Coffee makes the world go round. After all, how many of us need that first cup of coffee to get our day off to the right start? However, with coffee serving as a staple of the human experience, it can lead to some questions about how it can affect our bodies.
Coffee is packed with certain compounds designed to accelerate our bodies and keep us energized when all we want to do is fall back into bed and take a nap. So knowing just what else our morning coffee is doing to us might be worth a thought, considering it is a popular way to start the day.
Our bodies work fairly typically and tend to be uncomfortable with sudden alterations. Coffee is a widely accepted tool to do just that, however. One such part of our bodies that has a set pace is our metabolisms, which are directly responsible for making sure the foods we eat are converted into energy the way nature intended. So, what happens when we subscribe to a lifestyle of chronic caffeine ingestion? With this article, that is what we hope to figure out.
Coffee Can Increase Your Resting Metabolic Rate
Coffee has been enjoyed for centuries, with many different grades, blends, and types being marketed. There has even been some debate about which coffee is the healthiest for you. In addition to being an immensely effective way to turbocharge you for the day ahead, coffee's effects can even kick your metabolic rate up a notch to make it more effective.
Everyone has a resting metabolic rate that determines how many calories you burn while at rest. This is directly tied to the rate at which your metabolism can function, so slower metabolisms mean fewer calories burned while faster metabolisms mean more are burned. So, in some respects, a faster metabolism is a very useful thing if you are looking to shed a few pounds. However, coffee has something of a surprising effect on the rate at which your metabolism fulfills its function.
Studies have reviewed the effects of caffeine on the resting metabolic rates of subjects who consumed coffee. The results came back to show that the caffeine in the subjects' systems led to their resting metabolic rate spiking by a rate of between 3% to 11%. Larger doses of caffeine correlated to higher rates of RMR's calorie-burning effects.
So, while coffee seems to motivate you to go, it offers a similar benefit to your metabolism and allows you to burn more calories while simply sitting at your desk. In another isolated study, there was an observed effect of subjects consuming 4.5mg of caffeine per pound of bodyweight even exhibiting a 13% increase in their metabolic rate.
Given that caffeine is the chief stimulant in an average cup of coffee, you are certainly not going to be lacking its effects on your metabolism. A single cup of coffee averages around 95mg of caffeine. Though, certain blends might have a higher concentration of caffeine depending on the beans being used.
The fact that caffeine can enhance the resting metabolic rates of the average coffee drinker might well be cause for celebration. After all, working off your daily meals without having to move around as much means you do not have to run around kicking yourself for every little treat you enjoy. However, while an 11% increase in your resting metabolic rate is an impressive jump, you would do well to remember that these stopgap measures have a habit of wearing off quickly. Relying on coffee to boost the rate at which your body burns calories while at rest is good for the short-term but should not be relied on for long-term use.
Coffee Can Increase the Rate at Which We Burn Fat
Similar to how coffee can boost our metabolism's ability to burn calories while at rest, it can offer a similar enhancement for burning fat. This is the result of a chain reaction. Caffeine enhances the fat-burning effects our bodies naturally provide, which in turn enhances our metabolic processes.
However, this serves as something of a double win since burning fat is one of the main reasons anyone sets out to bolster their metabolic rate for any reason. Unfortunately, this is where some of the bad news sets in. While caffeine enhances our ability to burn fat and speed up our metabolisms, there is a catch.
The effects are less prevalent in individuals who are already obese. This is not to say it does not work at all. However, the effects are not as strong as they are in individuals who have a lighter weight when compared to others. The study that discovered caffeine's effect on fat-burning discovered that people of a leaner build saw a 29% increase in their body's ability to burn fat. However, obese subjects only exhibited a 10% increase, leaving a 19% gap between the two builds.
While this is still a valuable increase, it is probably a little disappointing to know that it works better on those who might not need it quite as much. Still, having a cup of coffee increase the rate at which you burn fat by any percentage is a worthwhile consideration. The only other caveat is that the effects also diminish with age. Although, that is to be expected as our metabolisms experience a bit of a decline as we age anyway. However, you might wonder what exactly causes caffeine to interact with our metabolisms in this way.
Coffee is Packed With Stimulants
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that coffee contains stimulants. After all, that is pretty much the point of coffee's existence. However, the collection of stimulants found in coffee beans is relatively varied, and some of them are known to interact readily with our bodies in pretty specific ways.
We have already discussed the range of effects that the main stimulant of coffee has on human metabolism. We are, of course, referring to the caffeine that has demonstrated an almost startling amount of power over our metabolic and fat-burning rates. The way that caffeine can affect our bodies in this manner is because it prevents another function of our body from operating correctly.
