If losing weight sits high atop your New Year’s resolution list, you might want to reach for a piping-hot cup of joe.

Why? New research suggests that just 4 cups of coffee a day can actually help shed some body fat.

The finding follows a 24-week investigation that tracked coffee’s impact among 126 overweight men and women in Singapore.

Investigators initially set out to see if coffee could help lower the risk for type 2 diabetes. In the end, the researchers found that those who drank 4 cups of caffeinated coffee per day over six months saw a nearly 4% drop in overall body fat.

“We were indeed surprised by the observed weight loss that was specifically due to fat mass loss among coffee drinkers,” said study author Derrick Johnston Alperet, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Alperet said it suggests that “this loss in fat mass was not likely to be due to changes in lifestyle, namely diet and physical activity.”

The findings were published recently in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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