There Are Some Big Holes In The Coffee Loophole Diet

If TikTok is inspiring you to drink more green smoothies, start gratitude journaling or get your daily steps up, more power to you. We even love it for popularising sustainable, feel-good fitness trends like the 3-2-1 method. But when a trend encourages you to override your body’s hunger signals or lead you to believe they are something that should be suppressed, all we see is red flag after red flag.

What is the Coffee Loophole diet?

The Coffee Loophole diet, one of Tiktok’s popular wellness trends, involves drinking black coffee - often with other herbs or supplements added such as cinnamon, lemon or chromium - whenever you feel hungry in order to curb your appetite, boost your metabolism and thus help you achieve weight loss.

Many of those who promote the “loophole” claim that if you can drink your coffee concoction within seven seconds of feeling hungry, your appetite will be successfully curbed. Others claim there are even more health benefits to be reaped from this habit, such as reduced inflammation and regulated blood sugar levels.

Can coffee support weight loss?

Coffee in itself is not some magic pill or quick-fix weight loss shortcut, but there is some truth as to why this trend gained momentum in the first place. The caffeine in coffee can suppress your appetite and boost your metabolism due to the release of neurotransmitters such as adrenaline and dopamine.

Are these changes significant enough to make the juice worth the squeeze? Nope. The Cleveland Clinic highlights that although coffee can support weight loss if it’s replacing high-calorie beverages, coffee doesn’t have magical calorie or fat-burning powers.

Research has shown that any fat-burning or metabolism-boosting benefits are modest at most and the appetite suppression people experience from drinking coffee tends to be very short-lived, while other studies show that caffeine actually can increase appetite in some people.

The same goes for any ingredients you’re mixing into your coffee, whether that be a dash of cinnamon, green tea extract, chromium or a squeeze of lemon juice. There is no conclusive evidence to support these ingredients having a proven, significant effect on weight.

If you’re looking to use coffee as a form of pre workout to boost your performance or give you the energy spike you need to get through your workout in the first place, that has far more evidence behind it. The International Society of Sports Nutrition has evaluated the research currently available and says that in many studies, caffeine has been shown to enhance components of exercise for athletes and non-athletes, such as muscular endurance, strength and speed.

What’s not to love about this trend?

Apart from the obvious question of how on earth you’re supposed to have a coffee ready and guzzled down within seven seconds of your hunger pangs kicking in, there are a few things to be aware of.

Feeling hungry is your body’s clever way of letting you know you need to eat and should cue you to think about your next nutritious meal. Coffee ain’t a meal! When we encourage you to listen to your body, we don’t mean listening for the rumbles of your stomach so you know when to brew your next cup of joe.

Although reducing your calorie intake is an essential part of weight loss (if that’s a goal of yours), there are far more sustainable and healthy ways of eating in a calorie deficit than trying to override or ignore your body’s natural hunger signals. Try to think about building healthy habits you can maintain for life, with an approach that includes feel-good nutrition and movement habits, and remember that a video on TikTok will never show you every single lifestyle choice behind a person’s weight either.

Skipping meals or replacing food with coffee is not sustainable or healthy (nor is guzzling more than three or four cups per day), and can lead to nutritional deficiencies while also affecting your sleep, digestion, mental health, heart health and hydration. Drink too much and your tolerance or dependency can also build, meaning you need more to feel any benefit or suffer withdrawals when you take a break.

If you love coffee, our advice is to enjoy it for the taste or the boost in energy and focus it gives you, rather than the weight you think it might help you lose.

When is the best time to drink coffee?

Now that we’ve established that your cue to drink coffee should not in fact be your hunger, nor should you be trying to down it in a seven-second window, when is the best time to have a cup?

As the Cleveland Clinic explains, your body naturally releases cortisol in the morning to help you wake up and become alert, with cortisol levels typically peaking between 7 am and 8 am before slowly dropping throughout the day.

There isn’t a single best time for everyone (all our bodies are different), but because having a coffee first thing in the morning on top of this natural cortisol spike can leave you feeling anxious or jittery, you may feel the most benefit waiting until your cortisol starts to drop somewhere between 9:30 am and 11 am.

If you’re drinking coffee for a pre-workout boost, the International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends you consume 3-6mg of caffeine per kg of bodyweight around an hour before exercise. Some people may notice the benefits with a lower dose, so if you’re not usually a coffee drinker, check the nutritional information on your coffee for the caffeine serving measurements and start small!

Focus on feel-good habits

If a weight-loss hack sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and the Coffee Loophole diet fits into that category. Healthy, sustainable weight loss happens gradually over time and doesn’t involve crash diets, skipping meals or cutting out food groups, and there are hundreds of delicious, nourishing recipes in the Sweat app with all their accompanying nutritional information to make it easy.