Is your coffee habit making you fat?

While I was making my morning coffee today I was remembered something my nutritionist friend told me recently.

Caffeine has a half life of around 4 hours which means that if you drink one cup at 8am, you still have half the caffeine from that cup in your system 4 hours later - at 12 noon. And then you have half that amount still in your system at 4pm and so on through the day.

You can easily see why nutritionists recommend a maximum of one cup a day - it's plenty to deliver enough caffeine to last you for 24-hours. You can also see how 'chain drinking' one coffee after another can cause the jitters and loss of focus - you are literally flooding your system with one of the most powerful stimulants known to man.

It's even worse if you take the contraceptive pill....

Women taking the contraceptive pill having 1 cup of coffee should expect the the half life of caffeine to be increased to 5-10 hours and if you are pregnant it's roughly 9-11 hours.

So, although a little caffeine can help with fat burning, too much will over stimulate your system and send your blood sugar levels on a rollercoaster throughout the day which can make losing weight difficult. Too much caffeine backing up in your system will also make it difficult to sleep and disrupted sleep patterns lead to weight gain.

So do yourself a favour and start cutting back on the caffeine from today. Aim to reach a point where you have a single cup each day and really enjoy it. Seek alternatives at other times safe in the knowledge that more caffeine at this point will do you more harm than good.

Photograph by غzǻҰёll ♥ RAINBOW ! (Flickr)