☕️ saturday mornings #24
courage, health experiments & avoiding tuesdays
Hi all,
Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been testing, learning and exploring over the past few days.
Thanks for taking the time.
✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."
― C.S. Lewis
☕Health experiment of the week:
Supercharging your morning coffee
I’ve been experimenting with tweaking different variables in my diet, and wanted to share some of my learnings with you all.
Given I’m a bit of a coffee fanatic, I figured I’d start here.
A lot of people know that the nutrients you consume in the morning can have a huge impact on how you feel for the remainder of the day.
And, not so coincidentally, 90% of North American adults begin their day with a cup of coffee. However, not many people think twice about their morning coffee. After all, they’re barely awake.
I want to cover how coffee can be used as a tool to promote weight loss, common ingredients put in coffee that you may want to reconsider, and finally what you can include in your coffee to provide an incremental health benefit.
For uncommon results we must look in uncommon places. Onwards.
Some Introductory Notes
First, I want to note that I’m not a doctor, nor do I try to play one on the Internet. This is a compilation of a bunch of deep-dive research I’ve done from legitimate sources and peer reviewed studies, but as with anything involving health, there are a lot of footnotes involved.
Now to the fun stuff.
If your goal is weight loss, your morning coffee can be a high-leverage tool.
How does caffeine work? Caffeine blocks an inhibitory neurotransmitter called adenosine, which is a compound that gradually builds up throughout your day that makes you feel tired or sleepy, reaching peak levels in the evening.
In regard to weight loss, caffeine is a fairly powerful appetite suppressant, often used by people that employ time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting.
It also spikes your adrenaline levels which then signals your body to break down fats and release them into your blood which can lead to fat loss, assuming you are burning more calories than you consume.
Caffeine also raises your resting metabolic rate, or RMR, by 3–11%. One study showed that caffeine increased fat burning by as much as 29% in a healthy individual.
For an added boost, you can pair your coffee with a glass of grapefruit juice. Grapefruits contain a molecule called naringenin which extends the fat-burning half life of caffeine.
However, a good rule of thumb is not to consume caffeine after 2pm as you don’t want it to interfere with sleep quality. When you don’t getting enough sleep (consistently less than 7 hours) your body becomes very stingy about giving up fat, and 70% of weight loss comes from lean body mass instead, according to a study by Matthew Walker’s research lab.
What to Avoid
I’m not going to cover cream and sugar here for obvious reasons.
However for a fun fact, a medium double double has 200 calories, 13g of fat and 21g of sugar (for reference, a can of Coke has 140 calories).
Milk
This one may be polarizing, as many people think of milk as being quite healthy. But because milk is so insulinogenic, it can lower your insulin sensitivity over time and can have a disproportionate impact on weight gain, especially if you drink 3-4 cups of coffee a day.
For a quick crash course, the hormone insulin triggers the cells of your body to absorb glucose from the bloodstream, which happens after a meal. Insulin is responsible for dealing with the flood of glucose flowing through your transit arteries, to avert what could be a dangerous level of sugar entering your bloodstream to your muscles where it’s used for energy. If the cells of your body stop responding to insulin they cannot efficiently absorb glucose from your blood.
Got it? Good.
Milk is categorized as an insulin secretagogue as it prompts the pancreas to secrete insulin after consumption. This excess insulin created can blunt a rise in glucose after consumption, which is a good thing, but make you more insulin resistant the next day, which is not so good.
All in all, it can slightly reduce your sensitivity to insulin over time. Lower insulin sensitivity can lead to weight gain.
To back me up, there’s a ton of case studies of people who’ve lost 5-10 pounds in a given month just by removing the milk from their coffee.
Black coffee has virtually zero calories. Plus if you tend to drink coffee with milk, odds are you won’t notice much of a difference drinking coffee black.
Stevia
A lot of artificial sweeteners have emerged as a superior alternative to sugar. While they don’t appear to have the same caloric impact on a nutrition label, that doesn’t equate to eliminating the downside.
According to a new study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researchers, the natural sweetener stevia may lead to a gut microbial imbalance, which can lead to a variety of gastrointestinal health issues.
What to Add
Cinnamon
Cinnamon is one of those commonly used but forgotten ingredients, which has been shown to have some impressive health benefits.
It’s loaded with powerful antioxidants, such as polyphenols, helps your body fight infections and repair tissue damage, and has been linked to a reduced risk of heart disease, the world’s most common cause of premature death.
Cinnamon also improves insulin sensitivity, which can lower blood sugar levels and improve your metabolism. Bodybuilders often consume cinnamon before their “cheat day” for this reason.
Most importantly, cinnamon in coffee is also pretty tasty.
Coconut Oil
This may sound crazy but hear me out.
Putting coconut oil in coffee or tea was originally popularized by people doing the ketogenic diet.
It contains fats called medium-chain triglycerides, or MCTs. MCTs are interesting as they pair quite well with the molecular impact of caffeine.
They have been shown to increase the number of calories your body burns by speeding up your metabolism and provide a rapid energy boost. Additionally, MCTs also act as an appetite suppressant, by altering the body’s levels of hunger-inducing hormones, such as ghrelin.
If any of these ideas sparks your curiosity I’d recommend using my findings as a “hypothesis”, testing 1-2 of these tweaks, and then measuring the results over a week. If you do plan on designing any experiments, I’d love to hear how they pan out.
❓Question for reflection:
Would I say yes to this if it were on Tuesday?
I stole this question from Esther Dyson, an investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist, who uses it as her litmus test before accepting a speaking engagement.
Although I’m sure no one wants to hear me speak, this question can be applied to almost any opportunity that comes across my desk.
The question is deceptively simple, but the underlying idea is that it’s easy to say yes to things that are far off in the future when your schedule looks uncluttered, especially as saying no often involves disappointing someone.
However, eventually the day will come when it is on Tuesday and you don’t want to be kicking yourself for saying yes when it’s not something you’re interested in.
One day the seemingly distant future will be now, and the choices you make today shape the choices you are able to make down the road. Forethought often can be a virtue.
To boil it down, when something arises I try to think hard whether this specific opportunity gets me farther away or closer to the five main outcomes in my life I’m aiming towards.
If not, and my heart isn’t in it, it’s not a good use of my time and energy and someone else would likely do a much better job.
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
If you’ve enjoyed it, share it with a friend.
And, as always, please give me feedback by replying to this email. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a great weekend. You deserve it.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas