Green Tea and Weight Loss
One of the other benefits that people have touted green tea for is the potential that it can be useful as a dieting tool. The thinking is this: green tea increases the metabolism of drinkers and allows them to burn off extra energy without doing anything more. This results in burned fat - by making your metabolism speed up, green tea can cause you to shed pounds without having to do much more than you currently are. I'm somewhat skeptical about this idea myself - there are all kinds of proposed miracle diets, and while some of them may work, I don't believe in a silver bullet - it would just be too obvious if there was one because everyone who drank green tea would be thinner. It might be somewhat helpful, but it isn't going to get you out of doing a traditional diet combined with exercise. After all, even if it does speed up your metabolism, you're still going to have to exercise to burn calories - it would just help you burn more. However, there do appear to be some other health benefits from drinking, and it can't hurt - if you want to try it out, there's really no reason not to. This page will explain the various research on the weight loss aspect of green tea.
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Does Green Tea cause Weight Loss?
There is at least some recent research suggesting that it does. One study has shown that there is a significant increase in energy expenditure in the body caused by drinking green tea - and not just from the caffeine, but from some other process. They estimated roughly a 40% increase in the amount of energy burned by the body during the daytime. However, keep in mind various things that could affect this: first, the time of day that you eat things can affect whether or not the calories are burned off. Second, you may not be burning off many calories on your own depending on your activity levels. The other thing to consider is that the tea in this study was used during mealtimes, so that's probably when you should drink it if you want to replicate the results. There are also studies suggesting that green tea has no weight loss benefits - that it essentially just has the same effects caffeine would on the metabolism. Many people have seen all kinds of exaggerated claims about the effects - for example, a doctor on Oprah claimed that if you simply replaced coffee with green tea, you would be guaranteed to lose 10 pounds within six weeks. I've searched around extensively trying to find more conclusive studies one way or the other, but mostly what I've been able to find are conflicting results and people hawking it as a miracle diet. Could it work? Certainly. There is evidence that it has, at least among some people. But it could also depend heavily on your diet and activity levels. If you want to try it, it's not going to hurt you. But I wouldn't go out and buy cartons of it expecting it to be a magic solution. If it does anything, it boosts your metabolism levels - you will burn more energy for the same activity levels. That means it's not going to work on its own - it will help your exercise burn more calories, but you'll still have to exercise.
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