Does Coffee Halt Weight Loss?

Do you want to lose weight? Do you like drinking coffee? Do you sometimes think you’d get better results if you drank less of the good stuff?

Well maybe that’s the case.

If you normally drink it with milk and (or) sugar and cut back on either the milk or the sugar (or both) you’ll reduce your calorie intake naturally and you may see an effect on your weight.

If a lot of your coffees come from a coffee shop and are laden with creams and syrups reducing the number you buy will almost certainly help reduce your calorie intake.

Even with black coffee you may find you sleep a bit better if you cut back and as getting enough sleep is helpful when it comes to both weight loss and training intensity you might see a small benefit there.

But it’s not all clear cut.

Coffee can sometimes act as an appetite suppressant so cutting back may affect your appetite a bit at first, if you’re also adding in pre workouts to replace a pre gym black coffee you might even end up consuming slightly more calories.

If you’re using caffeine for energy in lieu of actual food you might want to look at how you’re fuelling your body rather than using coffee as a lifeline. It might be low calorie but it’s nutritional value is never going to rival that of real food.

Essentially, whilst there may be benefits they might well be minimal and if you like the taste of coffee and are drinking black coffee or coffee with milk and no sugar the benefits of cutting it out might just not be worth it.

Think, Plan, Do, Check In

How do you plan your goals?

Goal setting, something which can help you focus in on what you want but also something that can seem a little overwhelming. Like honestly how many times have you put of doing something until you’ve planned it out and put off planning it out because you just don’t know where to start?

Goals and all they entail come in two parts – firstly you need to know what you goal is and why, because honestly, a goal you don’t really care about will not help motivate you. The goal you have needs to mean something to you, be something that will bring benefit to you in some way.

Then they need to be achievable. If you’ve never run before aiming to be in the next Olympics probably isn’t going to happen right. But even the more mundane of goals needs to be realistic. If you’ve got a full time and kids aiming for something that requires 5 hours of gym time a day is setting yourself up for failure. You want something that will push you, that’s tough sure, but it does need to be possible for you and your lifestyle.

Then you get to the planning, the how. Here I find it easiest if I break it down. Work backwards, what do I need to be able to do, how can I do those things and what will I need to do step by step to get there. Once you have those steps you can plot them, how much time will you need on each one, when will you do them, how will you fit them into your week, what equipment will you need, who will you need to ask for help from. Once you’ve done that your plan is literally mapped into your diary, it’s appointments that you just need to keep each week. Your goal suddenly is just something you’re doing anyway and that makes it’s way easier to reach.

Regular check ins with yourself are then needed. Each week or month you want to see if you’re where you wanted to be. If you are great. If not you’ve got the chance to rejuvenate your plan a bit. Do you need to slow things down, do a bit more, repeat a few steps again.

Goals once reached sound inspirational, great, like someone just woke up one day and said I’m going to do xyz and just did it via pure determination. In reality, you need to think, plan and create habits to reach goals and realistic planning is the key.

If you’d like to hear more of my ramblings on goals here’s a podcast I did last year …

https://anchor.fm/heather-sherwood/episodes/Goal-Setting-Your-Why-and-How-e1pver7

Fizz, fruit and veg

If you want to lose weight and follow any kind of fitness accounts chances are at some point you will have come across one of the many supplement companies out there. Herbal life, Juice Plus, Arbonne, these companies differ from slimming clubs in that they are sold more as a healthy lifestyle aid than a weight loss product (although they can also be targeted at weight loss). What they hope to persuade people is that by buying their products you will be healthier and fitter than if you used other products or none at all. When you’re feeling out of shape or overweight this marketing can be very persuasive.

Often they sell protein powders, vitamin type supplements and energy drinks (fizz seems to be a popular term) to be used as a coffee alternative. They look desirable to customers because the idea of a brand offering everything you need to fuel your fitness journey is let’s face it, alluring.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of these products. They’re the same kind of supplements PTs will recommend but branded and expensive.

Protein powder for instance, you’re generic brand will set you back around £20-£25 for a KG bag. These companies will often sell essentially protein shakes (marked up as other things perhaps) for double that. Vitamins, depending on where you get them can cost a few quid, except when you get them from a company such as this. Energy sticks? £20 or more a month for one drink a day, well it might seem less holistic but a coffee costs a fair bit less than that.

The fact of the matter is, having tried at least a couple of these companies products, some of them do taste good. For me Herbal Life vanilla protein is still the nicest one I’ve ever tasted. Does it do anything more than that to deserve the price tag? No. You’re getting nothing extra from buying these products instead of ones from places like My Protein.

Then there’s the claims the products can ‘make’ a healthy lifestyle. Juice Plus supplements with a range of fruit and veg (6 tablets a day) will set you back £69 a month. On top of food and any other supplements. Why not buy £18 of extra fruit and veg a week and bulk out your meals? Or put the £69 towards your shopping.

It might be you use these products and love them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like the taste and can afford it then why not. If you’re on a budget and just want to feel better about yourself though, you don’t need to spend huge amounts on supplements or vitamins to start making progress.

Priorities

Fitness is about prioritising.  We can’t do everything. You can have lots of goals, and they can cover multiple disciplines or be very different to one another, but in reality at any given time you need to focus on one more than the other.

