Green Tea and Weight Loss: How a Popular Summer Drink Can Help You Shed Inches

I love green tea. Really, any kind of tea is alright in my book but when it comes to simplicity and pure health benefits, especially when trying to get rid of a few extra pounds, it’s hard to beat. Plus, it’s a very inexpensive way to kick up your metabolism and lose weight fairly quickly. Since I’d imagine you don’t want to read a lengthy science report, I’ll skip over exactly how green tea (or more specifically EGCG, a polyphenol found in green tea) promotes weight loss, but it simply blocks an enzyme from breaking down noradrenaline in the brain which ramps up the part of your nervous system which controls muscle tension and the release of energy from fat. So when your metabolism is increased, you burn more calories while you go about your day. Good stuff, right? According to a study published in the British journal of Nutrition in 2005, people who consumed 270mg of EGCG daily burned an average of 180 extra calories per day when compared to a placebo. That breaks down to losing approximately 22 pounds per year by simply sipping on green tea! The study went on to say that the 270mg was the “optimal concentration” of EGCG since the results showed that higher doses didn’t burn any additional fat or calories. What that means is you only need to drink about 3 cups of green tea (or take 270mg of green tea extract) per day to help kick up your metabolism. It’s super easy to do especially if you make it a gallon at a time to ensure that it’s always available. Worst case, Starbucks has really good iced green tea as well. Exercise + Green Tea Extract = Knockout Punch For Fat At least if you’re a mouse, that is. There was another weight loss study where the researchers fed 3 groups of mice a high fat diet. Next, they put the 3 groups of mice on a weight loss regiment consisting of either pure exercise, green tea extract, and a combination of the two. What happened? * The exercising mice lost 24 percent of the added weight. * The mice taking just the EGCG (green tea extract) lost 47 percent. * The group of mice who got both lost 89 percent of the weight they gained. The key is these results were achieved over a fairly short period of time, so I guess that means you should pop some green tea extract, jump in one of those big balls and go for a run! Maybe not, but it’s good to know that there’s something natural and inexpensive you can do to step up the fat-bu ing effectiveness of your workouts.