Be interested to see a percentage increase in fat burning (I.e. is it worth nailing a coffee or not if you are a big fat coder looking to shift a few pounds)
replies(4):
Now we know why the N is so low. /s
> MFO, Fatmax and VO2max were significantly higher in the afternoon than in the morning (all P < 0.05). Compared to the placebo, caffeine increased mean MFO by 10.7% (0.28 ± 0.10 vs. 0.31 ± 0.09 g/min respectively, P < 0.001) in the morning, and by a mean 29.0% (0.31 ± 0.09 vs. 0.40 ± 0.10 g/min, P < 0.001) in the afternoon. Caffeine also increased mean Fatmax by 11.1% (36.9 ± 14.4 [placebo] vs. 41.0 ± 13.1%, P = 0.005) in the morning, and by 13.1% (42.0 ± 11.6 vs. 47.5 ± 10.8%, P = 0.008) in the afternoon.
>Compared to the placebo, caffeine increased mean MFO by 10.7%
https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-020-...
3mg/kg is over 250mg of caffeine for an average weight man. Twice a day makes that 500mg.
An 8.4oz can of Red Bull contains 80mg of caffeine. They were giving these people an amount of caffeine equivalent to 6 cans of Red Bull. Not a perfect comparison because Red Bull contains other ingredients, but that's still a lot of caffeine. For another point of reference, that's 2.5 shots of 5 hour energy (200mg caffeine per bottle).
To top it off, the subjects were caffeine-naive, so they had no caffeine tolerance. They must have been feeling extremely energetic.
No wonder they burned more fat. I'm not sure this is going to translate to your casual coffee drinker or someone with a high caffeine tolerance.
Seems as though we're talking about MFO (maximal fat oxidization) of 10.7% in the morning and 29% in the afternoon. Interestingly you see an increase in VO2max as well - which I believe is essentially blood oxygen.
A few things I'll point out though:
1. This is just 15 men, aged 32 +/- 7 years. Doesn't quite seem like enough people to definitively draw a conclusion.
2. They are described as 'caffeine-naïve' (which I assume means they do not normally consume caffeine) - so it's unclear if this effect would be the same to somebody who already regularly drinks caffeine.
I mean this sincerely too, since it's a very low-effort and quick way to find what is often some pretty critical flaws in the presented conclusions.
https://aaptiv.com/magazine/pre-workout-drinks "Are Pre-Workout Drinks Healthy or Harmful?" > The caffeine and creatine that most of these drinks contain can also have harmful effects on the body. “Excessive caffeine can increase your heart rate and blood pressure, causing cardiac issues,” Woeckener notes.
Easy is the wrong word. Getting your diet under control is the hardest part of losing weight. Most effective, absolutely. Simple, yes, easy, no.
I know a lot of people who spend way too much time trying to optimize supplements and other tiny details instead of throwing down and getting on with your life.
Edit: after reading other comments yours makes more sense, but I'd still be more worried about what's actually in a pre-work out beverage than over-exertion.
Power fat burner: caffeine + blood thinner. That’s most of what things like redline do. Is it going to work if you don’t exercise? Nope, but it sure as hell does help if you are exercising.
I’d really only recommend it to people focused on losing a lot of weight. If you’re trying to lose 10lbs it’ll never make a difference. If you’re trying to lose 100lbs though, then yeah, 6-12 months worth of slightly increased metabolic rate will probs have a net positive affect.
I used to drink a lot of Red Bull and stopped as a result. But I sometimes think one of the reasons I haven't put on weight despite my lifestyle is because of my caffeine habits.
The first way made me feel tired and light-headed, and not that great overall. The second way (high exercise, a little diet control) took longer, but also makes me feel 10 years younger and pretty much as healthy as I've ever been.
The fat burning might be from reaction of organism that is not used to a lot of daily caffeine ingestion. For example, when I don't use caffeine for a long time my heart rate increases when I increase amount of coffee I drink. But then goes back after some time (presumably when my body gets accustomed to it again).
Also, this kind of research must be read with a little bit of scientific background.
It is easy to get an impression author wanted to establish causation, but in reality this research only shows correlation, and correlation does not prove causation.
Edit: found this ingredient list but not sure if it is the same formulation or what I am looking for: https://www.heb.com/product-detail/vpx-redline-xtreme-triple...
That being said, caffeine is a good pre-workout.
