To Caffeine or Not To Caffeine, When Training?

From your comment before editing and your comment above, you seem to think I think it's some kind of magical drug. Of course you can gain weight with a caffeine addiction, that doesn't mean caffeine doesn't help weight loss and your case is not evidence that it doesn't. (**EDIT** Also worth noting, if the addiction was met with lots of coffee with milk in, there's a lot of calories in milk...) You need to be doing other things right though. Just Google 'does caffeine help weight loss' and there seem to be lots of articles stating it does and why. I don't think I've found one (and no, I've not looked all that hard) that says it doesn't. Even in this thread most people are saying it's helpful in one way or another, although you state most are saying otherwise?

It's a bit like someone saying walking 30 minutes every day helps weight loss and you saying, 'well I walked an hour every day and gained loads of weight'... yes, maybe you ate McDonald's three times a day! Maybe you had a chocolate addiction! The walking was still better than not walking!
 
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It's a bit like creatine - there's plenty of evidence for the efficacy (although these effects appear to have variation between individuals, with some getting no benefit) and it's dirt cheap, so there's no harm in indulging yourself. The magnitude of effect if you are a responder is in that sort of 0.5-1% range where combined with all the other small wins you can eke out it adds up, so yes not magic, but not totally worthless either.
 
Yup, which I'm fine with. On a bicycle, you'll pay hundreds to lose 500g from your bike. A tiny increase, but it's an increase (or decrease I guess).

**EDIT** I guess this is the problem though. Everyone is looking for some magical pill that makes them lose weight. I lost 6 stone in 6 months and the amount of people that came up to me all excited "How did you do that?!". When I explain it's through lots of hard work the look on their face changes. At the same time, it's lot's of small changes, probably less than a 1% effect in themselves. Switching out Semi Skimmed milk for Alpro Light in coffees and breakfast for example. That only saves me maybe 100-200 calories a day, but do a few of these things and you've knocked a reasonable chunk of calories off.
 
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AndyCr15 said:
If you mean you drank caffeinated coffee and then sat on the couch, no, I doubt it would do much either. But with exercise, apparently it will help burn more fat than without.
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Caffeine does increase metabolic rate for while so there is some additional calorie burn but small.
While working out you can normally work a little hard for a little longer burning more calories.

It does increase fat metabolism during cardio but this wont change the calorie burn rate (ie.. you will process slightly less glycogen instead), but this is critical for endurance performance. E.g., caffeine improves marathon performance by 2-4%, which is a huge margin in a well trained athlete. For longer duration races this becomes even more important because calories consumption is one of the biggest issues. If you can get an additional 50-100 calories an hour form body fat over glycogen then over a long race this could result in 10% plus faster time, but there so many variables it is hard to track.
 
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