Green Tea Diet Plan
7 Easy Steps to Permanent Slimming

A 7-step easy-to-follow green tea diet plan that includes useful tips on food recipes, menus, exercise programs and alcohol consumption.

Unlike other weight loss programs that may involve counting carbohydrate grams, monitoring calories and drinking maple syrup, the green tea diet plan is easy to follow. The most important thing is drinking a quality green tea that has been proven by scientific studies to help you increase energy and burn fat.

Green tea keeps you in optimum health. It helps you achieve your goals more easily. It will complement any food and exercise program you choose to follow.

What do successful weight loss stories have in common?

Listed below are 7 important findings that have been proven time and again in countless human case studies. As you read the words on this page, consider how to incorporate them into your green tea diet plan.

Green Tea Diet Plan #1:
Love Your Tea!

Replace your usual beverages with tea. If you can’t give up your morning Joe right away, just limit yourself to one cup of coffee and follow that with a cup of tea later in the morning. Commit to one or two mornings a week and keep adding days as the week goes by.

Brew a large amount of green tea in the morning and keep it on hand. Drink tea throughout the day. Drink it in between meals and with your meals.

Aim for at least 6 glasses (or mugs) of green tea per day. You can drink it iced or hot, it’s up to you (and the weather, I suppose).

Learn why a tea diet really works.

Green Tea Diet Plan #2:
Moderate Alcohol Consumption

According to Dr. Barnard, author of A Physician's Slimming Guide, 1 to 2 servings of alcohol a day does not cause any heart problems. If you are pregnant or prone to developing breast cancer, even a small amount can increase your risk significantly.

Occasional alcohol consumption is acceptable. Red wine is the best choice due to its antioxidant properties.

If you are drinking alcohol for health reasons, remember that tea contains far more antioxidants than red wine, and the antioxidant EGCG in green tea has been found to be twice as powerful as red wine's resveratrol.

Here is how much one serving of alcohol contains in term of calories:

4 ounce of wine contains 85 calories
1.5 ounce of liquor contains 124 calories
12 ounce of beer contains 150 calories

It is widely accepted that alcohol is fattening. But that's not the only reason why it should be avoided. What's important is that drinking alcohol can stimulate appetite and make you want to eat more.

If you eat a potato, you feel full and stop eating. But when you drink alcohol, you want to eat even more, and these calories just get added straight onto your waistline.

Want to lose weight fast? Follow your green tea diet plan. Drink tea and cut back on alcohol.

Green Tea Diet Plan #3:
Go Healthy On Fat

It is obvious, isn't it? Want to lose weight, eat less fat! But this is actually the hardest part of any diet. This is when you need to follow a weight loss program that works for you.

My preference is to incorporate your green tea diet plan alongside a low fat diet. I will make a case for it here. I am sure you will do what feels right for you.

When you eat a balanced diet, your food intake will consist of:

60% carbohydrates: Whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes.
15 to 25% protein (around 50 grams): Lean beef & pork, poultry, eggs, fish, legumes, nuts and seeds.
15 to 25 % fat.

Now, that's the theory. In real life, most people get about 40% of their calories from fat! On a typical 2,000 calories menu, this is 800 calories. We don't realize this because fatty foods are everywhere.

Here are the percentage of fat calories for some animal products:

Milk 35%
Extra lean ground beef 54%
Ground beef 60%

A 1990 Study conducted in Cornell University kept volunteers on several diets for several weeks. They found that those who ate food that was very low in fat and high in carbohydrates lost weight steadily, without limiting how much they ate.

But those on a high fat diet could not lose weight even though they ate skimpy portions.

There are at least 3 reasons why fat and oil are bad for you.

They carry twice as many calories as any other food types. Fat and oil contain 9 calories per gram, carbohydrates and proteins contain only 4 calories per gram.
Fat has by far the lowest thermic effect of any food. When you eat protein or carbohydrates, your body needs to burn 20% to 30% of that energy just to digest and absorb the food. Fat's thermic effect is just 3%. Little work is needed to absorb fat into your body.
The fat you eat is the fat you wear! Whichever types of fat you eat, whether they are saturated, unsaturated or trans-fat, they are ready to go straight into your fat tissue. Your body doesn't need to do any work to store them. If you don't do any exercise, these fats will stay there forever.

To add insult to injury, certain types of fat can cause serious health problems. I am talking about the processed fat (called hydrogenated or trans fatty acids) and to a lesser extent the saturated fat.

Which Fat You Eat Does Matter!

Saturated Fat

Saturated fats can be found in animal products such as butter, cheese, egg yolk, dairy and meat. They are considered harmful because they can increase your cholesterol level.

