I am on a 16:8 plan. Looking to drop about 10-15 pounds. No rush to do it, just starting and making a lifestyle change overall.
I start my fast around 7pm every night so obviously that extends past 7am in the morning. At 7am I’ve been accustomed to drink coffee for years. It could be Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, McCafè or Keurig pods. I have tons of flavors of creamer. I don’t put any sugar in my coffee at home though.
How am I supposed to switch to black coffee? I’ve heard such… contradicting views. One group says coffee is fine and won’t throw you off that bad, others say you’re an idiot for trying to go against IF guidelines.
What the hell am I supposed to do?! I will not give up coffee for anything. Period. But is it REALLY a big deal or do I need to try black coffee?
Black coffee won’t break your fast, which is the goal here. I’m a coffee drinker too, and I prefer it with cream and usually a bit of sugar. I found it really easy to skip the sugar and go to just cream (half & half, not flavored or sweetened). Then I tapered off the cream over the course of about a week until I was drinking it black. Sometimes I’ll break my fast with another cup with cream and sugar if I miss it too much.
There are so many variables. Are you fasting strictly for weight loss? Or to reap other benefits, like insulin sensitivity, ketosis, increased autophagy? You say you don’t add sugar to your coffee, but do the flavored creamers you have have any? Even some artificial sweeteners create an insulin response in some people.
The quick and dirty answer: if you’re fasting for weight loss, and you make room for it in your calorie target, then you do you to keep yourself sane and happy. However, you should stay away from sugar at all costs, and be cautious with artificial sweeteners - it’s “easier” scientifically to simply not have them to remove any question of whether or not they impact your insulin/hunger responses. But again, if it’s the “only” thing that will keep you on track with fasting overall, then do it, because at the end of the day CICO is still the most important in terms of impact. Just understand that you may find your fasting windows harder than they need to be, because your body, in super simple terms, may be reading your artificial sweetener as sugar and expecting energy, and release insulin in response, making you hungry (or, hungrier.)
If you’re fasting for the other benefits, then yeah. Nothing but black coffee. I’m with you - I used to love a little coffee with my sugar and cream - but I had to adjust because to me the additional benefits are just as important to me (and I’m already possibly compromising my additional benefits because I also vape, and there’s not yet a ton of evidence on the impacts, though what little I have been able to find indicates that vaping does in fact negatively impact autophagy. So quitting vaping is next on my list of stuff. But not yet.) So now, I usually have tea or black coffee during my fasting window, or, if I open my fasting window up early enough in the day, I let myself have coffee with cream and a little stevia or monkfruit (which are the two sweeteners that generally don’t cause an insulin response, but I keep it within my feeding window anyway.)
Try it each way for two weeks at a time and see which one feels better for you? Coffee with creamer is a very dirty fast and might make not eating harder in the long run, but if you’re not putting a huge number of calories worth in then it’s not going to make up the calories of missed food. You just lose ‘bonus features’ of fasting to some extent. Prior suggestion to creep the creamer content lower and lower is also a good one IMO.
Personally I switched to black tea a few years back while testing for lactose intollerance (fake milks are great in porridge but vile in tea) and it took some time but I’d never go back now. You might find with some practice black coffee isn’t so bad.
I’ve switched from oat milk to a tiny splash of cream in my coffee. That way it’s mostly fat and shouldn’t have a huge insulin spike frim sugar/carbs. Probably doesn’t have a huge effect, only way to know is blood glucose monitor but I have no desire to do that.
I switched to black coffee this weekend. I can now drink it fine, and actually look forward to it!
I take it with 2tsp of erythritol instead of sugar (flavour equivalent of 1tsp of sugar) and just a pinch of salt, which completely removes the bitterness and opens up the flavour profiles of the coffee. Don’t drink it straight away, wait for it to cool slightly.
After a day or so you should get used to it!