The Number One Thing You Should Consume Each Day for Weight Loss

It’s inexpensive, incredibly healthy, and it will burn fat.

There are so many odd and expensive supplements out there that claim to lead to fat loss.

While they may indeed help you lose weight, you’re likely both spending too much money on them and consuming weird ingredients alongside the fat-burning substance. Fortunately, there is one thing you can consume that is inexpensive, readily available, and incredibly healthy. And that thing is coffee.

Here’s how coffee leads to fat loss and how you can use it to maximize its fat loss benefits.

Coffee and Fat Loss

It has consistently been demonstrated that coffee can lead to increased fat loss.

This is achieved through various mechanisms.

Fat Mobilization

Losing fat requires two processes: fat mobilization and fat oxidation.

Fat must first be mobilized — i.e., come out of storage and move into the mitochondria, before we can burn it for fuel — oxidation.

Coffee helps with both of these processes.

This 2004 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that consuming caffeine increases fat mobilization. This means that drinking coffee (or anything containing caffeine) helps fat to move out of storage and into the mitochondria where we can use it as a fuel source.

Fat Oxidation

Once the fat has moved out of storage, we can start to burn it. This is oxidation.

This study found that ingesting coffee stimulated the metabolism, increasing the metabolic rate and led to the oxidation of fat. Coffee increased free fatty acids in the blood through the process of lipolysis (breaking down fat). Researchers explain that fat oxidation is “significantly greater after coffee”.

BAT

Building on the fat oxidation discussed above, some research has found that consuming coffee leads to the activation of a special kind of fat.

Here’s a quick background.

The body has two different types of fat — brown adipose tissue (BAT) and white adipose tissue (WAT).

The WAT is what we normally think of when we think of body fat — this is the fat we see. BAT, on the other hand, is less well-known. BAT is present in high amounts in babies, but in lesser amounts in adults. However, this is the fat that has the potential to make us less fat.

This is because BAT is a special kind of fat:

“BAT moderates your body chemistry to keep you healthy. It improves your body’s ability to handle blood sugar, increases bone health and density, helps build [lean] muscle mass, increases longevity, and helps you burn WAT more efficiently.” — Geoffrey James, science of coffee expert

This means when BAT is activated, it will actually burn WAT. This is how cold exposure works to burn fat — it activates the BAT which burns the WAT, therefore reducing our total body fat.

It turns out coffee also has the ability to activate BAT.

When we consume caffeine, it activates the main region of our bodies (just above the collarbones — the supraclavicular region) that has BAT. This has the same effect on BAT activation and subsequent WAT burning as a cold plunge. And all it takes to activate this is a single cup of coffee!

This study suggests that coffee, through its ability to activate BAT, could be “the secret to fighting obesity.”

One of the authors stated,

“Brown fat works in a different way to other fat in your body and produces heat by burning sugar and fat, often in response to cold. Increasing its activity improves blood sugar control as well as improving blood lipid levels and the extra calories burnt help with weight loss. However, until now, no one has found an acceptable way to stimulate its activity in humans.

This is the first study in humans to show that something like a cup of coffee can have a direct effect on our brown fat functions. The potential implications of our results are pretty big, as obesity is a major health concern for society and we also have a growing diabetes epidemic and brown fat could potentially be part of the solution in tackling them.”

Lowering Total Body Fat

This 2020 study found that women who drink 2–3 cups of coffee each day have lower total body and abdominal fat than women who drink less or no coffee. This study just looked at correlation but is worth highlighting here. The researchers explain,

“Higher coffee consumption was associated with significantly lower total body fat percentage and trunk body fat percentage in a dose-response manner.”

This 2011 study found that consuming coffee reduces the accumulation of fat around our organs and waistline. They suggest this is due to the polyphenols (a type of micronutrient) in the coffee.

Increased Adrenaline

Caffeine stimulates the release of adrenaline, and adrenaline leads to fat oxidation.

“What caffeine does is stimulate the central nervous system, which sends signals to the fatty tissues telling them to break down fat. So it does so by increasing blood levels of hormone called epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline, and it travels through the blood to fatty tissues creating these signals to break down fat.” Dr. Aastha Kalra, New York-based physician specializing in weight loss

Improved Physical Performance

There is a wealth of research showing that caffeine leads to improved physical performance.

Caffeine has been shown to decrease perceived effort during a workout, and thus improve performance in the gym. It also increases time-to-exhaustion, muscle strength, and sprint power.

All of these lead to us being able to go harder for longer, meaning we’ll burn more calories during the workout than if we had not consumed any caffeine beforehand.

Furthermore, this 2011 study found that consuming caffeine increases energy expenditure, which leads to more calories burned during the exercise session.

What You Can Do

• Consume coffee before morning fasted cardio to increase fat oxidation
• Consume coffee before afternoon exercise to increase fat burned by 29%
• Wait one hour after waking before consuming coffee — when we compound our natural cortisol spikes with a cup of coffee, it can dramatically increase our stress response, and can also cause our bodies to be immune to the impact of the caffeine.

There is no shortage of research showing that coffee improves our ability to lose fat.

There are various mechanisms at play, outlined in this article, but there is no doubt that coffee can help you on your fat loss journey. However, we need to be smart with our coffee consumption. If you’d like to learn more about healthy approaches to coffee, check out these articles:

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