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In order to stay energized, most of us drink coffee; not with the intention to boost our metabolism.
But here you have got one more reason to grab your second or third cup of coffee in a day as it can offer both.
It simply indicates the number of calories you burn at rest.
The higher your metabolic rate, the easier it is for you to burn more calories, lose weight and keep it off.
Furthermore, numerous studies have shown that drinking coffee can minimize the risks of liver disease, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Since you’re a coffee addict, you may have already known that coffee contains caffeine, which is the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world.
And for your information, I would like to mention that caffeine is also included in the most popular fat burning supplements today – of course for a good reason.
Moreover, it’s one of the few constituents known to increase metabolism and help mobilize fats from your fat tissues.
But,
Well, this is the question you’ve been looking for in this blog.
So without further ado, let’s take a close look at the evidence.
Caffeine encourages the nervous system, which sends signals directly to the fat cells, telling them to break down fat.
It does this by increasing blood levels of the hormone epinephrine.
Epinephrine also referred to as adrenaline, goes through your blood to the fat tissues, indicating them to break down facts and release them into your blood.
Indeed, freeing fatty acids into your blood does not help you lose fat until and unless you’re burning more and more calories than you consume through your diet.
This condition is basically referred as a negative energy balance.
Either by eating less or exercising more, you can reach a negative energy balance. On the other hand, taking fat-burning supplements like caffeine is another complementary strategy.
Coffee beans contains many biologically active substance which find their way itself into the final drink.
Here’re some of them that can affect your metabolism:
Caffeine is very important among these. It’s very potent and has been studied thoroughly.
Surprisingly, caffeine in coffee works by blocking an inhibitory neurotransmitter called adenosine.
Caffeine increases the release of neurotransmitters (like dopamine and norepinephrine) and firing of neurons by blocking adenosine.
This in turn, makes you awake and feel more energized.
In this way, when you feel tired, coffee helps you stay active. In fact, on an average, it may improve exercise performance by 11–12%.
There’s one major caution: Consumption of caffeine on a daily basis develops a tolerance power to its effects over time.
In the short term, caffeine can increase fat burning process and boost the metabolic rate, but after a while people develop a tolerance to caffeine and it stops working.
But if in the long term, coffee doesn’t make you use more calories, there’s still a chance that it reduces appetite and helps eat less.
One study showed that caffeine has an appetite suppressing properties which effects men, but not in women, making them eat less at a meal following caffeine consumption.
Whether caffeine or coffee can help lose weight in long term may depend on the individual.
At this point, there’s no such evidence of long-term effects.
Resting Metabolic Rate is the rate at which you burn calories.
The higher your metabolic rate, the easier to lose weight and in this way you can eat without gaining weight.
According to the studies, caffeine can increase Resting Metabolic Rate by 3–11%, with high amount of doses causing a greater effect.
Interestingly, the increase in metabolism is usually caused by an increase in fat burning.
Unfortunately, the effect is less noticeable in those who are obese.
The numerous researches showed that caffeine increased fat burning by 29% in lean people, on the other hand, the increase was only about 10% in obese individuals.
The effect also appears to lessening with age and is greater in younger individuals.
Even though caffeine can boost your metabolism but its effect can be diminished in long-term coffee drinkers due to tolerance.
Therefore, if you’re primarily interested in coffee for the sake of weight loss, it may be best to cycle your coffee drinking habits to prevent a backlog of tolerance.
Possibly cycles of two weeks on, two weeks off is best.
Of course, there’re plenty of other great reasons to drink coffee, including the fact that coffee is one of the single largest sources of antioxidants in the Western diet.