Cyclists I know commonly take 400mg before a race to training session, and often top up over the course of the event if it's more than a couple hours. So I don't think the numbers reported are high, unless casual coffee is your basis comparison. But in the context of caffeine for fat loss, where supplements have high amounts, the numbers seem in line with common use.
That would tell us whether there is just an additive effect of high-dose caffeine and exercise, or if somehow the caffeine is interactive with exercise (i.e., has a bigger effect in the exercise group than in the rest group).
From the admittedly little I know about biology and sleep science; I thought it was universally accepted that poor sleep harms your metabolism and thus would make fat-burning less likely.
500mg is a huge amount for a caffeine-naive person, no matter how you look at it. No one goes from drinking zero caffeine to 6 Red Bulls per day without experiencing abnormally high stimulation.
After about 6 months of this, one day I was sitting at my desk having just finished my afternoon Redbull, and felt my heart skip a beat, literally. Like a little mini-heart attack. Scared the shit out of me, and I quit Redbull cold turkey that day.
At the time I was really into cycling, riding about 100 miles per week (50 on the weekend plus daily bike commute). I was in tip-top shape, with no family history of heart problems, and an otherwise normal, low-sugar, whole food diet.
Never experienced that since, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are studies that find a link between super-high caffeine energy drinks and heart or other health problems.
> In athletes, it is known that endurance performance is poorer early in the morning and late at night compared with the afternoon [6], and that MFO and Fatmax are higher in the afternoon compared to the morning whether in non-athlete male students [7], in untrained normal-weight and obese individuals [8], or in endurance-trained athletes [9]. The difference has been explained by the higher body temperature, the enhanced neural activation and contractile properties of the skeletal muscle, and the higher plasma catecholamine concentrations found in response to exercise in the afternoon compared to the morning and evening [10, 11].
So it seems like regardless of if you had caffeine or not, it is better to work out in the afternoon vs. in the morning
I tried it once in college and it blew my mind that something like that was available off the shelf.
This is the best collection of research I have seen on the topic and where I arrived at my 3-5 number above many years ago, perhaps it will be useful and seems to speak to the broader topic at hand: https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Caffeine
It is actually opposite. Most organisms under stress increase their energy consumption.
A good proxy for energy consumption by your body is your heart rate. Heart rate is linked to the amount of blood distributed through your body and amount of blood is amount of oxygen that is needed by your cells for metabolism.
And amount of oxygen used by cells is almost equal to the amount of energy produced (excluding those rare anaerobic regimes).
Heart rate is always lowest at night during sleep.
What you probably meant is that a person who has poor sleep will have a statistical tendency to eat more, for many reasons. One it is more difficult to exercise willpower when you are not rested well. It might also be more difficult to accurately judge whether what you feel is hunger.
To accurately compare energy use by body you would have to externally limit amount of calories ingested to same level and figure out how much CO2 you emit or how much weight you lost.
Otherwise you are measuring your regulating machine -- ie. your brain, hormones, etc. and that is whole other set of problems.
Eating makes us feel better and if you are on poor sleep you might eat just to offset it.
TLDR: weight gain is not from body using less energy but from your regulating machine being put out of balance.
Body on caffeine will still use more calories, but your brain on poor sleep will make worse choices and you will eat more just to offset unhappiness.
This is not the type of information we come to HN for.
if you mean poor control of your body's natural drive to eat which is imperative to our survival, then sure
very few people can consistently control this "impulse" -- the best way to control it is to get adequate sleep and regulate your hormones
Caffeine is a pretty common ingredient in any pre-workout, and you can get 200mg pills online cheaply.
I can no longer drink red bull because it gives me really bad heart palpitations. Meanwhile, I can pretty much drink coffee all day without issue.
In addition, if you diet only, it is very easy to cause yourself annemia or other health issue. It happened to me and it actually affects life a lot. Most of sources talk about what you should not eat, but very little about how to recognize you are missing something or overdoing it.
It matters very little if we burn fat faster, though I doubt it; it matters what the outcome is. In this case it does appear that people get fatter.
> More than two dozen epidemiological studies from around the globe looking at sleep deprivation and BMI in humans have shown association between decreased obesity and an increase in sleep duration.
