Turn Your Brew Into A Fat Burning Machine

You know that morning coffee you love so much? It can do a lot more than simply perk you up and help you get your day off to a cheerful start. When you fix it the right way, your cuppa Joe can increase your metabolism and help you burn through fat reserves faster. Here’s the skinny.

Coffee and Your Metabolism

Caffeine. It’s the magic ingredient that gives coffee its irresistible kick. Not only is caffeine the world’s most popular psychoactive substance, offering a completely legal high, it’s also an ingredient you’ll find listed near the top of many diet pills and fat burners.

But what is it that makes caffeine so powerful? As it turns out, this chemical is among just a few substances with the ability to increase metabolism by helping to mobilize fat from the cells where it’s stored.

There’s more to the story. Caffeine blocks adenosine, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that slows nerve cell activity to promote drowsiness. Among its many benefits is the ability to make you feel awake and energized by speeding up those nerve cells. At the same time, it increases the rate of neuron firing inside the brain while simultaneously stimulating the release of adrenaline. This prepares you to get up and get moving. As adrenaline is released, the liver releases stored sugar into your bloodstream to prepare you for action.

Caffeine also increases dopamine, which helps to put you in a good mood.

Caffeine isn’t the only stimulant found in coffee. If you make this your morning beverage of choice, you’re also going to get some other beneficial stimulants.

Theobromine – If this compound sounds familiar, it probably is! Theobromine is among the chief flavanols found in chocolate. It’s beneficial for your heart and lungs, and it’s a natural anti-inflammatory substance as well. This compound stimulates the release of toxins and helps the body expel them via urination. You can thank theobromine for part of coffee’s ability to stimulate your brain, too: It has been proven to improve mental performance while helping to reduce mental fatigue.
Theophylline – This is another stimulant that’s found in chocolate as well as coffee. This compound benefits asthma sufferers and makes its way into prescription drugs. The interaction between theophylline and fat metabolism isn’t clear.
Chlorogenic acid – This powerful compound doesn’t just enhance weight loss. It’s also known for its ability to improve mood. It is a potent antioxidant, and it has the ability to help lower blood sugar. If you are interested in increasing your chlorogenic acid intake, you may want to consider green coffee bean extract as it contains higher amounts.

Studies show that caffeine has the ability to increase the body’s resting metabolic rate by up to eleven percent. The leaner you become, the greater caffeine’s effect on metabolism is likely to become. In lean individuals, caffeine showed the ability to increase fat burning by an astonishing 29 percent. It showed a still-impressive increase in fat burning in obese individuals, raising their fat burning capacity by about ten percent.

Start Transforming Your Coffee Today

If you prefer to drink your coffee black, you don’t have to change anything – although you might want to experiment with some of the techniques I’m about to mention. If, on the other hand, you are among the majority and you prefer lots of sugar, cream, and other decadent additives in your coffee, you’re probably consuming too much sugar and too many extra calories to receive any of the benefits that coffee’s compounds provide.

Luckily, you can continue to enjoy delicious-tasting coffee and get the best of both worlds by switching to natural calorie-free sweeteners such as stevia or monkfruit, and by carefully choosing which kinds of fat to add to your coffee.

Choose organic coffee. Coffee is among the most treated crops on the planet, and conventional types typically carry a heavy chemical load.
If you like cinnamon, consider adding it to your coffee. Cinnamon tastes delicious and it supports good health.
Think about adding raw cacao powder to increase your coffee’s theobromine content and lend a delicious chocolate taste.
Try vanilla extract or other flavored extracts to give your coffee an interesting taste.
Choose a healthy fat such as ghee, MCT oil, coconut oil, or organic cream. Try not to add milk or half and half to your coffee since these contain natural milk sugars. If you like, you can skip the fat in favor of a plant milk with no sugar added. Coconut, cashew, and almond are all delicious.
If you enjoy sweetener and added flavors, consider flavored stevia drops. I personally love the vanilla cream flavor.
Consider developing a taste for black coffee. This way, you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits even when you don’t have access to your blender and healthy ingredients.

If you have a minute, put your ingredients and your coffee into the blender and whip it up on high for about 15 seconds. You’ll end up with a scrumptious treat that’s better tasting (and better for you) than anything you’ll find at the average coffeehouse!

