Lose weight with black coffee

Coffee offers a plethora of health benefits. There’s the well-known ability to give your concentration and alertness a temporary boost, and drinking coffee may also lower your risk of liver disease and type 2 diabetes, according to the Linus Pauling Institute.

Black coffee is a healthier alternative to a calorie-packed cup of coffee with cream/milk and sugar and may also help you lose weight.

Also Read: Best Snacks to Eat with coffee

However, be careful not to overdo it, as too much caffeine can have a negative effect on your health.

In this article, we take a look at these weight loss claims and briefly discuss the downsides of drinking too much coffee.

Reducing calories and weight loss

If you drink coffee, black is the best option for weight loss. Black coffee contains virtually no calories, it is the coffee creamer and sugar that provide these.

A single cup of coffee with two teaspoons of sugar and 30 ml of coffee creamer already has 69 calories.

And because we usually drink an average of about three cups of coffee a day, that adds up to 207 extra calories in total.

If you completely switched from coffee with sugar and coffee creamer to black coffee, you would consume more than 75,000 fewer calories per year. That is almost the same as 10 kg of fat.

Potential Benefits of Caffeine

Caffeine may also have some calorie-burning benefits that aid weight loss, but it’s too early to jump to conclusions.

A study published in 2012 in Food & Function indicated that caffeine boosted thermogenesis. This is a phenomenon that helps you burn more calories.

Another study published in 2009 in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition also found that caffeine improves thermogenesis, but this study was small and had only seven subjects.

A report from the International Journal of Obesity published in 2010 noted that thermogenesis components (such as caffeine) work better in some individuals than others or are only effective under certain conditions.

So while there is potential for the caffeine in coffee to help you lose weight, you shouldn’t rely on coffee alone for weight loss, at least not until more studies are published.

Black coffee and weight loss

There is also evidence linking coffee to weight loss and weight control. A study published in 2015 in the International Journal of Epidemiology looked at the dietary habits of more than 93,000 people to look at patterns between coffee consumption and weight.

The researchers concluded that individuals who drank more coffee had a lower risk of obesity and a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

An animal study published in Nutrition & Diabetes in 2014 found that mice that consumed coffee and then fed a diet high in fat gained less weight than mice that didn’t drink coffee.

Observational and animal studies are not conclusive evidence that coffee will help you lose weight, but they do show that it may be.

Disadvantages of coffee

Even if you drink zero-calorie black coffee, you should still drink it moderately and limit your caffeine intake.

While small amounts of caffeine may boost thermogenesis, consuming too much can cause chills, sleep interruptions, and anxiety, depression, or a rapid heartbeat.

The University of Maryland Medical Center states that two to three cups a day is the maximum recommended limit of caffeine intake.

If you drink more than three cups a day, opt for decaffeinated coffee for the extra cups.