> Data regarding impact of sleep deprivation on weight loss is conflicting in animals and humans. Sleep deprivation in rodent models causes weight loss despite hyperphagia [63–68]. These differences in rodents and humans may be explained by increased brown fat in rodents (rarely present in adult humans), which is metabolically more active and has been shown to increase thermogenesis and total energy expenditure [67]. In conclusion, epidemiological data is suggestive of weight gain with sleep deprivation though a few studies have also noted weight gain with prolonged sleep. Based on data on sleep duration and weight, sleep hygiene counseling could form an important tool in management of obesity.
> This began with the same warm-up protocol, followed by increments of 50 W every minute until self-reported exhaustion
Am I wrong to think that this is simply "caffeine gives you energy to push yourself harder"? They controlled calorie intake, so simple CICO would suggest a longer exercise period needs to dig into fat reserves.
Based on my personal anecdote, drinking caffeine before athletic activities gives me the energy to more consistently work at the edge of my physical limits. When I'm sleepy, I just don't care to push myself as hard.
How about comparing it to Starbucks' regular hot coffee sizes?
- Short - 180 mg
- Tall - 260 mg
- Grande - 330 mg
- Venti - 415 mg
Is drinking a 12oz Tall at Starbucks really dropping your jaw?
Redbull doesn't actually have that much caffeine. A typically, 8oz cup of coffee has more caffeine than a redbull.
In fact, most "energy drinks" don't have that much caffeine. They have other ingredients that also provide energy.
Other anti-oxidizing drinks like green tea do help a lot though.
It really depends on the person. I was a former coffee addict and even though I mostly have quit coffee for full 10 years now I still can't get back to regularly consuming it. It's either half a cup once two weeks or a very shitty 2-3 days after.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-caf...
At the same time I started drinking a strong pot of Earl Gray tea every morning to try get my butt in gear and outside in the dirt quicker. Normally I'm not a caffeine user. For the first week of this, my teeth would chatter and hands shake after finishing the pot of tea, it was very reminiscent of a cocaine bump. And it certainly worked well for motivating me to get busy.
But something I learned was my endurance went to shit on the caffeine. I was super impatient and wanting to do everything as fast as possible, while doing fundamentally slow long-haul heavy-mode operations. It turned out I got less done with the caffeine than without. I'd quickly burn myself out inadvertently trying to move everything faster than they were ever going to move with just my manpower. It was like the stimulant tricked me into operating deep in the realm of diminishing returns where I'm putting in 200% effort for 10% faster movement, while making myself frustrated with how long it's taking.
Now I don't think caffeine is particularly useful for anything physical that doesn't resemble a sprint, at least not for me. The psychological effects just increase the likelihood of burnout by mistreating an endurance task as a sprint.
While caffeine has a very different mechanism of action, it does appear to indirectly work on the same dopamine-adenosine system. So it's not too surprising it'd work much the same way for weight loss. And fortunately caffeine seems to be mostly self-limiting in its compulsiveness.
https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-020-...
I doubt Starbucks is deviously out to over-caffeinate its customers (although if they were, they've got my vote!) but rather the difference is attributable to variations in their brewing process.
There's a limit to the amount of caffeine that can possibly come out of a bean, and so I would say that unless there's evidence they're spiking the brew, that Starbucks coffee is roughly the definition of an "average cup of coffee"
A Venti is 590mL and 415mg of caffeine, 700mg/L of coffee. Based on the chart in [1] that would be roughly speaking the midpoint of roast kind at the 150 minute mark making cold brew, 10g/100mL of coffee beans (Figure 1). Or approximately a dark roast, coarse grind hot brew (Figure 3).
That said, Red Bull very likely contains several types of flavonoids that also act as MAO-B inhibitors.
Coffee, on the other hand, contains both MAO-A and MAO-B inhibitors mainly from the Harmala alkaloid family. Some of the compounds are neurotoxic.
[edit] Found this [3] which I assume is what you were talking about? Which I assume is the reason studies show it can act as an antidepressant [4]. Fascinating!
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23850513/
[2] https://www.jwatch.org/fw108796/2014/05/06/severe-hypertensi...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16139309/
[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313988#possible-ri...
Nespresso capsules have 60g for reference.
> A nonlinear association between coffee consumption and CVD risk was observed in this meta-analysis. Moderate coffee consumption was inversely significantly associated with CVD risk, with the lowest CVD risk at 3 to 5 cups per day, and heavy coffee consumption was not associated with elevated CVD risk.
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha....
Yes, absolutely. But I rarely consume caffeine so my experience is very different than yours.