Caffeine prevents the function of a neurotransmitter called adenosine. Ordinarily, adenosine inhibits other neurotransmitters from firing too frequently. Coffee essentially takes this rule and casually tosses it out the window to allow the neurotransmitters responsible for releasing dopamine and norepinephrine to go about their business unimpeded. These are the neurotransmitters that help us stay awake and energized, which is why caffeine is what we use to stay awake. However, caffeine is not the only important stimulant in coffee and not the only one that affects our metabolism.
Another important stimulant found in coffee beans is a chemical called chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid is only introduced to our systems via the consumption of certain foods and liquids, including coffee. What makes chlorogenic acid worthy of note is that it can slow the rate at which we absorb carbohydrates. This, in turn, can affect how quickly our metabolisms process carbohydrates and impact how much of the nutrients from those carbs are stored by our bodies for later use. While this is a minor stimulant, it does affect our metabolisms that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
With all of these metabolic effects that coffee offers, you might think that you have discovered the holy grail of weight loss and metabolic adjustment in something you happily drink every day. However, this brings us to our next point.
Is Coffee a Long-Term Metabolic Stimulant?
It is always nice to discover that something so beloved can also offer benefits to improving our health and appearance. Caffeine's ability to stimulate our metabolisms makes it an exciting tool for weight loss efforts. However, it suffers from the age-old issue of not being quite as perfect as it sounds. There is, as always, a catch. While useful for short periods, caffeine is not sustainable as a long-term metabolic booster.
The effects of caffeine, and by extension coffee, are a positive thing. However, our biology makes it so that we develop a tolerance to certain compounds when we are exposed to them frequently. Caffeine happens to be one of those substances. Eventually, your body will begin recognizing the caffeine and adapting to it so that the normal amount of coffee you are drinking will have diminishing returns on metabolic enhancement. Of course, you could easily up your intake of coffee to compensate for this, but too much caffeine is also unhealthy in general.
Overconsumption of coffee can lead to cardiovascular trauma as it is a stimulant, and stimulants also impact the rate at which your heart does its job. Overstimulating your heart can be unhealthy or even fatal. This is why enjoying coffee requires moderation, not to overtax your physiology. Though the effects of coffee on the metabolism are only a short-term benefit, it does offer one potential use as a long-term supplement. While it might stop boosting the rate at which calories and fat are burned, coffee also affects your appetite.
You simply feel less hungry after drinking coffee, which could help stunt any habit you might have of snacking between meals. While not directly tied to your metabolism, this benefit could make coffee an effective long-term tool for weight loss. If you cut yourself off from certain compounds, your metabolism also begins to lose tolerance. So, after a while, you could technically reuse coffee's short-term effects if you have allowed your body enough time to reset your tolerance levels.
Keep It All Natural
You will be hard-pressed to find someone who does not love their morning cup of coffee. A love that might be even more justified now that we know it can serve as a tool to enhance our metabolism. Enjoying that warm cup of energy before getting your day started in earnest is a small comfort that people across the globe have come to cherish. With so many exotic blends, it has never been easier to find one ideal for you.
So, if you find you could do with giving your metabolism a little kick, consider making your morning coffee a more regular occurrence. However, you might also want to consider finding a coffee blend designed to maximize its health effects and weight loss traits rather than simply swinging by Starbucks every day.
To that end, we at Bella All Natural would like to offer a solution. We believe fully in providing an avenue for those who want to take their health and beauty into their own hands to keep them in a more natural state. While that might seem difficult to do with coffee, it is very much possible.
We offer a specialized Skinny Iced Coffee designed to help burn away fat while also compounding the natural benefits afforded by caffeine itself. Just add a couple of scoops to ice water, and you will have an iced coffee specifically designed to burn fat and bolster your metabolism. So, if you want to kick things up a notch, check out our website and try out our products today. And remember to always keep it all natural!
Now let's turn to you, our readers! Have you ever given coffee a try during a weight-loss journey, or have you perhaps given our Skinny Iced Coffee blend a try? If so, how did either of those options work out for you? Did you see the results that you were hoping for with the use of coffee? We surely hope you loved our blend as much as we do!
Additionally, is there anything that you may have questions about in regards to coffee and its effect on metabolism? Was there anything that we talked about in today's article that you would like to hear a little more about? Be sure to leave all your thoughts and questions in the comment's section down below! Not only would we love to hear what you think, but so may other readers, as well!
