Does Green Tea Promote Weight Loss?


We often read about the positive effects green tea can have on your health, including positive effects on body weight. Can green tea really help you lose weight? While there is no miracle food, drink, or pill that's guaranteed to take off excess weight, studies show that green tea can be a helpful addition to your weight loss regimen. When combined with a healthy life style, it can be a great adjunct to a well thought out, weight loss program.

Recent studies have preliminarily shown that green tea can aid in weight loss efforts. It appears that many of the health benefits of green tea arise from its ability to stimulate thermogenesis, which is your body's way of eliminating excess calories so they won't be stored as fat. It appears that green tea has a stimulatory effect on the body’s ability to break down fat. The drawback is you may need to drink 6 to 10 glasses of green tea a day to see this weight loss effect. Because green tea contains caffeine, this may pose a problem for some people who can't tolerate the associated stimulatory effects. Decaffeinated green tea is available but may not be as effective in promoting weight loss as the caffeinated version, although it does appear to have some stimulatory effects on weight loss despite the absence of caffeine.

For this reason, you may want to consider adding a green tea supplement to your daily vitamin regimen. Besides being a convenient way to get your green tea, the supplement provides you with a concentrated source of weight loss promoting catechins which reduces the need to consume a large number of green tea servings in order to get the health benefits of green tea.

How does green tea promote weight loss? Again, the answer lies in its thermogenic properties which help to boost metabolism and energy expenditure while preventing excess calories from being store as fat. This is a direct result of the catechins, so abundant in green tea, which likely has a synergistic effect with the associated caffeine. This means the combination of the catechins with caffeine may result in an even greater effect on thermogenesis than either chemical alone. This makes green tea an ideal agent for promoting weight loss. The health benefits of this simple drink are rather remarkable.

How does the use of a green tea supplement work in actual practice? Some studies have show that up to 75% of people who consume sufficient quantities of green tea have some weight loss. Results can be even more significant if green tea is combined with a good exercise and weight loss plan.
The health benefits of green tea are being more apparent as time goes on and it's gratifying to know it can have a positive effect on weight loss. But, don't forget, good old fashioned healthy eating and exercise should be the backbone of any weight loss program.