Green Tea For Losing Weight: Effective or Not?
How much can I expect green tea to help me in my goals of losing weight? To answer that question, let’s make the assumption that your desired weight-loss goal is one pound per week. To make that happen, you must accomplish a caloric deficit of 3500 calories per week. That means you must burn up about 500 calories per day more than you take in. (7×500=3500) This can be done by a combination of exercise and diet modification, and green tea can play a significant part.
Recent research performed in Japan amongst other places has shown that by increasing your intake of green tea by just 5 cups per day, you increase your calories burned by thermogenesis by about 70 or 80. Thermogenesis is another name for the body’s heat production process. The primary origin of thermogenesis in green tea is the caffeine found in it, but there are also catechins called EGCGs that boost heat production and burn more calories.
According to this research, by drinking 5 cups of green tea every day, you will achieve only about 15% of the calorie burning boost that you need. And 70 or 80 calories is only about 15% of the 500 extra that you need to burn daily. So clearly, although following a green tea diet is a helpful tool, by itself it’s not enough to get the whole job done.
By itself, extra green tea consumption will not be enough to lose a large amount of weight per week. Nevertheless, it’s still an important and effective piece of the puzzle and should seriously be considered as one of the tools at your disposal.
In conclusion, you shouldn’t be expecting the pounds to magically float away simply by drinking more green tea each day. But according to OneGreatEarth.com, the research shows that green tea does have effective benefits for both weight loss and health in general, so you have every reason to include it in a balanced program of sound nutrition and exercise.