Packed with antioxidants and caffeine, green tea is a great natural aid for anyone looking to lose weight. It boosts your metabolism, helps you burn fat faster, and gives you plenty of energy.
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We love green tea here at NutraTea. Packed with antioxidants, it has multiple benefits for your health and wellbeing. It is no wonder that green tea is increasingly popular as an alternative to coffee and black tea.
Many people turn to green tea when they want to improve their fitness, lose weight, and feel happier and healthier within their own skin. That’s because this delicious herbal tea has a reputation for naturally helping us burn fat, use calories, and shed pounds.
Of course, there are plenty of products on the market that promise a quick and easy way to lose weight. We’re always wary of anyone offering a magic bullet solution – too often diet pills and weight loss shakes are terrible for your health and encourage poor eating habits.
As tea enthusiasts, we prefer gentle herbal remedies that support your health and fit your lifestyle. There’s no substitute for a healthy diet, regular exercise, and a good night’s sleep. But green tea is a wonderful addition to that healthy diet to help you burn fat and speed up your metabolism.
How Does Green Tea Help Burn Fat?
Green tea contains several compounds that are known to increase your body’s ability to burn fat. Two of its most important fat-busting components are caffeine and a group of antioxidants called catechins.
Caffeine is a well-known stimulant – many of us struggle to start our days off without our daily caffeine dose. As well as giving us mental focus and a boost of energy, caffeine also helps us burn fat faster.
When we drink caffeinated drinks like green tea, our bodies increase the level of a hormone called norepinephrine in our blood. This hormone signals our cells to break down fat and release it into our bloodstream, where it can then be used for energy.
Like caffeine, the catechins in green tea increase our norepinephrine levels and encourage our bodies to burn fat faster.
So, why choose green tea instead of just drinking any caffeinated drink? It is because the caffeine in green tea works together with the catechins to increase the effectiveness of both compounds.
In other words, your body will be able to burn more fat for longer when you drink something like green tea, which contains both caffeine and catechins.
Does Green Tea Boost Your Metabolism?
Another reason that green tea is so popular for weight loss is that it contains compounds that help to speed up your metabolism.
Your metabolism is the rate at which your body converts the calories from your food into energy. If you have a fast metabolism, you’ll burn calories faster and there will be less leftover for your body to store as fat. So, when you are trying to lose weight, a fast metabolism is a definite bonus.
Drinking green tea increases the activity of your sympathetic nervous system, taking your metabolism up a gear. This means you’ll use calories faster. Combined with exercise and a healthy diet, this increased metabolism can help you lose weight.
Will Green Tea Help You Exercise?
While green tea might not be able to force you to the gym, it can make your workout more effective once you get there. Those fat-burning properties we discussed above are increased when you exercise, meaning you should find you lose fat more easily when you combine green tea with physical activity.
The antioxidants in green tea can also aid in recovery, which is why many energy drinks and supplements contain green tea extract. All those antioxidants help reduce inflammation and counteract the effects of oxidative stress from working out.
The caffeine in green tea can also give you the energy boost you need to make it off the couch and into your trainers. This combines with the effects of an amino acid called L-theanine that helps to increase your alertness, meaning you’ll feel more energised and awake.
Can Green Tea Make You Lose Weight?
We’ve already seen how green tea can increase your metabolism, burn fat, and make your workouts more effective. This all combines to support your weight loss efforts.
But can green tea also just make you shed pounds? Here, the science is more ambiguous, but the answer appears to be a qualified yes.
A 2018 review of the evidence found that green tea has a positive effect on weight loss for most people. However, in a few cases, it didn’t have an effect. The authors of the review suggest that the weight loss benefits of green tea may vary between individuals depending on their diet, gut microbiome, and enzyme levels.
So, will drinking green tea make you lose weight? The truth is we can’t say for sure. It all depends on your unique physical make-up and the rest of your lifestyle, including your diet and activity levels.
However, green tea does have plenty of benefits for anyone trying to lose weight and is an excellent complement to other healthy lifestyle changes. Plus, all those antioxidants have other bonuses for your physical and mental wellbeing.
Green tea is also a great choice for those looking to maintain a healthy weight and stay trim. We use it as the main ingredient in our NutraTrim tea, combined with other herbs that support weight management and healthy digestion.
