21-Day Black Coffee Challenge

BOOST MOOD & HEALTH • INCREASE ENERGY • MAXIMIZE FAT BURNING • SUPPRESS APPETITE • IMPROVE ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE • BOOST GROWTH HORMONES • LOWER INSULIN LEVELS

There are three simple rules (and one bonus). For the next 21 days:

1. 1. Fast for at least 12 hours every day. Wait 12-16 hours from the last time you consumed calories before breaking the fast. You can drink black coffee, unsweetened tea or water during the fast but nothing else. This is a simple form of Time-Restricted Feeding (TRF) (often confused with Intermittent Fasting). All your food/calories are consumed within a compressed eating window of 8- to 12-hours every day. Here’s an example — if your last meal ended at 7PM (and you didn’t eat anything after), wait until 7AM to eat breakfast. It’s important to realize that many of the benefits of fasting come from a long period of time between meals, and not extreme calorie restriction. Time-Restricted Feeding has been shown to:
      • • Maximize fat burning
        • Boost growth hormones
        • Lower insulin levels

      WOMEN: Women tend to react more poorly to fasting, especially fasts exceeding 14 hours. They are simply more sensitive to caloric restriction, seeing as how their biological “programming” prefers they have a steady source of calories in place for growing, feeding, and nursing babies. Whether you have kids or not, that’s what a significant portion of your DNA is geared toward. So if you’re a woman, just be aware of this.

   2. Break your fast with a high-protein meal. To set your body in a fat-burning, anabolic (muscle-building) state rather than a fat-storing state, break your fast with a protein-rich meal (20-30g). See some sample meals below.
   3. Only drink black coffee during the fast (duh!). That means no cream, sugar, sweeteners or anything. BLACK. If drinking black coffee is difficult for you, try a higher-quality coffee or try a dash of sea salt in your black coffee. Black coffee has been shown to:
      • Boost health
      • Increase energy and cognitive performance
      • Suppress appetite
      • Contain ZERO calories
      • Develop a taste and expand your palate for quality coffee

Our favorite coffee is Purity. It’s lab-tested to be the highest in antioxidants and the lowest in toxins (ZERO mold). And if you use code EVOLVEDNS, you get 30% off your order. That’s $62 for a 5lb bag + free shipping!

• RESET BONUS: Avoid caffeine for the first 7 days. Decaf coffee and tea are fine (in fact, I recommend you pick up some high-quality decaf for this challenge). This will desensitize your body to caffeine. Once you add regular black coffee in after the seven days, the positive effects will be increased and you will require LESS coffee to maximize the benefits. Many of caffeine’s effects, including fat burning, strength benefits, and euphoria, are subject to tolerance, and may not occur in people used to caffeine, no matter how large the dose is.

• If going caffeine-free cold turkey is too drastic for you (caffeine withdrawal can be pretty brutal for some people), take the first 14 days to slowly cut back on your caffeine intake. This may be the least unpleasant way to do it. Replacing one or two cups of regular coffee with decaf every few days will do the trick. If you normally drink eight cups of coffee a day, for example, replace two to four cups with decaf for two or three days. Then reduce your intake of regular to two cups for a few days. For the last seven days of the 21-day challenge, do zero caffeine, so your body can properly reset itself. It won’t be easy, —potentially headache-filled—but if you can get through all three weeks, your tolerance should be reset. When you go back to having caffeine, start off will small amounts.

Fat Loss Accelerator
If you really want to step it up, throw in one of the following active morning routines BEFORE eating your first meal. Also, have something that contains caffeine specifically RIGHT BEFORE YOU WORKOUT to increase your body’s rate of fat loss. When you perform light aerobic exercise in a fasted state, you tap into your fat stores for energy, melting away belly fat. Short term studies find that fasted cardio increases fat oxidation in the body. People who go for a run in a fasted state have a lower respiratory quotient, an indication of greater fat burning versus glucose burning. One study found that a morning fasted cardio session increased 24-hour fat oxidation by 50% in young men. If you struggle with exercising fasted, take 4-8g Essential Amino Acids (EAAs) prior.

