Does Green Tea Help With Weight Loss?

Green tea is considered one of the healthiest beverages in the world — and for good reason. It's packed full of powerful antioxidants and other health-boosting compounds and nutrients (via Healthline). As a result, green tea is associated with many important health benefits, including weight loss.

As it turns out, drinking green tea on a regular basis can actually help you burn body fat and lose weight. That's because green tea consists of many substances and ingredients that can help boost your metabolism. For instance, green tea contains caffeine and an antioxidant known as catechin, both of which can help speed up your metabolic rate and help your body burn excess fat.

Caffeine and catechin can also increase your body's rate of perceived exertion. This can help you exert more energy and boost your athletic performance. Furthermore, multiple studies have shown that drinking green tea can help you burn 3% to 4% more calories per day. This equals around 60 to 80 additional calories spent every day.

If you're looking to lose weight, drinking green tea alongside a well-balanced diet and regular exercise routine is a safe and effective way to achieve this goal and garner positive results (via Medical News Today). But exactly how much tea do you need to drink in order to speed up your metabolism and start losing weight?

While there's no magic number, drinking two to three cups of green tea every day should be enough to help jumpstart weight loss. And although the exact brand doesn't matter, it's best to drink green teas that are minimally processed, as they tend to have a higher nutritional content than tea leaves that are more highly processed. It's also better to drink plain green tea (via Women's Health). Adding milk and sugar to your tea will only add calories to the beverage, which can be counterproductive if you're drinking it specifically to lose weight. 

For best use, drink a cup of hot green tea in the morning, in the early afternoon, and shortly before you exercise. As David Wiener, a training specialist at Freeletics, told Women's Health: "If you consume green tea before working out, these antioxidant compounds can increase your fat burning during cardio exercise, as well as continuing to burn calories at rest, helping you burn more than you would with exercise alone."