Let's take a realistic look at what's involved with using green tea for weight loss. To provide a clear perspective, let's assume for the moment that you are pursuing a weight-loss goal of one pound (0.45 kg) per week. How would green tea help to achieve a one-pound-per-week goal?
For starters, there are about 3,500 calories stored in just one pound of fat. Whatever weight loss method you choose, in order to lose a pound per week, you must achieve a calorie deficit of 3,500 over the course of the week. A calorie deficit means that you burn more calories than you consume, through the process of diet modification, exercise or both. So to see one pound of weight loss per week, you need to maintain an average calorie deficit of about 500 calories each day
Recent research conducted in Japan and elsewhere has indicated that if a person drinks five cups of green tea each day, then an extra 70-80 calories will be burned through the process of thermogenesis. This is the name of the process for heat production in living organisms. Much of the thermogenesis effect associated with green tea comes from its caffeine content, but some of it also occurs because of its high concentrations of EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate).
Although 70 or 80 calories per day is a significant step in the right direction, it still does not come close to the 500 calorie daily deficit that you need in order to lose a pound per week. And for sure, it's nowhere near what it would take to lose the inches per week claimed by some green tea websites out to make money. As indicated by this research, if you were to do nothing except add five cups of green tea per day to your nutrition program, then it would take about 43 days to lose a single pound, and about one year to lose about eight pounds. While these results can provide a very nice boost to your weight loss efforts, they certainly do not support the pie-in-the-sky results that many green tea advocates claim.
It's evident that doing nothing more than drinking a few extra cups of tea each day is not going to result in sufficient weight loss to meet your goal. Nevertheless, it can still be a very helpful addition to your toolbox of weight losing techniques. Burning an extra 80 calories per day is nothing to sneeze at -- it might be just enough to shift your daily balance away from a calorie surplus to a calorie deficit.
So in summary, you can't expect the pounds melt magically away just by following a simple green tea diet. But realistically speaking, the research does indicate that green tea remains an effective, if limited, tool for achieving significant weight loss.
Kualani Kapuna is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to One Great Earth. She is very interested in the world around us and likes to write on a variety of topics.
She is a firm believer in the health benefits of following a green tea diet.
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