So how is the green tea weight loss study going? After this first week, I can honestly say, I didn’t meet my goal of 1 pound for this first week but instead lost about half a pound. So where did I go wrong?

First I can say, I did cut back on the amount of food being eaten which is probably responsible for the half pound lost. Where I went wrong though is not actually drinking five cups a day and this is where it’s good to analyze stuff like this so you can avoid any obstacles you may have in reaching your goals.

As a working stiff, a majority of my day is spent at work and there wasn’t a way to make hot tea, nor did I have a thermos to transport hot tea to work. Today I remedied that problem with the purchase of a thermos. Buying pre-bottled green tea would also have worked but the green tea diet should be cheap and at $1.40 per bottle, that adds up.

For the food consumed, I really only have choices when it comes to breakfast in dinner. Lunch is provided by my company and here in Japan, it’s bad manners to not eat all of your food. On the plus side it’s Japanese food so that means lots of miso, nori, and rice and such. Japanese food also has lots of root vegetables which I think is supposed to be healthy. Breakfast is usually eggs and toast or toast with homemade marmalade. Dinner has been pretty standard American stuff, chicken and dumplings, pasta alla carbonara, homemade pizza etc. The only difference is that instead of eating two bowls of chicken and dumplings, I’m only eating one.
Originally, I thought my commute to work by bicycle was going to be enough as far as exercise go but from here on out, I’m going to try and add thirty minutes of using my Xoot Street to supplement the commuting. This will provide several benefits: Besides the extra aerobic exercise, with the addition of a backpack and a couple water bottles, I can get some strength training. Secondly, I gain in proficiency in riding the Xootr which will be a plus when I use the scooter for traveling. Hopefully too, my wife will start to feel as perhaps the Xootr just might be worth the money I spent on it, instead of some stupid nerdy toy. Finally, since I did write an article for this site reviewing the scooter, it’ll give me a chance to update that article on how well it’s holding up.

So to sum up, week one was either a failure or less successful than hoped. Analysis however, reveals the solution is very simple and so going into week two of the green tea diet, I feel hopeful. As it stands, the diet is: eat less, exercise 30 minutes a day (Xootr Street) and five cups of green tea. It’s very likely that there won’t be another update of my progress with the diet as constant updating is a bit geeky to me. The purpose of this post was to instead take a look at obstacles to meeting your goals and finding ways around those obstacles.

Why Green Tea Weight Loss?
One of the drawbacks about having a website on homemade ice cream, is that you can eat a lot of homemade ice cream. This isn’t necessarily a good thing for one’s waistline. When I left the military 10 years ago, I was a “studly” 185 pounds. Today, I am a mushy 240 pounds — not attractive! Having a daughter, and wanting to be a good parent, something has to be done if I’m to live to see my grandchildren. And thus the idea for the green tea weight loss challenge.

In my mind, the topic of weight loss is super sleazy. Probably about as sleazy as cell phones, check-cashing loans, infomercials, and credit cards for people with bad credit. What makes it so sleazy, is all the scams that attempt to exploit people who are unhappy with their appearance. As far as I know, there is only one way to lose weight and that’s the way combination of controlling your diet and exercise. In basic training at least, if you were overweight, they sent you to fat camp first where you ate nothing but salads and do exercise all day before you can join a platoon. So with that in mind, I’ll be adding 5 cups of tea to my diet daily for a sort of green tea diet.