The study used caffeine-naive individuals. That is, people without any caffeine experience or tolerance.
If you give two tall Starbucks coffees to a caffeine naive person, it will definitely cause some notable effects.
Frequent coffee drinkers tend to underestimate the impact of their caffeine tolerance. A seasoned coffee drinker consuming two of the strongest coffees on the market day after day is a different story than caffeine-naive individuals skipping straight to excessive doses of caffeine without any tolerance.
Sample size is only a very small part of the overall methodological picture—design matters too.
The first point is that lack of sleep is associated with increased metabolism (increased energy expenditure at rest).
The second point is that the apparent link between weight gain and sleep deprivation could be explained by involontary caloric intake increase.
Experiments have been conducted this way since forever - just 3 days ago I was reading richard feynman's book where he talks about this issue as well - basically the people who try to run experiment properly take longer and are pushed away and never get published or cited, whereas the poorly conducted experiments which show results aligned with what would make headlines get all the attention.
This is why I take any studies, experiments, trials results with a big grain of salt.
Starbucks coffee doesn't really have a higher ratio of caffeine, just more volume than the official measurements.
That being said, I don't know anybody that drink 8oz cups of coffee.
> More than two dozen epidemiological studies from around the globe looking at sleep deprivation and BMI in humans have shown association between decreased obesity and an increase in sleep duration. These studies however do not establish a causal relationship.
The paper also mentions and agrees with who you were responding to:
> In summary, energy expenditure is reduced during sleep. Sleep deprivation appears to increase energy expenditure.
And finally in the conclusion:
> Paradoxically a similar U-shaped relation is also noted in several studies looking at the relationship between sleep and weight, with both short and long sleep leading to weight gain.
I may have missed it, but it doesn't appear a causal relationship was ever formed between metabolic dysregluation from sleep issues and weight gain. And since both less and more sleep were associated with weight gain, is sleep or the lack thereof just another symptom of stress and depression? Both of which often cause people to eat more.
A Starbucks dark roast (short size) has 130mg at 8oz - that is 16.25mg/oz.
That means the espresso has 4.6x the caffeine per volume. I’d say those people you’re tired of have something worth listening to.
https://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/94fbcc2ab1e2435985...
But yes, I stopped and got better almost instantly.
If you are able to run faster... well guess what... you'll also consume more calories!
[1] https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-health/sleep-and-bl...
But it's still nothing compared to Ripped Fuel in the 90s. In college I could take a couple of those, lift hard for 2 hours, shower and then party all night like it was no big deal.
https://www.livestrong.com/article/32157-ripped-fuel-work/
> Thermogenic dietary supplements, more commonly known as weight-loss supplements, were classically made up of ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin, known as the ECA stack (ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin).
Years ago "studies showed" that caffeine had an anabolic effect that aided muscle growth. Now it seems that the opposite is "thought" to be true. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28177708/]
Starbucks drinks typically have 2 shots (such as a grande mocha) which gonna be around the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee
Unfortunately, it's readily-apparent that you can never outrun your fork, so forget about "burning calories" through cardio. The goal of fitness to lose weight ought to be weightlifting to gain as much muscle mass as possible to raise one's BMR. Passive metabolism is about the only way to do it without enrolling in BUD/S. In general, gymrattery and endless treadmill running are wasted effort.
I’ve run some experiments on myself, and this lasts for days at a time with one tall in the morning. If I keep at it for several days, I will crash early one evening, but still only sleep for 4 hours. It’s a nightmare for someone who typically sleeps 8 hours a night — I just feel fog-brained all the time. That said, workouts are super easy.
If I had a tall in the morning and evening on a regular basis, ugh... I can’t even imagine. I did this once for extra energy during a sports tournament (we won), but I basically had to drink myself to sleep each night.
Multiple doctors have told me that caffeine sensitivity varies from person to person, but I am on the unusually sensitive side.
Starbucks use Arabica, typically Italian or French espresso based drinks ha e been made with robusta or an Arabica robusta blend.
Starbucks coffee is not higher in caffeine compared to other cafés, it can actually be lower. The only sig ificant difference is portion sizes, like you mentioned.
This is the most frustrating part of any exercise science related literature. There are just so many studies that have absolutely preposterous designs. There is no shortage of papers drawing sweeping generalizations while using a sample size of 10 untrained individuals, over the course of 3 weeks, and with no regulation of diet. Then there's the general meaninglessness of "volitional failure" as a measurement -- Gah! It's maddening!
