Green Tea and Weight Loss
You can add green tea to your diet and increase your ability to lose weight. That’s right, green tea contains ingredients that not only give you other health benefits but also has properties that help you lose weight. Of course, drinking any type of tea without sugar to replace high calorie soft drinks is one reason, but there are special phytochemicals in green tea that help you drop extra pounds.
You might think that green tea is something very different from oolong or black tea that you normally drink. However, it’s really the same type of leaves bet they receive less processing. The processing, fermenting, of the tea affects the leaf’s contents and makes it far less medicinal or beneficial for weight loss.
These extracts in green tea are catchetins. Catchetins are phytochemical polyphenols. That sounds quite scholarly, but if you break down the two words to their meaning, it’s far easier to understand. The term phytochemicals simply describes the fact that these are substances found in plants. The term polyphenols means that those substances are beneficial for your health.
Green tea helps stabilize your blood sugar. When you have spikes in your blood sugar, your body tends to store fat for those times when you body’s blood sugar level is lower. According to a study at the University of Chicago Tang Center for Herbal Medicine Research, green tea reduces cholesterol levels, fats and glucose. The scientist performed the study on animals but they it has relevance to how green tea works when humans drink it. The catchetins in green tea also helped reduce the deposits of fat under the skin.
There are other studies that skin green tea can increase your metabolism. People with higher metabolism and thermogenesis burn more calories doing nothing than those with lower levels of thermogenesis. The term is simply the base level of calories your body uses when it is in a resting stage. According to a study completed in 1999 by Dulloo, et al, green tea contained compounds that increased the calories the body burns without increasing activity. A 2005 study by Westerterp-Plantenga, Lejeune and Kovacs showed that green tea that received no alteration to remove caffeine, worked better at increasing metabolism than its decaffeinated alternative.
Stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, can increase your inability to lose weight. According to “Psychopharmacology”, 2007, green tea actually lowers the stress hormone cortisol in your body. Stress acts in two ways to sabotage diets. It increases comfort eating and tends to store the fat in the abdominal area so it increases your waistline too.
Green tea also works as a powerful diuretic. If you have water weight gain, simply drink a few cups of green tea and you’ll find that you can solve the problem of water retention rapidly with a cup or two of green tea. It works far better than water pills in many cases.
When you replace high calorie drinks with a cup of green tea, you first lower your calorie intake and increase beneficial catchetins. The green tea has 0 calories if you add no sugar and a very few if you squeeze a bit of fresh lemon in the drink. The payoff is that the lemon also adds nutrients with only the addition of a few calories. You also can add cinnamon or ginger to your tea for even more benefits. If you must drink sweetened tea, try adding cinnamon and a bit of honey. It contains far more nutrients than plain sugar and is delicious.
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