When it comes to losing fat there are many diets to choose from. There are thousands of diets that combine food choices in such a way to reduce caloric intake and cause fat loss. Most diets work, however not every diet works for every person. One of the goals of dieting is to find a diet that you can follow. Hopefully, you’ll find a lifestyle diet that will be easy to stick to once the excess fat is gone. Picking a diet that restricts you too much will be difficult to follow and will increase your chances of failure.

Here at “Think Sim” we believe that any diet without coffee is going to be a miserable disaster. I’d rather be 20 pounds overweight sipping on a hot mug of freshly roasted coffee than lean with only memories of coffees consumed long ago. With that said, I decided to seek out a diet that puts coffee first. To my knowledge none exist. It is then our duty to create a diet or modify an existing diet so we coffee drinkers can lose the fat and not abandon our favorite beverage. Although we strive to drink coffee in our diets, coffee by itself shouldn’t be the basis of that diet. Most of our energy should still come from food.

Caffeine as a Fat-Loss Supplement

In addition to coffee’s role in the most popular diets, let’s briefly address how caffeine by itself can be used to lose fat. There are many fat loss supplements at the nutrition store where the primary ingredient is caffeine. Supplements with names such as Metabolife, Ripped Fuel, and Beta Lean HP all use a combination of caffeine and ephedra (Ma Huang). This combination has been effective at promoting fat loss while preserving muscle. Although there are some critics of ephedra-based supplements regarding safety, this article isn’t going to go into that debate. For more information on this topic read Muscle Growth and Fat Loss by Stimulating the Я-Agonist System – The Role of Ephedrine, Caffeine, and Aspirin by Michael C. Prevost Ph.D.

The Role of Coffee in Other Diets

Before we build or modify our own diet let’s divide the major diets into 4 groups and examine how they feel about coffee. There are other diets and there are diets that fit into multiple categories. This overview is not meant to be complete and is only intended to serve as a starting point to building a coffee-friendly diet.

1. Low-Fat/High-Carb Diet
2. Isocaloric Diet
3. Low-Carb Diet
4. Macrobiotic/Holistic

The low-fat/high-carb diet includes the Pritkin Diet, Dean Orish’s diet, and countless others. Because coffee is fat-free, this diet is the most coffee friendly. However one of the reasons fat-free diets sometimes fail is the belief that removing the fat makes one immune to excess calories. A mocha made with fat-free milk may be without fat, but it is loaded with sugars and is calorically dense. If you like the sweeter coffee choices, be aware that although the drink may be fat-free you can jeopardize your diet with too many empty calories.

By far the most popular isocaloric diet is The Zone. An isocaloric diet is one where the calories from fat, protein and carbs are equal or close to equal. In the case of The Zone that ratio is 40-30-30 (40% carbs, 30% protein, and 30% fat). Isocaloric diets pay very close attention to the quality of carbohydrates. One of the key elements of this diet to avoid sugars. A simplistic overview is that by avoiding sugars the body can become more effective at burning stored body fat. But does Dr. Sears like coffee? No. Caffeine even in absense of calories can affect blood sugar. More on this later.

The low-carb diet made famous by Dr. Atkins restricts carbohydrate intake to the point where the body goes into a state known as ketosis. In the absense of carbs the body becomes very efficent at burning fat. Like the Zone diet, this diet is concerned with blood sugar and insulin levels; therefore, coffee is forbidden.

The last group is the Macrobiotic and Holistic diets. These diets deal with food combining, and Chinese medicines/enzyme therapy. You may be be able to guess how these diets feel about coffee. They don’t like caffeine because it is an aggressive stimulant. Often, they recommend ginseng tea or grain coffee as a substitute for real coffee. No thanks.

Coffee and Insulin

Both The Zone and Dr. Atkins frown on coffee because it can negatively affect blood sugar, which will affect the body’s ability to burn fat. How can a zero calorie beverage affect blood sugar? According to the Canadian Diabetes Association: Drinking caffeine in large amounts as coffee over a short period of time has been shown to raise blood sugar. Caffeine does this by enhancing the effect of two hormones (adrenaline and glucagon). These two hormones release stored sugar from the liver resulting in high blood sugar. And what happens when blood sugar levels are increased? From the Running Planet article The Glycemic Index – How to use it to Increase Your Energy And Lose Weight: This results in large amounts of insulin being dumped into your blood stream. Remember that the job of insulin is to regulate your blood sugar. It needs to do something with the excess glucose (sugar). The easiest thing for insulin to do with it is to store it in your body as fat. Simply put: coffee can affect your blood sugar which could interfere with the body’s ability to burn fat.

These fears of coffee may be over-stated. Even though the authors of these 2 diets do not favor coffee, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that either of these diets can be successful despite the continued consumption of coffee. And there is some non-ancedotal research, which indicates that exercise helps stabilize blood sugar after ingesting caffeine. Our goal, as defined above, is to get lean while continuing to enjoy coffee. So let’s address the problems coffee could pose to a diet, and find a solution.

Step 1 – Clean Up Your Coffee

Coffee by itself is perfect. It has zero calories, zero carbs, and zero fat. It even has properties that assist with fat loss. Coffee by itself isn’t the problem. Lattes, mochas, iced espresso blended with sugar, whipped cream, ice cream, flavored syrups, alcohol, and caramel are just a few of things we add into our coffee. Coffee is derived from the old Arabic word “qahwah” which means “gives strength”. Consuming popular coffee drinks today that are as calorically-dense as desserts has the effect of giving coffee a bad name, and changing the meaning of coffee from gives strength to gives girth.

