Drinking strong coffee before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds

This is not surprising to anyone who has ever walked into a GNC, or other health food store... is it even news? They’ve been selling shit like “redline” for many years to do exactly this.

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.

What is the blood thinner for?

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...

If you ever want a very real anxiety attack drink half of a redline without any caffeine tolerance. If you want to die, drink an entire redline.

I tried it once in college and it blew my mind that something like that was available off the shelf.

Blood thinners reduce blood viscosity increasing flow. Aspirin is commonly used together with ephedrine and caffeine to form an ECA stack. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECA_stack

Amphetamine and methamphetamine are actually approved as treatments for morbid obesity by the FDA in America. AMP is actually still used in some cases today, though much more sparingly than historically. The side-effects and potential dependency make their use often very problematic. Still, between increasing the base metabolic rate and energy levels, and suppressing appetite, they do work.

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.

GNCs and other health food stores sell lots of snake oil. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of the stuff on the shelves, or stuff in the stuff on the shelves, does very little, if anything, for fat burning/muscle building.

And no amount of exercising will ever be better than just... eating less. The only surefire way to lose weight fast. People hate this one simple trick.

Can't buy ephedrine anymore. Or pseudoephedrine, which was shit anyway. They've been replaced with synephrine and other stuff, which is just bad.

I came here to write this same comment, and I have a caffeine tolerance. Redline is the pot candy bar of caffeine. It's a tiny bottle and if you don't read the side that says drink 1/2 or less too start, you can end up in a pretty bad state.

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).

Ephedrine is still available over the counter, in the US, at least.

Don’t even need to particularly eat less. Calories in/calories out. As long as you’re in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight. Now what your body is actually burning to lose that weight is a different story.

I 100% agree with you. I probably should have called out the "probably net benefit" is at most an extra 2-5% weight loss over an entire year with eating correctly and exercising making up 95%+ any potential weight loss.

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.

> This is not surprising to anyone who has ever walked into a GNC, or other health food store... is it even news?

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.

Eating less can change your metabolism.

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.

> As long as you’re in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight

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".

> Can't buy ephedrine anymore

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".

"Make healthier meal choices" is also vague, esoteric and for most people, will not result in weight loss. CICO is simple, effective and for the common person, a completely acceptable way to lose weight.

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.

You can say the exact same thing for Keto, IF or any other alternative meal planning. There are pros and cons to eating in different ways. Throwing out CICO with the bathwater is excluding potentially millions of people who don't have the time, money or opportunity to "just eat healthier".

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.

CICO is the core of any effective diet. The rest of it is all about trying to enforce it. Which is all about keeping people from feeling hungry, bored, or otherwise failing to follow through.

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.