Unsaturated Fat

If possible, switch your fat intake to unsaturated fat, which can be found in fish, avocados, nuts and vegetable oils. They contain the healthy essential fatty acids (EPA) such as omega 3 and 6. Not only do EPA's reduce cholesterol, they also promote weight loss by increasing fat burning and metabolism.

Trans Fat

Finally, beware of trans fatty acids. They are basically the "processed" oils.

Vegetable oils, in their unprocessed form, are healthy and unsaturated. However, when exposed to light and air, they turn rancid very quickly. To make them last longer, manufacturers "hydrogenate" them. The trans fatty acids in hydrogenated oils are believed to increase bad LDL cholesterol more than saturated fat.

Hydrogenated oils are really sneaky and can be found in most day to day products. The package can say "no cholesterol" and "low saturated fat" and yet the product can be loaded with trans fats!

Products to watch out for are margarine, fried foods, cookies, biscuits and baked goods.

The key to successful weight loss is not to avoid fat altogether, but to eat low to moderate amounts of high quality fat.

Green Tea Diet Plan #4:
Beware of Refined Sugar!

According to Tom Venuto, author of the excellent ebook Burn the Fat, the 1980s and 1990s were the anti-fat era. No distinction was made between the good and bad fats. Mainstream media hit home the message: All fats are bad. Fats make you fat.

This spawned an entire industry of fat free foods, causing an average American's fat consumption to reduce dramatically in the two decades. However, a very strange thing happened. The incidence of obesity, instead of going down, actually shot up by 60% in the 1990s. What went wrong?

According to Tom, the main reason is because manufacturers have simply replaced fat with refined sugar. A food can be fat free on the label and be 100% sugar.

Eating refined sugar can caused your sugar level to spike up, which triggers a large release of insulin in your body. Having too much insulin in your body can increase food cravings and fat storage. So you may be eating a low fat diet, but those excess calories are being converted into fat all the same!

Speaking from my personal experience, avoiding refined sugar and trans-fat are two of the most important habits you can incorporate into your green tea diet plan. Fortunately, scientific studies have found that drinking green tea helps regulate your blood sugar level.

Green Tea Diet Plan #5:
Never Starve Yourself

Don't eat skimpy portions. When you go on a diet and starve, your body's survival instinct is triggered and you automatically go on "energy saving" mode. This reduces your metabolism and makes you burn fewer calories.

According to studies conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the real problem starts after the dieting period, because this slowed metabolism can continue for up to weeks afterwards.

This causes the familiar yo-yo phenomenon, where you not only regain the lost weight, but rebound to an even higher weight than you started with.

Green Tea Diet Plan #6:
Graze Like A Sheep

This may work for some of you, although it is less important than eating a low fat diet.

When you eat several times a day (in much smaller amounts), you raise your metabolism by providing your body with constant fuel. The body burns it quickly knowing that there is a steady supply of energy.

Stop eating huge meals and start eating periodically throughout the day. Have a modest breakfast, a mid-morning snack, a modest lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, a modest dinner and a little snack while watching your favorite show.

Make sure you aren’t eating too much. The idea is to break down three large meals into several smaller ones.

Green Tea Diet Plan Step #7:
Exercise!

It only takes three weeks to make something a habit. Exercise for three weeks while eating a healthy diet and you will reap the lasting rewards!

Find something you love to do in the way of exercise. The key is to have fun.

Let's start with a half hour walk everyday. If you like, also do an hour 3 times a week. Pick a place that you enjoy walking.

As your body starts to adapt to physical activities, you may want to step up another gear and aim for around 30 minutes of cardio per day.

If you have been on a low-calorie diet, try switching over to a diet plan without calorie restriction before performing any rigorous exercise.

This is because your low-calorie diet is likely to have reduced your metabolism. While exercising should increase your metabolism, it can actually have an opposite effect on people who have been starving themselves.

You may need to start with 15 minutes a day and work your way up. There are hundreds of cardio exercises. Choose from machines such as treadmills, ellipticals or rowing machines.

In addition, you may want to improve your strength via a program that you enjoy. Yoga, pilates or weight lifting should be incorporated in the same way (working your way up to 30 or more minutes) but every other day instead.

What other benefits does combining a green tea diet plan with exercise bring?

Green Tea Diet Plan and Exercise

Happy dieting… the green tea way!

References

Foster GD (1990). Controlled trial of the metabolic effects of a very low calorie diet: short and long term effects. Am J Clin Nutr 1990;51:167-72.

Neal D. Bernard (1992). A Physian's Slimming Guide. Book Publishing Company.

Burn The Fat. Feed The Muscle. Tom Venuto (2003).

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