It's also not two 12oz coffees, it's one at 8am and another at 5pm. It just kinda seems like everything you write here is trying to cause a reaction and it feels manipulative.
You write all this just to reveal your actual point:
> If you give two tall Starbucks coffees to a caffeine naive person, it will definitely cause some notable effects.
Well, sure. We can all agree on that. And one of the notable effects is increased fat oxidation. Notice how uninteresting this observation is by itself. No need to dress it up as something more.
Red Bull does nothing to most people that a cup of black coffee wouldn’t do. But the placebo effect is a helluva drug.
I’m not a keto maximalist, do whatever works for you. But most people looking to lose weight would do wonderfully on 1,250 calories per day of high protein, medium fat, with the odd day of fasting and plenty of water and coffee. Refeed every couple of weeks to keep leptin in check.
A sample size of 15. Seriously?
Are you sure it isn't heartburn? It happens to a lot of people who drink coffee (and hasn't anything to do with the heart).
And still we don't know if total energy output was the same, because coffee can be a stimulant so may drive you to work harder.
When I lost a bunch of weight, I counted the calories of everything I ate for about a year (and still more or less do 15+ years later; calorie content of foods is generally the same). After a few weeks/months, you pretty much memorize the calories of what you're likely to eat regularly. It makes the cost benefit analysis a lot easier, "the next X I eat is 300 calories, is that 300 calories going to provide me the satisfaction the first did?" Personally, I found the answer is almost always no, and when it's not, you generally feel good about it.
From what I understand, a pound of muscle burns 6 Cals/day (that’s kCals, but in the US we just use Cals capitalized). A pound of fats burns 2-3 Cals/day. A 25 year old amateur non- drug- enhanced male can put on maybe 10 lbs of muscle in a year with a oot of hard work.
So the idea of putting on muscle to increase metabolism in order to get lean won’t pay off for most of us.
I mean, these places sell a lot of "supplements" that may or may not actually do what is claimed on the label. A triple-blinded trial showing that caffeine does actually increase fat oxidation is absolutely newsworthy, IMO.
Muscle makes you look good with clothes on. Diet makes you look good with clothes off.
https://www.triplebarcoffee.com/blog/how-many-ounces-are-in-...
For comparison, an old friend (let's call him Dave) started hitting the gym with me and confessed after 6 months to starting his first cycle of steroids. He developed muscle much quicker than he expected, and so his expectations rose significantly. He sustained a major injury from attempting a bench-press that he was, in every sense, muscularly abled to do- but his tendons weren't. His wrist hasn't been the same since, and he can't bench press anymore.
Anyway- coming back to the original point.. I don't believe caffeine has any effect on someone's judgement for "Can I lift that, safely?". The result of hormone abuse might give a false sense of capability, though.
In [1], it is shown that caffeine decreases insulin sensitivity in cells. E.g., muscle cells use less insulin.
[2] https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/142/6/2702/2989741
In [2], it is shown that insulin inhibits mitochondrial oxidation of fatty acids.
These two findings support the finding in OP - if muscle cells use less insulin due to higher caffeine levels, they use more fatty acids oxidation.
Perhaps even uncomfortably so: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs
That's not how muscle gains work. It's exponential decrease per year with steady training: 13-18 lbs the first year, 7-9 lbs the second, and so forth until about year 5.
What you eat can change your metabolism.
This CICO bullshit is honestly no better than middle age alchemy beliefs from people who don't realize humans are far more complex machines than a high school science fair battery but feel smart calling out newton's third law.
Your gut flora, your metabolism, your stress levels, what times you eat, your heart rate, your existing muscle mass, your sleep, vitamin levels, all those affect how much you burn actively and passively, how much you absorb from your food, what sources of energy your body decides to burn, and your energy levels as a whole.
Weight loss is fucking hard for a reason. "Just eat less to lose weight" is akin to telling someone "just use a linter to fix your code". Good idea? Maybe. It usually helps. Silver bullet? fuck no, i don't need to tell you it's way more nuanced and complicated than that.
And depending on a million different factors, you may lose a lot of energy, burn less, as you hinted to you may lose muscle mass, do damage to your gut flora, all things which after you're done losing a couple kgs will have you wondering "why the fuck am i feeling so weak all the time, and why have I stopped losing weight?"