Note that brewing your own organic coffee at home and adding healthy ingredients might sound expensive, but it’s a habit that’s likely to save you money especially if you are drinking lattes, mochas, and other concoctions from a coffee house. My old habit was costing me anywhere between $6-$10 on an average day. I spend less on coffee in a month now than I used to spend in just one week! Not only is my body happier, my bank account is thanking me, too.

Maximize Your Coffee’s Fat-Burning Potential

In order to maximize caffeine’s fat burning power, consider doing other things that increase your body’s resting metabolism rate. While there are many factors that go into determining resting metabolism, here’s the short, sweet version of what happens when you increase your rate using whichever methods appeal to you most: The higher your resting metabolism rate (RMR), the more calories you burn throughout the day – even when you’re not doing much of anything. Increasing your RMR is one of the easiest ways to boost fat loss and shed unwanted pounds faster.

Exercise – Physical activity increases the body’s resting metabolism rate. Metabolism stays high for about two hours after exercise and shows a slight elevation for up to 48 hours post-exercise. You may enjoy even more benefits if you choose high-intensity interval training (HIIT)
Lift Weights – Choosing to make some time for weight bearing exercise is another way to boost your resting metabolism rate.
Drink Water – When you drink about 17 ounces of water, your resting metabolism rate increases by an average of ten to thirty percent. The effect lasts for about an hour. If you drink cold water, your RMR will increase even more as your body expends heat to bring the water up to the same temperature as the digestive tract.
Stand Up – You might have heard the saying that “Sitting is the new smoking.” Stand up when you can, and you’ll burn some extra calories. In one study, participants who stood up to work expended an extra 174 calories over the course of a single afternoon. If you have to sit for long periods of time, try to take short breaks to stand up while talking on the phone and doing other tasks. Quick “walk” or “stand up” breaks can help you keep your metabolism up.

Last but not least, get plenty of rest. When you don’t sleep enough, your metabolism slows down, and this can negate some of your other efforts while causing other harmful side effects.

How Much Coffee Should You Drink?

Have you ever heard the saying that sometimes it’s possible to get too much of a good thing? This is true when it comes to coffee. Too much coffee can contribute to high blood pressure, and it can lead to addiction, too. Most coffee drinkers have a mild form of caffeine addiction, but when it becomes severe, you might experience some truly unpleasant (and harmful) side effects:

Feeling fatigued when the caffeine wears off
Being jittery when you drink too much coffee
Headaches, tiredness, and a feeling of depression when you don’t get your daily dose

Sleeplessness or the lack of deep sleep cycles can be problematic, too. Caffeine has a six-hour half-life, meaning that drinking a big cup of coffee containing about 200 milligrams of caffeine will leave 100 milligrams of caffeine in your system six hours later, and 50 milligrams of caffeine in your system another six hours after that. If you drink your last cup of coffee at 10 a.m., for example, you’ll have 100 milligrams of caffeine in your system at 4 p.m. and 50 milligrams of caffeine remaining in your system at 10 p.m.

This can prevent adenosine from taking effect and promoting drowsiness at bedtime, meaning you don’t get the sleep you need. Even if you do fall asleep, your brain will be too active for deep, restorative sleep cycles to occur.

Know how caffeine affects you and use it as a tool in your “good metabolism” kit! While individual responses to caffeine vary, most of us respond best when we enjoy four cups of coffee per day, or even fewer than that. If your intake is higher than 400 milligrams of caffeine, then you may want to start cutting back gradually until you reach a safer level.

You might consider cycling your caffeine use, as well. Cutting back frequently to prevent your body from becoming over-tolerant of caffeine may boost its benefits, since caffeine tolerance blunts the metabolism-increasing effects of caffeine along with its ability to pep you up. If you notice that it takes more and more coffee to create a sense of alertness, you might want to ease up gradually and then reintroduce the caffeine. Whether you do this or not, you’ll find that your coffee can help you manage your appetite, even over the long term.

In the end, there’s no such thing as a magical cure for all of your weight loss woes – but this one comes pretty close when you know how to use it to your advantage.