Using green tea for weight loss is the “in” thing right now, especially now that a number of Hollywood stars are using it. You will hear about green tea in the news and you will find countless articles online about it, but what is almost always lacking is information about how exactly to use green tea for weight loss and what the actually dosage is! If you have been trying to find out this information and you are now frustrated that you couldn’t find anything clear and useful, then you have found the right article. Here we will explain exactly how much green tea you need based on studies.
First we need to understand what it is in green tea that brings about weight loss effects. It is actually the antioxidants in green tea called catechins, which are also responsible for the many other health benefits of green tea, that generate weight loss and these catechins do it in two distinct ways.
- Catechins boost our metabolic rate, which in turn increases the amount of calories we burn daily.
- Catechins dissolve some of the fat in our blood, that gets there from the food we eat, before it gets deposited on the body as fat cells.
So what a number of studies have found is that the right dosage of these catechins is key for inducing green tea weight loss, and that the weight loss effects increase substantially in combination with a healthy diet and exercise. The weight loss properties of green tea may still work for those who do not change their diet or increase their physical activity levels, but the effects are so slow that it is almost ineffective.
A Japanese study found that giving overweight men 690-mg of catechins helped them lose significantly more body fat, especially around the abdomen, than men given only 22-mg. This study put all the male volunteers on the same diet and the same exercise program of 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise three times a week for a period of 3 months, the only difference being that half of them were given 690mg of catechin and the other half 22mg. This is clear evidence that green tea catechins really help speed up any weight loss program!
Ok, so the question is “how do we consume 690-mg of catechins each day?”.
There are basically two ways to do this:
- Drink 5 to 6 cups of loose leaf green tea each day. A cup of loose leaf green tea delivers, on average, about 120-mg of catechins. However, avoid green tea bags, these contain green tea leaf shavings, and are not the whole loose leaf. These tea bags contain less than half the amount of catechins of loose leaf tea.
- If 5 to 6 cups a day doesn’t sound doable, then use green tea extract, which is a supplement form of green tea that you can buy at most health food stores. Make sure the product you buy clearly states how many catechins (which most of them do) each pill or capsule contains, this way you can rest assured that you are getting the correct amount of catechins.
Sources:
Am J Clin Nutr.
2005 Jan;81(1):122-9.
“Ingestion of a tea rich in catechins leads to a reduction in body fat and malondialdehyde-modified LDL in men.”
Nagao T, Komine Y, Soga S, Meguro S, Hase T, Tanaka Y, Tokimitsu I.
