How Green Tea Can Help You Lose Weight Naturally

Green tea is the healthiest beverage on the planet.

It is loaded with antioxidants and various substances that are beneficial for health.

Many studies have shown that green tea can increase fat burning and help you lose weight.

Let me explain how that works...

Green Tea Contains Substances That Can Help You Lose Fat

Green tea is more than just hot, flavored water.

The bioactive substances in the tea leaves dissolve in the water and make it into the final drink.

When you drink a cup of quality tea, you're actually getting a large amount of beneficial substances with potent biological effects (1).

The best known of these is caffeine. A cup of green tea contains much less caffeine (24-40 mg) than a cup of coffee (100-200 mg), but still enough to have a mild effect.

Caffeine is a well known stimulant that has been shown to aid fat burning and improve exercise performance in numerous studies (2, 3).

But where green tea really shines is in its massive range of antioxidants... being loaded with potent antioxidants called catechins (4).

The most important of these is EGCG (Epigallocatechin gallate), a substance that can boost metabolism.

Keep in mind that these benefits can be derived both from drinking green tea as a beverage, as well as taking green tea extract as a supplement. Most of the studies used extracts.

Green Tea Can Help Mobilize Fat From Fat Cells

In order to burn fat, it must first be broken down in the fat cell and moved into the bloodstream.

The active compounds in green tea can aid in this process by boosting the effects of some fat burning hormones.

The main antioxidant in tea, EGCG, can help inhibit an enzyme that breaks down the hormone norepinephrine (5).

When this enzyme is inhibited, the amount of norepinephrine increases (6).

This hormone is used by the nervous system as a signal to the fat cells, telling them to break down fat. Therefore, more norepinephrine leads to a stronger signal being sent to the fat cell and more fat gets broken down.

Caffeine and EGCG (both found naturally in green tea) may actually have a synergistic effect, because caffeine enhances another step in the same pathway (7).

The end result is that the fat cell breaks down more fat, which is released into the bloodstream and becomes available for use as energy by cells that need it, like muscle cells.