Is Caffeine Raising Your Cortisol?

In this episode of the podcast/newsletter, we decided to tackle a topic that was requested by several of our listeners. Evidently, there is a good amount of chatter going through the gyms that people should not be consuming caffeine for 60-90 minutes after waking otherwise it will boost your cortisol too high and this will lead to increased body fat, or at least hinder your ability to burn body fat. How do we respond to this theory? Let’s dive in.

So upon waking in the morning, your cortisol does go up. This happens primarily to begin mobilizing fuel sources for your body. There is some evidence that ingesting caffeine can increase cortisol, however it is not a huge effect. Also, the increase in cortisol tends to go down over time with continued ingestion of caffeine. The question remains whether this increase will increase body fat.

Thankfully we have a good number of studies that we can look at where they measure caffeine ingestion and track body fat. What does it show? People who regularly consume caffeine tend to have less body fat. Caffeine has also been shown to slightly increase your metabolic rate, which is beneficial to fat burning. This seems to fit anecdotally as well since most “fat burners” on the market contain caffeine. If it was secretly making you fat, it probably would have been done away with.

Another interesting side note in this conversation is that there is something else that has been shown to boost cortisol. Exercise. In this study, it was shown that the elevation in cortisol from exercise was most closely associated with increases in muscle size from resistance training. So if the argument is increasing cortisol makes you fat, shouldn’t exercise make you fat?

The bottom line is that many things in the body fluctuate, including hormones like cortisol. Short term spikes in certain things don’t always directly predict a downstream outcome. The accumulation of body fat over time is the result of lots and lots of processes, not simply a short term spike in cortisol.

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Simplified Takeaways…

1. Cortisol is elevated upon waking up in the morning.

2. There is some evidence that ingesting caffeine can elevate your cortisol, although it is not a huge effect, and it tends to go down over time with repeated caffeine ingestion.

3. We have a good amount of studies showing that the people who consume caffeine tend to have lower body fat.

4. Caffeine has also been shown to elevate your metabolic rate slightly.

5. Exercise also increases cortisol.

6. The increase in overall body fat is the accumulation of many interactions over time, not simply random short term spikes in cortisol.

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