1. 45-60 minutes brisk walk (with your dog or baby if you have one) or gardening
2. 30-45 minutes easy jog, yoga, swim, housework (wear a weighted vest), or bikeride
3. 10 minute kettlebell workout – Men start with 20lbs and women 15lbs. Perform the 3 exercises listed below. Do 10 repetitions of the first movement, then move to the next one. Take a 30 second break after each complete round (10 reps of each of the 3 movement). Complete as many rounds as possible in 7 minutes. Don’t do this exercise more than 3 days a week and don’t do it in concurrent days.

• Kettlebell deadlifts
• Goblet squats
• Kettlebell chest-supported hinge
• 30 second break
• REPEAT (As Many Rounds As Possible in 7 minutes)

Muscle Gain

Reasonable durations of fasting don’t cause muscle loss. In fact, you can do a few days of fasting without incurring any significant muscle loss. The ketones generated during the fast have protein-sparing effects, and the fasting-induced spike in growth hormone also spares muscle from breakdown.

Additionally, strength training itself is a powerful signal to your body that your muscles are essential tissues vital to your survival. Your body generally tries to avoid burning through essential tissues. Lifting also increases growth hormone. Paired with the fasting-induced GH boost, your muscles will be in good standing.

Fasted training augments the anabolic response—the ability of muscles to take up protein and get bigger and stronger. A 2009 study found that, compared to athletes who lifted weights after breakfast, athletes who lifted weights in the morning before eating had an augmented anabolic response to a post-workout protein-and-carb shake.

Performance

If you’ve consistently trained in a fasted state, the metabolic and muscle adaptations you’ll acquire will boost performance when you compete in a fed state. A fasted workout trains you to perform under difficult physiological conditions of low fuel availability, and that comes in handy. You probably wouldn’t enter a race or powerlifting match in a fasted state, but the fasted workouts you did in the months leading up to competition make you more likely to win.

Why This Works

Coffee and Tea
High-quality coffee has been shown to help people lose weight, feel more energized without the jitters, boost mood and ward off diseases feared most like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Caffeine can mobilize stored fat and burn more adipose tissue. The caffeine found in coffee and tea can elevate fat-burning by as much as 15 percent. In fact, having caffeine specifically RIGHT BEFORE YOU WORKOUT is shown to increase your body’s rate of fat loss by up to 29%, according to research published in the American Journal of Physiology. Additionally, coffee is a great source of antioxidants, and research has linked coffee to many health benefits such as improved mental health as you age. If coffee causes side effects such as anxiety, tremors or irritation of the digestive system, drink green tea or quality decaf.

Time-Restricted Feeding (TRF)
Your body has been conditioned to eat 3 square meals a day (plus snacks). Fasting is a great way to reset your body so that you are more aware when you are actually hungry and not just eating because of another reason (stress, habit, etc.).

TRF has health benefits, from improving your insulin sensitivity (or a healthier response to carbs) to shifting your body into burning fat instead of sugar for fuel. It also has a hormonal response that causes your body to release more growth hormones, which help to preserve lean tissue and increases utilization of stored body fat. In addition to fat loss, TRF’s potential benefits include improved cholesterol numbers, promotion of cellular housecleaning, increased lifespan (in animal studies), improved immunity, better athletic performance, and better appetite control.

One study found that when overweight women followed an TRF approach, they lost more weight and body fat and improved their insulin resistance compared with women who followed a more traditional diet of limiting calories seven days per week.

Tip: Use the app Zero to track your fast. Aside from tracking daily start and stop times, Zero also helps track nighttime eating. It does this by fetching your location to calculate local sunset time. For example, if the sun sets at 6pm, and you began fasting at 8pm, Zero would automatically log two hours of nighttime eating.

