, and irritable bowel syndrome.
Reason 12 – Coffee’s Friends are Not-So-Sweet
According to the folks at Roast and Post Coffee Company, only 37% of coffee drinkers drink their coffee black, while 63% add sweeteners like sugar or potentially harmful artificial sweeteners. While regular black coffee may not be high calorie or high fat, most commonly preferred coffee drinks tell a different story. For instance, while a 12-oz. cup of black unsweetened coffee has only a few unmentionable calories, a cappuccino made with even nonfat milk has 80. The popular caf�© mocha with whipped cream will provide you with nearly 260 calories in the nonfat milk version, and 340 calories and 21 fat grams in the regular version. So while coffee in itself may not be overstocking you with calories, it is clear that the way most folks drink their coffee is giving them more than their waistlines may have bargained for.
Information Compiled From:
“Fill it To the Rim?” by Jonny Bowden, M.A., C.N.S.
“Are Coffee Drinks Derailing your Diet?” by Lynn Grieger, R.D., C.D.E.
“Weight Loss and Coffee/Caffeine” by James Spicer
“Ten Important Reasons to Avoid Caffeine” by Stephen Cheiniske
“Improving Health After Years of Drinking Coffee, Regular or Decaf” by
Donna Smith, C.C.N., N.D.
