In my continuing quest to lose a very stubborn 20 pounds, I gave in to the hype and bought some green tea supplement tablets. THEN I read the box. Does anyone here take this? I am a little nervous about trying it in case I get wired (“naturally occurring caffeine”).
I guess my concerns are about side effects, and does it even work?
Is there a specific benefit to using supplements, as opposed to making a cup of green tea? Unlike many natural health products, it’s easy to find, doesn’t give you bad breath and is very tasty, so I’m a bit puzzled as to why the supplement is superior in this case.
Personally, I’m a little skeptical - I went through a phase at one point where I fell in love with green tea and guzzled the stuff like it was going out of style (I’m talking four to five cups a day) and didn’t lose a pound in the process… but that’s really just based on my personal experience and without having read any of the research on the potential wondrous powers of tea.
I found drinking green tea kept the weight at bay… but since I have a lightning metabolism, I’m probably a bad case study. Still, it worked. I looked and felt slimmer.
I should get back into that stuff. Soooo good. 
I drink a lot of green tea and oloong-cha (like a chinese darker tea, forgot what we call it back in the States) and I can say that if it’s caffeine you’re worried about you might want to stay away. I have kind of a whacky tolerance to caffeine, mind you, but I can chug two energy drinks and go to sleep, or drink 3 cups of coffee no problems, but green tea gets me wired. Especially like Genmai-cha (green tea with rice), I used to pound that stuff back in college with no remorse as a great study drink, hehe.
I do agree with staying away from the “supplementals” though. why take a pill when you can just drink a mug of the real stuff?
I’m a coffee lover who has recently moved to a land where the only coffee is instant. I keep getting bags of green tea as gifts, so I’ve been drinking that instead.
That stuff gets me wired! More wired than coffee ever did! I also toss back the redbull and espressos without blinking, but my morning cup of tea has me wacky and jittery.
Anyway, if green tea has any slimming effects, it’s probably in part because of the caffeine (which quells hunger) and the water content filling up your stomach. I’d drink the real thing. It’s a lot yummier if you buy the whole leaf stuff from a fancy coffee shop. Green tea bags kind of suck.
I drink green tea when I’m sick, because it has tons of antioxidants, and you can load it up with honey…which makes your throat happy when you have a sore throat/cold…plus it’s hot…
The caffeine in green tea is negligible compared to a cup of coffee…even less than regular black tea…which we Americans usually drink iced…so unless the tablets you are taking are super-concentrated, I wouldn’t worry about the caffeine. You’d get twice the caffeine from a can of Coke.
While I’ve never tried green tea as a weight loss method, I found it curious that when I went to my friend’s stepmother’s house for dinner, she served small cups of green tea afterwards “to cut the fat!”
She was a little tiny Korean woman, and her waist was the size of my thigh. Granted, she didn’t take second helpings of dinner like we did…
But nonetheless, she was pleasantly and firmly convinced that green tea had weight-loss benefits.
If I had to guess, I would say that like anything that ends the meal–be it cigarettes, coffee, hot tea–if you stop eating because you’re doing something else, you may have more success losing weight than if you didn’t have a “stop eating” signal. I’m a smoker and I know that I don’t eat anything else after I have a cigarette. And if I’m in a restaurant, I don’t eat anything after the post-dinner drinks show up, regardless of cigs. I drink my coffee or my Grand Marnier or whatever it is, and my plate of food has lost its appeal.
There’s something to be said for distracting yourself from your dinner.
Okay, well I think I am drawing the conclusion that the there is no real benefit to the supplement and it was a waste of money. Maybe I’ll try it on the weekend out of curiosity.
Thanks all!
This is correct. What would make you think a green tea pill would help you lose weight? 
There seems to be more health benefit to drinking the tea as opposed to a supplement. A recent article talked about how it helped bad breath which means you actually have to have the tea in your mouth. You can buy decaffeinated tea if you are worried about too much caffeine. If you don’t like hot tea it makes a nice iced tea, it’s kind of minty tasting. Use a diet sweetener or a natural sweetener, like stevia, to cut the calories.
Because that is how it is marketed. That said, I don’t believe in quick fixes either. Must have been a week moment.