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Green Tea for Weight Loss

There are many very good health reasons to drink green tea, as has been known and understood for thousands of years by the Chinese and other Far East civilizations. We in the West as waking up to these benefits and as our scientists investigate ever more deeply into the properties of this tea, more of its amazing secrets are revealed. One of these properties is its ability to help in the weight loss process and it does this in several different ways. here is an outline of how green tea can help you lose weight and how it brings this about.

Firstly, it helps to understand some of the ways in which we gain weight so that we can better understand how the properties of green tea can counter these effects and bring about a stabilization and eventual reduction in body weight.

Body Fat Storage

The body stores fat for one specific reason and that's because it is part of the digestive process that has been programmed into us to cope with times when food is scarce. Our ancestors did not have the modern appliances to store their food as we do now, such as freezers and refrigerators along with commercial food preservation methods from canning and bottling to vacuum packaging and the addition of artificial preservatives that we have now. So food had to be eaten fresh or it spoiled and had to be discarded. As most food had to be caught by hunters, that meant the family or tribe would eat well when the hunters brought back a fresh kill, or they would go hungry if they did not. To cope with the extremes of feast and famine, the body stores fat when we have plenty to eat so that it can be used during times when there is no food. During the times of famine, the body fat is slowly used up for energy to keep our ancestors alive until the next time of plenty.

In modern times, there are rarely times of scarcity, so as we tend to eat more than we need, we store the excess as fat. However, without the times of scarcity to balance this out, unless we exercise, our bodies never get to use the excess fat and instead just keep piling on more and more until we become obese.

How Green Tea Helps Us Lose Weight

While exercise is essential to force our bodies to burn excess fat, we can also help the process along by the diet we eat. We can also help that process by drinking green tea to lose weight, because some of its properties help the body to burn fats while also helping to prevent excess fats being stored. This is how it works:

Preventing Fat Storage

One of the properties of green tea suppresses the insulin response to eating foods that are high in refined sugars or carbohydrates that fall into the category of high GI (Glycemic Index). These foods cause a spike in blood sugar levels which trigger an insulin response to bring those levels back down to normal by carrying off the excess sugars and storing them as fat. By suppressing this insulin response, green tea helps to reduce the amount of body fat that would otherwise be stored by this process.

Another way in which this marvelous tea helps to prevent fat being stored is indirect, but also effective. Drinking the tea relaxes us, which in turn reduces stress. Stress is another factor that causes more fat to be stored in the body, so by reducing stress, we also reduce the tendency to store more fat.

Fat Burning Properties

Another property of the tea is in its caffeine content. Although this is lower than black tea and also coffee, it combines with other properties of the tea to speed up the body's metabolism and in turn accelerates the rate at which it burns fat, especially when combined with exercise.

So you can see that there are many good reasons to drink green tea to help with your own weight loss efforts. Added to the health giving properties, this makes it a very good beverage to drink in place of coffee or soda to improve health and aid overall body management.

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