Green Tea

Check the back of the bottle of many popular diet pills and you’ll see “green tea” or “green tea extract” listed as one of the ingredients.

Diet pills are often dangerous and packed with other unhealthy ingredients, but there’s a reason they use green tea. Green tea helps you lose weight. Of course it won’t be “20 pounds in one week” or other nonsense that marketing companies like to claim, but green tea has been scientifically proven to burn calories and block fat absorption.

Green Tea Burns Fat

Food (including sugar and fat) is synthesized into a substance called “triglyceride” in the liver and small intestine. It is then carried into the bloodstream to other tissues in the body.

Triglyceride is used as source of energy for life support and physical activities, and is very necessary. The problem comes about when there are excess amounts of triglyceride, because then it’s turned into fat which subsequently causes obesity.

That’s where green tea comes in. It contains high amounts of polyphenols which activate the enzyme that is responsible for dissolving excess triglyceride. In the long run, this means that green tea effectively aids in burning fat.

Green Tea Stimulates the Metabolism & Accelerates Weight Loss

Green tea contains powerful antioxidants called catechin polyphenols that are responsible for many of the health benefits of green tea. One of them in particular, epigallocatechin gallate (or EGCG for short), has been found to stimulate the metabolism and accelerate weight loss.

EGCG, along with the caffeine in green tea, stimulates the central nervous system and causes fat to be released into the blood stream for the body to use as fuel. This process of fat being used for energy is called “thermogenesis”. It provides extra energy, sheds excess water, and also helps to burn body fat.

Although caffeine alone can stimulate the metabolism this way, it’s important to note that researchers found that the combined ingredients of green tea were much more effective at this process than just caffeine by itself.

Green Tea Helps You Exercise Longer

Everyone knows how important exercise is to losing weight. It burns calories, increases your energy, and builds muscle which in turn boosts your metabolism even higher. The catechin polyphenols in green tea appear to stimulate the use of fatty acids by liver and muscle cells. This subsequently reduces the rate that carbohydrates are used and allows for more endurance and longer exercise times. In fact, a study using green tea extract on lab rats increased the amount of time the animals could swim before becoming exhausted by as much as 24%.

More endurance means more exercise, which means more calories burned, and it all adds up to more pounds lost for you.