If you’ve multiple different types of events coming up, you’re going to need to focus your training to the event coming up as it draws nearer, as other elements of your routine perhaps drop off a little. If you’re a Les mills instructor and new releases are coming up, you’re probably going to find your own training pulls back a bit as you spend more time learning choreography and practicing moves. If you’re goals are aesthetic you might find you need periods in a calorie deficit and periods in a surplus as you focus on different things.  My point is, even if you consider yourself a Hybrid athlete because you don’t just do one thing, you will need to inevitably focus in on certain things at certain times in order to achieve various goals.

Part of being able to do this is accepting that you can’t do everything all the time and being flexible and prioritising what’s going to be most beneficial to you at that point, and then letting go of the thing you can’t do right now without stressing.  Trying to do everything at once makes it much less likely you’ll be able to succeed.

Monday

Monday tends to be a day of starting.

Much like 1st January or the start of a new month it feels like a fresh page and the perfectionist part of most of us likes the idea of a chance to start again and do everything just right.

So often though, by 10am we’ve not done what we planned, not been perfect, dropped the ball in some way and feel like another week is a write off.

People who you would view as fit, healthy, motivated, the people who generally look like they have their shit together aren’t perfect though.  They don’t do everything absolutely on the ball every day.  Whilst their Instagram video might imply they do, they will of course sometimes over sleep. Miss a gym session, eat something that isn’t Instagram aesthetically pleasing.

What they do though is remain consistent. Some days they won’t do all those little healthy habits but they will do more of them more often than not.

This is the key to gaining results, not looking for the ideal week where a morsal of sugar does not pass your lips or where you are on a treadmill for more hours than you are not.

Doing little things that will help you reach your goal more often than you do not do them.

If you haven’t started this on Monday you can start this on Tuesday or Thursday or Friday.  

Rules are Rules

If calories in is less than calories out you will lose weight.

I’ve done no exercise in the last couple of weeks because I’ve been ill. I’ve also eaten, in terms of nutritious food, poorly. Essentially I’ve eat what I can a) stomach and b) make or buy with minimal effort. That has been food, most people would generally consider ‘bad’ and pretty high calorie in comparison to density. But I’ve not eaten much of it because I’ve been ill.

I lost weight, quite a bit quit quickly.

Because even though the food wasn’t low calorie or ‘healthy’ I ate fewer calories than I was using to exist (I was ill, I was literally just existing!).

Remember that even if you aren’t doing everything you think you should or being perfect, if the basic principles of a calorie deficit are being adhered to the results will still come. Your body doesn’t over rule a calorie deficit because you didn’t eat enough fruit or veg that week.

What you Enjoy

I’ve been really quiet on my blog the last few weeks, a bad infection completely took me out of the game. I’ve barely been able to eat let alone train or anything else!

Just before I got ill though I went canoeing. Now I have never been in a canoe before- a combination of not being able to swim and being terrified of water always stopped me, but I said this year I would try new things and push myself outside of my comfort zone so I went for it, and I’m glad I did.

It was actually a lot less scary and more fun that I expected (once I got the hang of left and right and kind of how to steer anyway).

I was also a pretty good work out if my back muscles are any kind of indication the next day. At the time it was a bit knackering – It wasn’t something I was used to doing and it was a hot day so towards the end ( I think we travelled about 13km) I was flagging a bit, but it was also fun and pretty and the concentration of what I was doing kind of made it not feel like exercise.

One of the things we get caught up with when training is doing things we think we should do. As in training should be lifting in the gym, running and so on and if we aren’t doing those things we aren’t keeping fit and healthy.  There are lots of activities, like getting out on the water, joining a sports team or joining a walking club though that do constitute exercise but it can sometimes feel like it’s masked a bit because they also count as our hobbies.

The thing about doing things like this though is, that unlike just going to the gym, if we enjoy them they’re a lot easier to stick with.

If you do keep finding yourself putting off joining the gym or going for a run but there’s a hobby which you really enjoy and want to do more of which is also physical, a good starting point would be taking the pressure off yourself on what you think you should do and instead actually do the things you take enjoyment from and let the results come that way.

Consistently doing something will always be better than occasionally doing everything

I’ve just got back from a long weekend in Austria. It was an amazing trip and very busy, we didn’t sleep much and were pretty much always on the move.  Then I’ve come back to work and it’s a busy week with lots of deadlines.

So I’m pretty tired and more than a little stressed. This has meant I’ve had to adjust what I do in terms of training. I’ve done a little less than normal and adjusted some of my sessions so I’ve done them but they’ve been a little shorter / less intense. It’s a bit frustrating because I feel like this year it’s been one thing after another, illness, work stresses, life stresses. All those things have affected my ability to train and I’ve really not done as much as I wanted to, I’ve had to consistently adjust expectations and it’s difficult to not feel bad about that.

What I’ve had to remind myself is that how we react to things going wrong is what matters most. If we only train when it’s convenient and things are good we will find we are very hit and miss.  If we consistently do what we can even if it’s not perfect results will eventually come and we will start to feel better overtime.

Consistently doing something will always be better than occasionally doing everything.