Many people drink coffee because they love the taste and enjoy the kick it gives. The main content of coffee is caffeine, which is a great stimulant as it instantly boosts up your energy. So, is caffeine good for you or bad? Just like the other stimulants, caffeine is good for you and does help you lose weight, but it must be taken in limited amounts, or else it can turn into an addictive habit and also cause health problems.
The real facts about Caffeine
Most of you must feel like you’re going up and down in a roller-coaster, whenever there is some information on caffeine. And understandably so! One day you find a researcher announcing that coffee and various other forms of caffeine, can actually help you control diabetes, asthma, treat headaches, reduce the Parkinson’s disease risk and also helps in the weight loss process. Then, some other report suggests that caffeine can clog arteries, lead to osteoporosis and increase your craving for carbohydrates, which is obviously not good for weight loss. So, which news should you believe?
The recent and the most reliable literature that has been prepared after going through around 19,000 studies, has revealed the benefits as well as the downsides of taking caffeine. The Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University has stated, that coffee is beneficial to all, except for pregnant women and heart disease patients. This, for the first time, has put to rest most speculations about caffeine. Therefore, you need not stop taking your daily morning coffee, which certainly helps you lose weight rapidly.
Caffeine and Weight Loss
Many trainers advise the use of caffeine to speed up the weight loss process. You can ingest caffeine in different ways such as coffee, energy drinks, tea, pills, etc. Caffeine is a common ingredient in most of the popular diet pills. So, this means that caffeine and weight loss do have a co-relation. But how exactly does it help you lose weight?
Caffeine boosts metabolism: Regular ingestion of caffeine, kick starts the lipolysis process, during which your body releases the free fatty acids into the bloodstream. This process is stimulated when the body breaks down the stores of fat and transforms it into energy. This proves that caffeine contributes in improving the metabolism activity and fat burning process.
Energy boost: Caffeine is known to act as a stimulant by increasing alertness and warding off drowsiness, at least temporarily. This indicates that you can extend your activity or performance for a longer period, by taking caffeine. The stimulation is both for physical and mental activities. Hence, if you ingest caffeine before your training sessions, it will help to increase your capacity to run on the treadmill for a few minutes extra, or allow you to lift weights for longer time.
How much caffeine is helpful?
This is a tricky question, since every individual reacts differently to caffeine. Some people drink coffee once a day and feel the stimulation all through the day, whereas others need it after every couple of hours and still do not get the same results. If you drink coffee regularly and hence, have developed high tolerance for caffeine, then you should first break your addiction, so that your body gets used to the no-caffeine effect for some time. Then, you may begin by ingesting small amount of caffeine everyday to lose weight. You can slowly increase the amount in milligrams and should continue to do, until you get the desired results. However, each time you must increase your caffeine intake only by few milligrams and the amount should never go beyond 200 milligrams, as caffeine can be addictive.
You can excel at your performance in the gym by taking a little caffeine shot, which helps you lose weight more quickly.