Exercise
Moderate exercise such as walking of jogging in a fasted state allows your body to tap into stored body fat as fuel. Incorporating the weights into your exercise increases the fat loss. A 2008 study showed that cardio plus resistance during a single workout significantly improves fat loss. The cardio plus resistance group not only burned fat and built muscle at the same time, but the amount of fat they burned was a tenfold increase over the amount burned by the groups that did cardio or resistance training only. On top of that, morning workouts jumpstart the metabolism, and working out on an empty stomach can help you burn up to 20 percent more body fat, which is more likely to be achieved in the a.m.

Fasting + Exercise
According to a recent study, after eating, adipose (fat) tissue “is busy responding to the meal and a bout of exercise at this time will not stimulate the same [beneficial] changes in adipose tissue. This means that exercise in a fasted state might provoke more favorable changes in adipose tissue, and this could be beneficial for health in the long term.

Protein
Protein first thing in the morning is important because it boosts your metabolism and it triggers leptin, your satiety signal, keeping you full longer preventing the likelihood of binging on junk food later in the day, and decreasing carb impulses. It also boosts dopamine, a brain chemical usually associated with feelings of reward. Plus, your body uses amino acids from protein to build lean muscle, which makes you more toned and helps burn calories when you aren’t being active.

You are more insulin sensitive in the morning which means,  if you start with a high carb breakfast like cereal or waffles, your body is more likely to store the breakfast as fat.

High-Protein Recipes
To keep things simple, pick one or two of your favorite and just stick with those the entire 21 days.

• High-Protein Green Smoothie – Our favorite is 2 cups organic spinach, ½ cup green tea or water, ½ cup frozen blueberries, ½ fresh-squeezed lemon, 1 scoop high-quality whey protein powder, ½ avocado, and stevia to taste. Add 1 Tbsp cacao nibs at the end of blending for a little texture.
• Performance Coffee (our favorite!)– For a performance and cognitive boost try 8-16oz coffee, 1-2 scoops high-quality whey protein powder, MCT oil (start with ½ tsp), 1 Tbsp high-performance chocolate, 3oz coconut milk. Blend or shake.
• Canned, Wild Alaskan Salmon – Using canned, wild Alaskan salmon along with leftover vegetables makes this a quick meal.
• Yogurt Parfait – Opt for organic full-fat plain Greek yogurt or unsweetened, plain yogurt, and toss on a few berries and walnuts or other nuts. Sprinkle with1 Tbsp high-performance chocolate and a little cinnamon.
• 3-4 Whole Eggs – Raw, poached or scrambled. Keep some hard-boiled eggs on hand and sprinkle with sea salt or truffle salt. Include a piece of fruit like a pomegranate, grapefruit or sliced tomato.
• 1-2 Tbsp Collagen Powder in your coffee or tea. It’s tasteless and blends right in.
• Legumes, Lentils & Beans – Breakfast can be as simple as steamed spinach and a can of beans although this doesn’t sound as tasty as the other options.
• 30-gram Protein Shake – Simple and fast – Use a high-quality whey protein powder or Essential Amino Acidss (7g), ice, water and/or full fat coconut milk or MCT oil
• Add a side of turkey bacon, organic bacon, organic sausage, or cottage cheese to any breakfast. Each ounce of animal meat/chicken/fish/eggs is roughly 7 grams of protein. A small handful of raw or dry roasted nuts can be a great addition as well.
• Healthy Fat Options – For some healthy fat, add ½ avocado or a spoonful of fresh guacamole to any breakfast. Other great options are hemp seeds, flaxseeds, chia seeds, almonds, almond butter, raw or dried nuts, sardines, salmon, MCT oil, grass-fed meat, omega-3 eggs, olives, or coconut oil/milk.
• Spinach, Kale and other Dark, Leafy Greens  – For fiber and a nutritious addition, add a handful to any breakfast – use with your eggs to create a vegetable scramble or omelet.
• Some Tea Options – green tea, white tea, Yerbe Mate, Guayuse or Chocolate Pu-erh (our favorite).
• Even adding additional protein to your current breakfast can help, although weight loss won’t be as fast if you’re eating carbohydrates.

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. Please understand that I have experience with all of these products, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.