Does caffeine make us have more energy even though it doesn’t have many calories? Does it make our bodies use up fat that is already stored? Where does the extra energy from caffeine come from?
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Caffeine burn calories. It tells your brain that you are not tired. As a result you move more and that causes you to burn calories.
“Energy” in the sense of your desire to move around, focus on things, etc, and “energy” in the physics sense, are not the same thing, though they’re weakly related. You’re still consuming physics!energy while you’re sleeping, even though that’s your lowest psychological!energy state, for example.
Caffeine is a stimulant. That means it pushes the body away from restful behaviors and towards energetic ones, and shifts the body into a physical mode that prepares it to take on those energetic tasks (in medical terms, it increases *arousal* – this is a different, more general, usage from its use in sex). For example, it increases heart rate and blood pressure as part of supplying more oxygen to the body.
That means that caffeine gives you more psychological!energy. But running your body that way has trade-offs. One of them is that your body is *consuming* more physics!energy to run itself. In that sense, caffeine actually *costs* you energy, at least a little. (Another trade-off is that your body puts maintenance work on hold to support immediate activity.)
Caffeine does not directly provide us with energy, but it does make us more alert and able to stay awake for longer periods of time. Caffeine does not make our bodies use up fat that is already stored; instead it stimulates the central nervous system, which can make us feel more energized. The extra energy from caffeine comes from increased alertness and focus, as well as increased blood flow throughout the body. This can lead to improved physical performance and endurance.
Caffeine just prevents you from being able to tell that you’re tired by blocking certain receptors in your brain, and gives you a shot of adrenaline.
Adrenaline has the effect of redirecting blood flow and increasing blood sugar levels, since it’s used to prepare you to fight or run from threats.
So, it doesn’t give you energy. It just makes you feel like you’re less tired, and puts your body in an excited state.
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Its because of how it interacts with receptors in the body. Caffeine conveniently slots in where the chemicals that would make you feel tired (Adenosine) slot in. Essentially just making it harder for you to feel that tiredness, i wish i could remember what the chemical was called though
We are not machines. While you can compare calories to fuel for a car (we won’t move without it), other things come into hand, like our mind.
If you don’t feel like moving, you’ll probably do things slowly. Caffeine kind of cranks your brain into not feeling this way, making you “feel” faster and with more energy. It doesn’t provide energy, but it helps you make better use of it (arguable).
Consider this: People sometimes take various stimulants — including caffeine (from coffee, tea, or soda), nicotine (tobacco), ephedrine (ma huang), or amphetamines — when they want to lose weight.
This is partly because these drugs reduce appetite: they make you want to eat less food.
But it’s also partly because they make you more “energetic”, in the sense of moving around rather than sitting still. And moving around burns calories. If you’re eating less food, and burning more calories, you’re likely to lose weight.
However, this turns out to be not very sustainable for the body. If you use stimulants often, you get addicted — you feel sick or blah when you don’t take them, and they don’t have the same effect any more. (Instead of coffee making you feel energetic, it just relieves your caffeine-withdrawal headache.)
So people end up either eating more food later on, or having episodes of feeling terrible from drug withdrawal, or getting really sick from taking more and more drugs.
It doesn’t. All it does is block the signals telling you that you’re tired. It’s like your body is trying to tell your brain that you have no energy left, but your brain just had the volume cranked right up on the radio. Once the music stops, your brain suddenly hears the message getting through and realises that you’re screwed.
Or maybe you could think of it as being like putting a bit of tape over your fuel gauge and drawing an arrow on it that points to “Full”.
Caffeine is a vascoconstrictor, it narrows your blood vessels, the blood to your brain is contricted and thats what causes the alertness and awake feeling and then from there your body will do all sorts of things to counteract the lack of blood to your brain, extra cortisol production being one of them, in excess caffeine is not good r/decaf
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