Green Tea as a Weight Loss Tea
If you go to Wikipedia, and look up green tea and weight loss, you’ll find it written that there are no studies in Pubmed, done to attribute any measurable weight loss to green tea. However, I was able to find two studies, one by the Queen Margaret University, in Scotland and one in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition which did a study on the effects of green tea on postprandial (means after meals) thermogenesis/energy expenditure and fat oxidation. Fat oxidation is just a fancy way to say how the body uses energy from fat. More specifically, the study looked at the amounts of epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) in green tea. The study found that for one control group, 122 mg of EGCG/135 mg caffeine, energy expenditure increased by 2.9% and fat oxidation increased by 12%. That’s versus no significant change for a caffeine only control group. According to the website The World’s Healthiest Foods, one cup of green tea contains between 25 and 35 mg of EGCG so to reach 122 mg of snarf it would require that I drink 4.88 cups of green tea. So I guess what I’m saying, is sorry Wikipedia you’re wrong. Anyways, there are other reasons for choosing green tea as an addition to my diet. For one thing it’s cheap and secondly, I live in Kagoshima Japan, which has a healthy green tea industry so it’s available everywhere and nearly infinite varieties. In fact, if I go out on my balcony, I can see a store which specializes in green tea across the street. Lastly, one green tea weight loss study done by the University of Geneva found that by simply drinking 5 cups of green tea a day, without any further activity, the human body burned between 70-80 extra calories, in other words 525 calories a week on average.

A Green Tea Shop in Kagoshima, Japan as seen from my Balcony

The Weight-loss Goal
Nutritionists, often recommend starting with a weight-loss goal of losing 10% of your total body weight and for me, that’s 24 pounds. Furthermore, they consider a weekly weight loss goal of 1 to 2 pounds to be ideal. Therefore in order to lose 24 pounds it will take between three and four months.

The Green Tea Diet
I already feel that I get quite a bit of exercise in my daily routine. I cycle to work at a brisk pace, and fairly active job which means that I don’t spend all day sitting on my but but rather running around. So to achieve my weight loss objective, I’ll be cutting back on ice cream (would green tea ice cream be ok?), beer and other snacks and also employing the concept known in Japanese as hara hachi bu (speech dictation software picked that up as “hot a hottie”) which means eating until you feel about 80% full. Additionally, there’ll be 5 cups of green tea consumed throughout the day. There won’t be any special powders, electrified belts, booty jigglers (booty jigglers are making a comeback in Japan), or any other bizarre crap that the weight-loss industry is trying to convince you that you need to lose weight. In a nut shell, green tea diet = simple.

About Green Tea
In the Japanese language, words change depending on what state they’re in. Take the word rice for example, uncooked rice (kome) is different than cooked rice in a bowl (gohan) which is different than cooked rice on a plate (raisu). And so it goes the same for green tea in Japan. Most of the words used for green tea, early grades of quality of tea, while other words indicate how the tea was processed. The most commonly used tea however, is called sencha. Green tea also comes in many forms. You can get loose tea leaves, green tea in bags (think earl grey or lipton), or green tea as a power. In Japan, the most common type is loose tea leaves.

Left to right: Sencha, Genmaicha, Sencha, Houjicha, Sencha Center: Loose tea leaves (from bag)

Tea in Japan, is usually served in small cups that lack handles (I’ve been told that these cups lack handles so you can warm your hands on the cup) and is poured from a ceramic or porcelain teapot that has a lid, and a large handle protruding from the side. It’s important to note, that when you serve the tea, you’ll need to hold onto the lid to keep it from falling off. Again, if you hit up Wikipedia, you’ll find out that the recommended amount of tea to brew is 2 grams per 100 mL of water. The tea should then be steeped for two or three minutes. Living in Japan however, I can tell you that most Japanese people just dump in the tea from a premeasured scoop, fill the teapot with water from an electric kettle, serve the tea for everybody, refill the teapot with water and place it back on the table so everyone can have seconds. They don’t usually exchange the tea leaves but instead, get several brews. This also reduces the amount of caffeine per each subsequent pot which might be useful if you want to drink a cup before bedtime.

Green Tea Weight Loss Conclusion or Ice Cream Addiction Recovery in a Nutshell
Anyways, that’s the green tea weight loss challenge. To recap, drink 5 glasses of green tea throughout the day, and reduce the total amount of food consumed while getting some brisk, low-stress exercise. It doesn’t seem as life changing (think life upheaval) as joining a gym, or buying preprocessed “diet” foods at the grocery store and that’s why I think I can do this. If you’d like to try this, drop me a line and let me know how it goes.