How Green Tea Helps You Lose Weight

Green tea seems to be one of the "in" things these days as a natural weight-loss supplement. More specifically, green tea pills seem to be popular, much more so than actually sitting down and drinking a cup of green tea.

But like most diet fads, the majority of people don't actually understand how green tea or green tea extract and pills actually help them lose weight. Most people view this sort of thing as a quick fix, a way of forgoing proper diet and exercise. They think that just taking pills will help them shed pounds without lifting a finger.

Green tea does not do that.

What it does do, however, is give you a metabolism boost. What this means in terms of weight loss is that it helps you burn more calories than normal. Yes, simply drinking the green tea will technically burn a few more calories per day than normal if you just sit back and do nothing, because in merely existing, living and breathing, we're burning calories to keep our bodies going. But to get the full effect of green tea's weight-loss potential, it needs to be combined with exercise.

Most of the research I've read states that green tea can help burn anywhere between 10-20% more calories. For the purpose of quantifying this in an example, I'm going to stick to the low end of that and say that it helps burn an additional 10% only.

Now, imagine that in a bout of exercise, you'd burn off 200 calories normally. Drinking a cup of green tea or taking some green tea extract beforehand, and you'd burn 220 calories during that exercise instead. That's the rough equivalent of a gram of milk chocolate, just in the extra calories you burned off.

To look at how this really helps you, you need to know what a calorie actually is. Don't feel bad if you don't know; a lot of people don't. Most people only know that it has something to do with food and that you need a certain amount in your diet and that you need to cut back on them to lose weight.

What a calorie is (specifically, what a food calorie is), is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. This does depend on the temperature of the water to begin with, of course, but stop and think about that for a second. 1 single calorie raises the temperature of a whole kilogram of water by 1 degree Celcius. Most nutrition labels give their measurements assuming that people eat around 2000 calories each day. And no, that isn't a typo. That's a lot of energy! I'm looking at a package of Cadbury Mini-Eggs right now and I see that 18 of those little eggs, a mere handful of chocolate, contains 200 calories, enough to raise the temperature of 200 kilograms of water by 1 degree Celsius.

What's 200 kilograms in something that we might be more familiar with? It's 200 litres of water. It's over 400 pounds. And those piddly 200 calories, a mere tenth of what most people are supposed to ingest each day, can raise the temperature of that much water by a degree.

Our bodies sure use a lot of fuel, don't they? Makes that additional 10% calorie burn seem like something much more significant now, doesn't it?

So how does this metabolism boost from green tea help you lose weight? If your weight is stable with the amount of food you put in it, and you're not increasing your calorie intake by a corresponding 10%, then the energy needed for the calorie burn comes from your body's stored fat. Green tea doesn't get rid of fat directly, but it helps the body use up stores of it by increasing the rate that it burns calories.

Personally, I'd rather drink a cup of green tea than take extract pills. It gives me extra liquid, for one thing, which helps me stay hydrated better when I'm exercising, and helps my body flush out crap that may be building up in more organs and bloodstream. It can be one of the 8 cups of liquid a person is supposed to drink in a day. If you really don't like the taste of green tea, then maybe taking the pills is a better option, but if you can stand the taste, consider just drinking some tea instead of swallowing another pill. You're getting hydrated in addition to getting the benefits of the green tea, then.

Green tea is not a quick fix diet supplement, nor will it help you lose weight by just sitting on your butt and not doing anything. All too many people now believe that taking some form of diet pill is enough, or worse, they think that taking a pill is better than proper diet and exercise because it means they don't have to exercise self-control or self-denial. Some people believe that if they just take a diet pill, they can eat whatever they want whenever they want, don't have to do more exercise than walking to the bathroom, and the pounds will just start melting away. This does not happen! Proper diet and exercise are the real keys to losing weight. There are things that help the process along, like green tea, but ultimately they still rely on the user getting up and getting out and working hard to take care of their bodies.