Many of our personal training gym clients ask if they should drink coffee. And should they drink it black? Or with milk? Or should it be cold-brewed? Roasted? Here are the answers to these questions and why we suggest these tips to get the most out of your coffee.
Many people already know the benefits of coffee. It is actually well studied.
- It lowers the risk of many cancers especially colon and skin
- It boosts metabolism and thyroid so weight loss becomes easier
- It aids digestion as do most other bitter-tasting herbs
- It has antioxidant effects. Even more antioxidants than the famous “green tea”. At the moment more than 1000 antioxidant compounds have been found in coffee.
- It has some protective effects on brain diseases.
- It has high amounts of magnesium and vitamins…
- and many more.
The problem is that some people don’t process caffeine well. They drink a small cup in the morning, and they get jittery nervous, and sometimes cold fingers and feet.
These effects can be so serious that they also have trouble sleeping at night. This is a sign that your liver cannot process the caffeine efficiently.
When I was on a low carb diet, I could feel these effects more as liver energy is low when you are using a low carbohydrate diet.
When you drink coffee, metabolism is sped up this is good for the whole body. All the healthy processes of your body are more efficient.
However it is like driving a faster car, you make the engine faster but then you also need to supply fuel faster.
If the liver is not healthy, it does not store glycogen well so when coffee stimulates the metabolism, the liver cannot release glycogen to match the new speed. You are less likely to have a healthy metabolism if you have poor nutrition, poor sleep quality and a high-stress life.
So how to get the benefits of coffee without the side effects?
We must support the faster metabolism that coffee brings. So here are some tips to balance out the benefits of coffee without getting the side effects.
- Eat with a meal so that the caffeine is released more slowly. The means with protein, as well as some fruit. Protein makes the caffeine release slower. And the fructose from fruit fills up liver energy to process the caffeine better.
- Eat with milk and sugar. You can experiment with how much sugar you need to provide energy for a faster metabolism. I put about 1.5 tablespoons per cup in my morning coffee. If I were to drink at night, I would add even more!
- Don’t drink first thing in the morning or when the stomach is empty. This time is when most likely you have lower glycogen and a more negative response if you are not healthy.
- Consider drinking the coffee cold at the beginning. The hotter it is, it is more stimulating.
- Take note of what time after you have coffee it affects sleep. This should improve over time but still, you want to make sure you sleep well.
- Consider a multivitamin supplement because processing coffee requires vitamins and if you are lacking in any of them the processing will slow down and you are more likely to feel the negative effects.
- Don’t drink coffee that is roasted with unsaturated oils. The most common ones in Singapore are the bitter black coffees at the popular toast/eggs/coffee brand stores. They are roasted with margarine which is an unnatural fat that damages your metabolism.
There is some genetics involved in caffeine processing speed just like there is with every process in your body. There is not much we can do about the genes. But we can supply the nutrients and environment so that whatever we do have is done as effectively as possible.
A simple way to get started is to start with more milk and sugar with only a bit of coffee. As you get healthier, you can increase the coffee proportion.
Tolerating coffee well usually means that your overall health is improving and as you exercise, eat, and manage stress better you should be able to tolerate coffee better as well. I hope that you can constantly improve your health so you can enjoy coffee more and more!
Tolerating coffee is just one of the ways you can see if your health is improving. Genesis Gym probably has the best personal training in Singapore which takes your total health into account.
So (totally unbiased opinion! haha) if you are looking for the best personal trainers in Singapore who customize your nutrition and training plans according to your body’s current condition please schedule a consultation at any of our Singapore personal training gyms and we will be glad to meet up to see how we can best work together.