Green tea is a no-brainer way to help you lose fat naturally. Aside from helping to prevent cancer, and improve brain function green tea also promotes fat loss.
Since it was first discovered around 4,000 years ago, it has become an incredible supplement for helping people lose weight and burn extra calories.
Here’s how:
1. Full of Antioxidants
Green tea is nutritionally packed with antioxidants like flavonoids and powerful polyphenols called catechins.
The main catechins in green tea are called epicatechin, epicatechin-3-gallate, epigallocatechin, and the one with the highest concentration in the drink – epigallocatechin-3-gallate or EGCG.
Epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, helps to protect our cells from free radical damage. It also helps to burn fat up to 17 percent faster. This compound is found in trace amounts in foods like apple skins, plums, and hazelnuts, but green tea is full of EGCG.
Catechins in green tea can also significantly reduce body weight and helped participants in a controlled study keep it off.
2. Prolongs Thermogenesis (Fat Burning)
Catechins in green tea prolong thermogenesis (the creation of heat in the body which burns fat), which is just a fancy way of saying they help turn you into a fat-burning machine!
Green tea has catechins by the load! There are more catechins in green tea than in black tea, for example. This makes green tea an ideal drink or supplement.
Moreover, the combination of caffeine and EGCG in green tea has been proven to significantly increase the resting metabolic rate, which means you burn more calories even when you are sitting on the sofa, or sleeping in your bed.
3. Breaks Down Fat Stores
Caffeine and EGCG help break down fat stores, moving fat to the blood stream so it can be burned off more easily. These two compounds essentially help the body reject excess fat stores.
Each cup of regular green tea contains anywhere between 35-100 milligrams of caffeine.
4. Controls Blood Sugar Levels
The polyphenols and plant nutrients in green tea additionally help to control blood sugar levels, which in turn helps you to eat less.
It can even reduce blood sugar spikes (known to cause belly fat) after eating starchy foods.
5. Prevent Diabetes and Obesity
Green tea even lowers the possibility of getting diabetes and becoming obese, two of the biggest diseases affecting Western countries today.
6. Reduces Appetite
Green tea reduces appetite. There are multiple factors in the beverage that likely contribute to controlling what, and how much you want to eat. The major appetite suppressant factor is due to the control of two hormones: norepinephrine and dopamine.
Green tea also helps the body release a hormone called CCK (cholecystokinin) that breaks down in the intestines after we eat, telling us that we are full.
Norepinephrine and dopamine, known as catecholamines, activate the sympathetic nervous system, and one of the known effects includes a reduction in the desire for food.
7. Improves Lipid Profiles
People who drink green tea have an improved lipid profile. In plain English, that means they are less likely to have heart disease, clogged arteries, and high LDL (bad) cholesterol.
It also means they won’t have blood sugar spikes which cause them to eat sugary and fattening snacks.
8. Reduces Harmful Abdominal Fat
Drinking green tea helps reduce harmful abdominal fat. Belly fat is not only unsightly, it has been linked to increased death-rates in otherwise healthy adults.
Green tea helps to burn it off and tells the body not to store excess fat in the midsection.
9. Burns Extra Fat During Workouts
If you want increased fat burning during workouts, then drink green tea!
Research has shown that catechins in green tea along with caffeine work together to significantly change body weight and composition.
The Most Powerful Green Tea – Matcha!
If you really want to take your green tea drinking to the next level, consider spending a little extra for matcha green tea.
Both matcha and regular green tea come from the Camellia sinensis plant, which is native to China.
The only difference is how they are harvested. Matcha green tea is covered for approximately two weeks just before the leaves are picked, preventing the plants from getting direct sunlight.
This time in the shade causes the plants to produce super high levels of chlorophyll, making the leaves turn a darker shade of green.
This also means that the tea, a fine powder which is made by grinding up the leaves, is sometimes 30-50 times more potent than regular green tea.
Just one cup of match green tea can have the same amount or more antioxidants than 10 cups of regular green tea.
No wonder it has been considered a super food in Japan and China for centuries.
Also, since the whole leaf is ingested when you drink matcha green tea, and not just the water that has been steeped with green tea leaves, so you are consuming a much higher level of all those fat-burning, calorie-torching catechins and other polyphenols when you drink matcha.
Tips for consumption:
There are literally no adverse side effects from drinking green tea until you drink around 1,200 cups a day (aside from the caffeine).
Since no human can possibly drink that much, you can drink green tea all day long and enjoy the benefits without worrying.
Just be sure to source an organic supplement, or organic green tea leaves, since tea is notorious for being grown with toxic agricultural herbicides, pesticides, and petro-chemical based fertilizers which can harm your health and weight loss goals.
A note on matcha green teas: Look out for cheap knock-offs. China often exports a lesser version of matcha, though it is called the same name.
True matcha should be bright green in color.
Sencha tea which is not matcha is lightly “shibui”—that’s sencha’s characteristic flavor—English doesn’t have a direct translation, but it could be called “tartness.”
Real green tea should taste earthy but not too tart.
Also, if the “matcha” you find is too cheap, you are likely getting a bad impression of real matcha green tea grown in Japan.
The amount of tea leaves needed to produce a small amount of matcha as well as the process of allowing the leaves to sit in the shade for several weeks causes it to be sold for a slightly higher price than regular green teas.
Drink green tea warm in the winter, and cold in the summer, the benefits remain the same. Aim for at least five to seven cups a day for the full list of benefits listed here to take action.
You can also take a green tea supplement, many of which have lowered caffeine levels if you are concerned about consuming too much caffeine by drinking so many cups of green tea through the day.
If you are going to go the supplement route, you’ll want to exploit the fat burning potential of a pill that has around 400-500 milligrams of ECGC – the most active catechin in green tea. This amounts to about four to five strong cups of regular green tea a day or half a cup of organic matcha.
Your go-to fat-burning, appetite-supressing, calorie-burning drink should now be green tea – right?!
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