In order to succeed on our diet, we must get back to basics. Regular coffee and straight shots of espresso are fine. As for milk, that depends upon your specific diet. An Atkins diet may allow half and half, whereas a low-fat diet would insist upon skim milk. If you must use sweeteners, at least make an effort to cut down: go from 2 packets to 1 packet.

Step 2 – Reduce Your Coffee Intake

If too much coffee can affect blood sugar then it only makes sense to reduce your caffeine intake. However, you don’t want to reduce your coffee intake at the same time you are reducing your caloric intake unless you have super willpower. Less calories and less caffeine usually means a reduction in energy which could lead to binge eating. A smarter move is to reduce your coffee intake for a week prior to the diet. Once the diet starts, you can slightly increase your coffee levels. It’s good to have a clear head when you’ve got an empty stomach.

Another idea is to space out your coffee intake. Instead of drinking 4 mugs of coffee back to back, consider spreading those 4 mugs throughout the day. One at 6am, 10am, 1pm, and 5pm. As long as you don’t consume too much, caffeine can be an appetite suppressant. Spreading that effect throughout the day will not only reduce your chances of increased blood sugar, but it will also help you cope with the reduced caloric levels.

Reducing your coffee intake is important, but it can be painful. Cutting back on caffeine can cause headaches and constipation. A good article on reducing caffeine intake is Accelerated Detox by Rachel Elliot.

Step 3 – Avoid Eating Simple Carbs with Coffee

Now if you’re on a low-carb diet, you’ll want to avoid simple carbs completely. However, it is a wise idea not to eat simple carbs on any diet while drinking your coffee. You know the simple carbs I’m referring to: the bagels, croissants, and scones that you see in every coffee shop. Going back to the insulin argument: if caffeine could affect blood sugar negatively then the last thing you want to do is combine it with something that is certain to cause an insulin spike.

Step 4 – Exercise

It’s common sense that exercise helps one lose fat on almost any diet. In the words of the The Illinois Department of Human Servies exercise …helps the body use insulin more efficiently, and this lowers blood sugar. If exercise can help us stablize our blood sugar then maybe we don’t have to get rid of our coffee in order to get lean. So lift some weights, do some aerobic activity, and keep drinking coffee. If you don’t have access to a gym, you can perform body-weight exercises such as the push-up and the Hindu Squat.

The 4 Diets Revisited

People are often more fanatical about their diet choice than their religion. So far be it from me to slam or endorse any particular diet. Each of the four groups mentioned restrict food selection and the result is often a caloric reduction, which translates to fat loss. What happens behind the curtains may be different, but a combination of healthy eating and exercise has always been the secret to getting lean. Using the above steps we can keep our relationship with coffee while dieting. Even a macrobiotic diet will be successful if your only deviation is pitching the herbal coffee in favor of the real stuff.

Everybody Is Different

It is possible to try the above steps with your chosen diet and not succeed. If you find that you must decide between coffee and getting lean, that’s a personal decision you should discuss with your doctor and roaster. In addition to weight training and power walking, this author followed a modified Zone Diet using the above 4 steps. The result was a body fat reduction from 18% to 9% in 4 months.

Related articles: Caffeine in food and beverages, caffeine in drugs

Our Stone Age ancestors certainly roughed themselves for food. They butchered the kill during the marathon hunt that lasted for days. They wandered for miles to gather wild fruits, grains and nuts. If they wanted to eat something sweet, beehive was smoked out of the bees to get the honey. This was done by climbing up a tree or chopping it down. Hard way to food!

Studies indicate that human beings come into the world with hundreds of genes and associated hormones that regulate the energy-balance equation. Calories consumed by us on one side and calories burned, through physical activity and calories needed to keep the body healthy on the other. Anything left over transforms into body fat.

As a society we are in a state of nutritional crisis and in need of thorough remedies. Today more than 60% of adults in the U.S. are classified as overweight or obese.

Many children have become so heavy that pediatricians are now facing an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes and hypertension—diseases that are closely associated with the overweight and that were unheard of among youngsters just a generation ago.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale University Center for Eating and Weight Disorders says “Physical activities have been engineered out of day-to-day life, and the food environment grows worse by the day”.

For those who are overweight, or who have diabetes, the low-calorie and low-fat diets recommended do not work well. In fact, for diabetics, they can actually worsen the condition. The only diet that strikes at the real cause of obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, hypoglycaemia, and type 2 diabetes is a low-carbohydrate diet.

Low carb diets are based on the principle that a diet low in carbohydrates leads to decreased production of body’s insulin, resulting in consumption of fat stores as energy source.

When fat stores in a body are used as main energy source, Ketones (a by-product) are excreted in the urine. Characterized by nail varnish (acetone), smelling breath and causes side effects such as nausea, fatigue and loss of appetite.

There are many different versions of the low carb diet, such as Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution, Protein Power, Neanderthin, The Carbohydrate Addict’s Lifestyle Plan, Life Without Bread, and others. All of them, however, have one thing in common – a very strict reduction in the consumption of carbohydrates. Most low carb diets replace carbohydrates with fats and proteins. Although diets vary in their recommendations, as a general rule, a low carb diet is synonymous with a high-fat and moderate protein diet. Those on a low carb diet should get at least 60 to 70 percent of their daily calorie intake from fat. Carbohydrates should make up less than 10 percent, and in some cases, less than 5 percent of daily calorie intake.

What’s Involved in Low Carb Diet?

A cut on all carbohydrate from the diet and increased protein and fat intake. Cut on things like pasta, bread, rice and alcohol, yet unlimited amounts of meat, cheese and butter are suggested to eat. That’s why sometimes Low Carb Diets claim to be luxurious diets.