This is an archived article and the information in the story may be outdated. Please check the time stamp on the story to see when it was updated last.
An efficient metabolism is essential for achieving healthy weight loss with ease, naturally increasing the calories you burn throughout the day and allowing you to maintain the necessary deficit to see results more quickly. The speed of your metabolism is determined by a variety of factors from your physical activity to the foods you regularly eat within your diet, and making small changes to your habits can have a significant impact on your metabolism for the better. As you work towards increased fat burn and a faster metabolism for weight loss, there’s one habit that doctors recommend integrating into your morning routine to streamline results.
Green Tea
A morning boost of caffeine is valuable not only in the energy it provides your day, but depending on the source it can also help to speed up your metabolism as you work towards weight loss. While coffee has a number of benefits of its own, starting off your morning with a cup of green tea is one of the best tricks to include in your arsenal for speeding up your metabolism. Michele Canon, XPRO, NASM CPT and Nutritionist for STRIDE GO explains, “Green tea contains caffeine and a potent antioxidant called epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). This catechin works by triggering enzymes to release stored fat from cells to be used as energy. The effect of EGCG in combination with caffeine further stimulates fat burning.”
The efficacy of your metabolism is key in determining how quickly your body burns through fat, leading to a larger calorie deficit without having to deprive yourself of any foods. “A faster, more efficient metabolism is important because it means your body is able to burn more calories at rest. When your body is metabolically healthy, it makes it easier to sustain an ideal weight over a lifetime,” notes Canon. Therefore, drinking a cup of green tea before breakfast can help to set your body into fat burning overdrive, providing you with more energy in the morning to sustain yourself throughout the day, and allowing food to work more effectively as fuel.
Once you’ve integrated green tea into your morning routine, it’s important to remember that results don’t come overnight and you’ll still need to maintain an otherwise healthy approach to weight loss in order to see any changes in your body. “When you combine green tea with a consistent workout routine and healthy diet, you can expect to see a difference in your weight and metabolic rate within 4-6 weeks,” says Canon. This may seem slow, but results which are achieved in a healthy and often less timely manner are typically easier to sustain over a long period of time, avoiding yo-yo dieting and ultimately preserving your body.
Weight loss may seem like an uphill battle, but focusing on making small changes that will improve your metabolism and boost fat burn without dramatically overhauling your life will be the best way to see significant changes that you can maintain. Adding green tea to your morning routine is a great, simple trick for naturally increasing the energy your body expends throughout the morning, hiking up calorie burn at rest and making weight loss that much easier. Of course, swapping a highly sugary coffee beverage with green tea in the morning will naturally take you one step closer to your goals as sugar is a primary culprit for unexpected weight gain and energy lulls, so being cognizant of this when preparing your green tea will also be helpful in reaching your goals with ease.