Green Tea: Does It Actually Help You To Lose Weight?

For as long as I can remember, green tea has been a prominent weight management supplement.

Like whey protein to muscle growth, green tea has always had a strong association with weight loss and is something I’ve used in the past to assist with my fat loss goals.

At first it started with a few cups a day. Then I realised you could get about 5 cups worth in just a single tab of Green Tea Extract, a widely accessible supplement available in most supermarket chains and high street drug stores. You get about 450mg of green tea extract in just one tablet, alongside 18mg of catechins and 36mg of caffeine – better than sinking five cups of the stuff and surrendering the majority of your day to the bathroom.

When you’re relatively fresh to the exercise ‘game’ (if we can call it that without being too cringey), you take things as gospel. I’ve been in the same position. I never questioned the ability of green tea to magically strip my fat away. I never gave a second thought to the components within the tea that were having an effect.

Now I’m much more of a nerd.

Green tea is made up of catechins (powerful antioxidants great for helping with cell damage), caffeine (we all know what that is), and L-Theanine (proven to reduce symptoms of anxiety and stress) and apparently it has a speeding up effect on your metabolism.

Now after scanning the research, there’s no doubting its effects on feelings of wellbeing. A systematic review published in Phytomedicine in 2017 concluded that green tea influences psychopathological symptoms including the reduction of anxiety, improvement in memory and attention and brain function. The review also stated that these benefits could not be attributed to a single constituent of the beverage, meaning many of its benefits may be linked to the L-Theanine for example, and not necessarily the green tea itself.

The Institute of Fruit Tree & Tea Science have supported these findings, demonstrating positive effects of green tea and tea catechins against inflammatory diseases.

But when it comes to weight loss the research is less convincing. In the Cochrane Systematic Review, 2012, the efficacy for green tea for weight loss in overweight and obese adults was investigated. They concluded that the role of green tea in aiding weight loss was not statistically significant and that there was no significant effect on the maintenance of weight loss.

In the same year, a study conducted by Kovacs & Lejeune, 2012, showed that weight maintenance after 7.5% body weight loss was not affected by green tea treatment.

There’s no harm in consuming green tea (unless you’re on 1,000 cups a day), but if weight loss is the goal then there may be better things to spend your money on.

At the end of the day, regardless of how much green tea you’re drinking, there’d be absolutely zero effect on weight loss unless a calorie deficit was enforced in the first place. That should be where your initial focus lies, not on a supplement that has very little effect on your body weight.