Is Black Coffee Good For Weight Loss?

Coffee is a popular, energy-boosting hot beverage around the world, with a consumption of 16 million bags a year. But coffee’s fame has recently included its weight loss effects.

Apart from being a delicious drink coffee has many health benefits. It contains niacin, potassium, magnesium, and antioxidants, making it a nutritious drink. The health benefits of coffee include lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes, supporting brain and heart health, and boosting longevity.

In this article, we’ll find out if black coffee is good for weight loss and if it’s suitable to drink during intermittent fasting, along with 7 other famous ways to drink coffee for weight loss and their effectiveness levels.

Does black coffee help you lose weight?

The good news for all coffee lovers: black coffee is indeed beneficial for weight loss. It boosts metabolism, suppresses appetite, and improves digestion, especially if you drink the right roast!

It contains less than 5 calories per cup. Drinking black coffee also decreases your ghrelin (hunger hormone) levels.

That’s why drinking black coffee without any sugar, cream, or milk creates a calorie deficit and boosts weight loss.

How to drink black coffee for weight loss

Light roast coffee is better for boosting weight loss as it has higher levels of antioxidants and organic compounds called “phenols”, which accelerate the metabolism and help fat burn.

Plus, light roast coffee has a smoother and less bitter taste, so it’s easier to drink it without any additives.

Of course, it may not create miracles in a day, but the weight loss journey becomes a little easier with black coffee when consumed in moderation – in other words, no more than 4 cups a day!

Can you drink coffee during intermittent fasting?

For those looking for easy ways to lose weight, intermittent fasting comes in handy. It’s a nutrition style that alternates between fasting and eating periods without restricting calories or any food.

After your eating period that enables you to eat whatever you want ends, your fasting period begins where you’re not allowed to eat or drink anything, excluding water, black coffee, black tea, green tea, or herbal teas.

So yes, you can drink black coffee during your fasting hours without adding any sugar, milk, or cream to it.

Best way to drink coffee for weight loss

For those who are looking for alternative tastes in coffee along with a helpful weight loss effect, there are lots of different ways to drink coffee.

Let’s see if the most popular coffee recipes for weight loss are worth trying or not.

Bulletproof coffee (ketogenic coffee)

Bulletproof coffee is a very famous beverage as part of a ketogenic diet, which uses fat as fuel. It’s a form of coffee to which you add unsalted butter, olive oil, or coconut oil.

These ketogenic coffee alternatives boost energy levels and weight loss. The MCTs (fats called medium-chain triglycerides) in healthy fats boost your metabolism and help you burn more calories, which eventually means you lose excess weight. They also improve digestion and relieve constipation, another factor contributing to weight loss.

P.S.: Although its caloric content is high, one cup of bulletproof coffee a day is allowed during your fasting hours as it does not interrupt the fat-burn, ketosis, and autophagy phases of intermittent fasting.

Coffee with Splenda

Splenda is an artificial sweetener derived from sucralose. Unlike sugar, Splenda is calorie-free and does not create a blood sugar or insulin response when consumed in small doses.

However, its chemical structure may have the potential to negatively impact your glucose metabolism. If your aim is to lose a good amount of weight, it’s best to avoid adding Splenda to your coffee. If you’d like to sweeten your coffee, you can use pure stevia or monk fruit sweetener.

Lemon and coffee

When we say lemon coffee, what we mean is the juice of half a lemon squeezed into a standard cup of black coffee. Sadly lemon coffee isn’t a magic potion that will make your extra few pounds go away in the blink of an eye. It has no significant effect on fat burn, so if you don’t particularly like the taste – and it’s not popular with many – don’t pin your hopes on coffee with lemon to lose weight.

P.S.: Even if you like to try new things, don’t mix lemon juice with milky coffee, as your beverage will turn into a curd-like solid!

Cold coffee

Drinking cold coffee has the same weight loss results as drinking hot black coffee, as the main ingredients and the caffeine levels are the same. If the weather outside is too hot to grab a hot beverage, you can drink cold black coffee to lose weight and enjoy a tasty iced drink.

The great thing about cold-brewed coffee is that it tastes less bitter than hot-brewed coffee, which makes it easier to drink without any additives like creamer, milk, or sugar – a big plus when you’re trying to lose weight.

Decaf coffee

Contrary to popular belief, decaffeinated coffee still contains some caffeine, but in small doses compared to regular black coffee.

The main fat-burning and weight-loss factor in coffee is caffeine. So decaf coffee has some effect on weight loss thanks to its low-calorie content, but not as much as regular coffee.

Cinnamon coffee

Cinnamon is one of the best ingredients to add to your coffee for both a sweet taste and effective weight loss results.

A compound naturally found in cinnamon, called “cinnamaldehyde”, boosts metabolism and improves the fat-burn process.

Cinnamon is also known for its ability to regulate blood sugar and insulin levels and suppress appetite.

You can add 1 teaspoon of cinnamon per cup of coffee to create a powerful recipe for weight loss.

Does enzyme coffee for weight loss work?

“Enzyme coffee” is allegedly a coffee type containing special enzymes that break down fat cells. But according to experts, it’s a completely meaningless term, as enzyme is a very broad term for proteins that speed up chemical reactions in the body.

Enzyme coffee is a highly promoted product on social media for its weight loss boosting effect, with claims that the useful enzymes naturally found in coffee beans are destroyed during the roasting process.

The companies that sell enzyme coffee claim they have found a way to preserve these enzymes, but they never list the “enzymes” among the ingredients.

It appears there’s nothing special about enzyme coffee. It’s just regular coffee with added chromium. So you don’t have to save money for enzyme coffee because it’s most likely a scam. Instead, you can take chromium supplements if advised to by your healthcare professional.