YMMV. "Make healthier meal choices" is better advice than "eat less, CICO".
Sure you can. It's called "Bronkaid" and any ol' drug store sells it here in the US. Usually you need to show ID and sign a waiver (you can only buy so much of it per month, since it's an ingredient for making meth IIRC), but other than that it's OTC, no questions asked.
If popping pills ain't your thing you could also grow ephedra yourself and brew your own "Mormon tea".
Communicating healthy eating, how your metabolism works, how each body reacts different to different kinds of foods, etc is a full time job. In a country (US) where attention spans are constantly being torn in every direction, educating people on the depths of how to correctly lose weight (minimizing muscle loss, maintaining energy levels, efficiently leveraging your body's metabolism) is a losing battle. Yes, jaded and cynical but its reality.
Sure we can be optimistic and _want_ people to lose weight correctly but if you're overweight or obese, the pros of CICO VASTLY outweigh the cons you described.
We have to be realistic on how we communicate how to lose weight _for the masses_. Trust me, I ventured into dietetics only to be jaded at various national and multinational attempts at building watered/dumbed down meal planning advice but throughout the years I realized that you have to have simple and easy to follow guidelines (everyone can understand CICO) so that on the whole, we're getting people to lose weight.
I'm not saying CICO is the silver bullet, far from it, but it WORKS.
The decreasing ability makes sense as nobody seems to put on, say, 90 pounds of muscle. Above I was referring primarily to people just starting out trying to “get in shape.”
I'd imagine it would be not quite as hard to find caffeine naive subjects for a caffeine study, but not by much.
However, as you say you cannot outrun your fork, well you also cannot outlift your fork either.
Your body burns its carbohydrate and fat stores when exercising through cardio, now if you're going to the gym and running on a treadmill for 20 minutes you're unlikely to burn much. But if you do this consistently outside multiple times a week, you will absolutely see changes provided you aren't overeating.
This idea that cardio doesn't burn calories or help you lose weight is ludacris. If this was the case, every triathlete, cyclist or runner would be overweight.
Here are some people writing about their experience of drinking 100% Robusta: https://old.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/6u2ef4/100_robusta_...
When I first started lifting, strength, stamina and hypertrophy all surged for the first 6 months, and plateaued. Aside from caffeine and whey, I don’t supplement with anything else but I see plenty of people that either have great genetics, or more likely dabble with anabolics in order to get the lean mass that they have.
Not having a heart attack is a lot healthier than fat loss, just saying.
Anyway, at 21 I decided to use Jack3d, back when it was damn near Meth, it had DMAA in it. I didn't know this but being the 250lb 6' guy I was, slinging grills and landscaping stuff all day, I bucked up and took the "max dose" of it the first time.
Shit, I hit the gym, did extreme cardio on an elliptical for over an hour, lifted weights with some random ripped bros, and when my girlfriend came after work I stayed and ran further on the treadmill than her and her friend. Just the readouts from the elliptical and treadmill were almost 2200 calories.
Even afterwards when we went home I couldn't wait for us to shower before laying into her I still was so wired. A year later she was talking about that night...
Yea, I bet like hell someone that hasn't ever messed with stimulants can be turned sideways by them.
I am 6' 240lbs, she is 4'6" and 90lbs. I can almost microdose caffeine depending on what I am doing... Sometimes it is an energy drink, sometimes cold brew undiluted, sometimes drop coffee. Shoot, at Starbucks I tend to be a "green eye" type of man and laugh when they ask if I want space for creamer.
Unless I pound back a massive amount of caffeine within 2-3 hours of bed I have no issues sleeping; then again, I have never had issues sleeping and the few times I do forget and drink caffeinated before bed, it only delays me a few hours or results in me reading a novel into the night.
[1] https://americanmigrainefoundation.org/resource-library/caff...
Most diets work for the first few weeks because people are engaged by the novelty. Longer term compliance depends a lot on the person, both mentally and physically (including all the complexities of muscle mass, gut biome, and the whole nine yards). There's no silver bullet. You just have to keep at it until you find something that you can stick with.
What works for me is doing my own cooking, keeping a lot of vegetables around, and getting out of the house so that I'm too busy to stuff snacks into my face. I suspect that would work for a lot of people -- though that last part is really difficult with an office job.
That's me. Everybody else, good luck.