You would be hard-pressed to identify a single person who does not enjoy a morning cup of coffee. It has become one of the most popular beverages in the United States due to its ability to energize and awaken those who consume it. Coffee has become a staple of the morning routine of Americans across the country. These morning cups of coffee are primarily meant to help the drinker wake up and prepare for the day ahead.
However, coffee has become popular among more Americans for reasons beyond the original intent behind the caffeinated beverage. The most surprising adaptation of coffee in modern society has been its use in dieting and weight loss journeys. While coffee is the furthest thing from an official dietary supplement, it has become popular for those looking to manage their weight.
One of the biggest reasons for coffee's prevalence in weight loss is the caffeine that makes the drink so popular. It has been proven that caffeine can suppress the appetite, so we feel less inclined to snack or overeat at meals. However, the efficacy of caffeine as an appetite suppressant is still being debated. Understanding caffeine's role in suppressing your appetite can help you better plan your dietary habits during your weight loss journey. The only question is how effective the technique truly is.
Can Caffeine Suppress Your Appetite?
Caffeine is a powerful stimulant that is the primary component of every cup of coffee. While decaffeinated coffee does exist, the caffeinated variant is the one that is enjoyed by the majority of the population. While caffeine is not exclusively found in coffee and can be found in tea and soda, it is most powerful in coffee. The stimulation of caffeine is what enables the consumption of coffee to energize the body. However, caffeine can affect your appetite in addition to the standard benefits of caffeine.
The human appetite is not so simple as eating to suppress it. There are several details that affect whether your appetite is sated or if you wind up craving snacks later in the day despite eating a full meal. The nutrient values of your meal and your body's hormones and activity levels affect your appetite. This is why highly nutritious meals leave you feeling full and satisfied in a way that a takeout order from McDonald's cannot provide. However, one of the chief compounds in appetite is a hormone known as ghrelin.
Ghrelin is a catalyst for the sensation of hunger and is manufactured in the gastrointestinal tract. Essentially, the level of ghrelin currently in your system is directly related to your appetite levels. The lower your ghrelin levels, the less hungry you end up feeling. Of course, this begs the question of what ghrelin has to do with caffeine consumption. The answer is that additional research shows caffeine can lower your body's ghrelin levels.
A 4-week study was conducted on the consumption of caffeinated coffee and how it affected the subjects' appetites. The results found that caffeine consumption reduced the subjects' ghrelin levels and their overall appetites. While caffeine's effects on ghrelin levels are not overly pronounced, supplementary studies have reinforced the fact that caffeine minimizes overeating. Other studies found that caffeine consumption causes the drinker to consume fewer calories throughout the day.
One study, in particular, found that consuming coffee within 30 minutes to 4 hours before a meal can impact your appetite. The study showed that caffeine consumption within this timeframe helped reduce the concentration of appetite hormones and feelings of hunger—further reinforcing caffeine's benefits on appetite reduction.
Ultimately, the consumption of caffeine does seem to affect your appetite. You have a greater chance of suppressing your appetite by consuming caffeinated coffee. However, this suppression effect seems to be limited to men. Fortunately, this does not mean your goal of using caffeine to aid your weight loss journey is doomed to failure. Coffee has several beneficial effects that can help you shed some extra weight.
Caffeine Affects the Metabolism
While we have discussed the role of caffeine in enhancing our metabolisms before, it is worth revisiting. The metabolism is responsible for how our bodies break down the nutrients we put in our bodies and directly affects how we burn calories, among other aspects of physical health. The rate of our metabolisms is determinant, resulting from physiological and biological conditions specific to each person. It is highly unlikely that you will share the same metabolic rate as your friends or family. However, the metabolism is also malleable and can be enhanced by diet and physical activity changes.
While there is no substitute for making profound life changes to enhance your metabolism, there are a few tools you can use for short-term enhancement. Among these tools is caffeinated coffee, which has shown profound effects in bolstering the metabolic rate of those who consume it. This has reinforced the popularity of coffee among those looking to improve their physical health by shedding some excess weight.
How caffeine affects our metabolism involves modulating our natural resting metabolic rate (RMR), which is the natural rate at which we burn calories. While the baseline RMR is different for everyone, research has discovered that caffeine consumption can enhance it. The studies conducted on caffeine's effects on the RMR show that it can cause an increase of between 3% and 11%, allowing us to burn more calories at rest after a cup of coffee.
Further studies determined that caffeine increases our body's ability to burn fat, compounding the weight loss benefits. The most notable study on caffeine's ability to improve our fat burning potential found a potential 29% increase in fat burning for coffee drinkers. Unfortunately, this effect is not readily available for every coffee drinker looking to lose weight. The 29% increase seems to only be available for those who are already lean, while heavier or overweight subjects only exhibited a 10% increase. Despite the 19% drop-off, the benefit to our body's ability to burn fat remains an invaluable tool.
While caffeine's effect on our metabolisms is not the focus of this article, it was worth reviewing what we know. If only because coffee, while useful, is not a perfect solution for your weight loss mission. There are some flaws with using caffeine as a dietary supplement that you will need to consider if you want to be successful in your journey.
How Effective is Caffeine as an Appetite Suppressant?
As popular as coffee is, the idea that it can be beneficial in helping lose weight and minimize excess snacking might seem too good to be true. Unfortunately, that assessment is appropriate since the effects of coffee as an appetite suppressant are not available to everyone. We briefly mentioned that using caffeine as an appetite suppressant only applies to biological men, while biological women are left without such a benefit. This unfortunate information is an example of how sexual dimorphism affects our bodies.
A study shed a little light on the suppressant effect of caffeine and how it applies to men and women, respectively. The study involved providing 300 mg of caffeine to the test group 30 minutes before giving them access to food. While the control group showed no deviation, the men in the test group showed a 21.7% decrease in calories consumed. The truly fascinating result was that the women in the test group showed no change in appetite compared to their male counterparts.
While the cause of this difference is not completely understood, the prevailing theory relates to how the different sexes store and access energy. Biologically speaking, women store more energy than men and are more resistant to stimuli that might trigger a nervous response. This means the female body might resist the effects of caffeine while the male body assimilates them. This includes the appetite suppression that caffeine is meant to provide.
While the limitation to males might be disappointing, other studies also cast doubt on caffeine's use as an appetite suppressant. More than one study has come back with results that show no reduction in appetite for those who consumed coffee, meaning caffeine's traits as a suppressant might be even less effective than initially believed. Ultimately, it seems as though caffeine's strength lies in being able to affect our metabolisms more than suppressing our appetites.
However, while caffeine may be a beneficial tool, it does not come without issues. Even when you can use caffeine to enhance our metabolic rates, there are drawbacks to excessive consumption of coffee. You're probably familiar with many of them by now.
Drawbacks of Coffee Consumption
While coffee remains extremely popular and caffeine offers a fair number of benefits for weight management, it is far from perfect. Aside from the appetite suppressant effect being limited to men, there are issues with using coffee as a long-term weight management tool and even serious health issues arising from long-term consumption.
The first of these issues is the fact that coffee has diminishing returns. The human body is highly adaptive and will automatically begin adjusting to any substance introduced to it. While this adaptation is not perfect and cannot be applied to everything we consume, it impacts coffee's benefits.
Similar to how we develop a tolerance for alcohol, our bodies begin developing a tolerance to the metabolic enhancements provided by caffeine. Over time, we acclimate to the effects until you can no longer use caffeine for metabolic enhancement. This makes coffee unsustainable for long-term use and primes it as a short-term supplement at best. It is possible to reset your body's tolerance to caffeine, but the process is time-consuming and could prove impractical for your immediate needs.
The only way to successfully use caffeine to enhance your metabolic rate is to use it for a short period. You also need to avoid relying on it completely and use it to jumpstart other lifestyle changes to promote weight loss. This is especially true since too much coffee also presents a serious health risk. Caffeine is a stimulant that interacts with our nervous system, which is not designed to handle excessive stimulation.
Too much coffee in a short period can have severe consequences on your cardiovascular health. Caffeine can overload the nervous system and cause heart attacks, among other heart issues. These issues can be fatal in extreme cases, making coffee and caffeine a double-edged sword. However, this knowledge should equip you to introduce coffee to your new dietary lifestyle in a healthy manner so you can avoid these potential negative effects.
Keep it All Natural
Despite the near-universal love for coffee in the world, it has a few issues. While it has many benefits for those looking to begin their weight loss journey or even those who need to wake up in the morning, it is imperfect. While coffee is likely not the ideal appetite suppressant you might have been hoping for, it can still be an invaluable tool in your weight loss journey.
While temporary, its effects on the metabolic rate can be just what you need to jumpstart your transition to a healthier version of yourself. However, counting on it to minimize your appetite seems to be a mistake, as only a portion of the human population experiences the effect. Most coffee can fulfill this role, but your best bet is to seek a product to help you lose weight.
Fortunately, we at Bella All Natural can offer some assistance in that endeavor. Our Skinny Coffee powder allows you to make a refreshing glass of iced coffee with the caffeine needed to jumpstart your metabolism. Additionally, we chose the natural ingredients in the product specifically for their ability to help you shed those unwanted pounds.
While the coffee might not be able to suppress your appetite depending on your sex, it can still help you on your way. So, if you are interested in giving our product a shot, we encourage you to visit our website and try it for yourself. However, the only thing you truly need to do is keep it All Natural!