Drink to Your Health: Helpful Beverages to Add to Your Weight Loss Efforts

If you plan to lose weight, and hate how your diet has you making do without the foods that you love, it isn’t all depressing news. There are plenty of diet beverages that you can turn to, to replace the excitement and flavor that you miss. Weight loss beverages can be full of wonderful tastes, and you can actually look forward to them. Most people never get to experience these tastes without a weight loss regimen. Seen this way, weight loss can be an adventure of good taste.

Green tea

While you’ve probably heard of green tea and its health benefits, you may have missed how deep those virtues really go. Not only does green tea come with antioxidant properties dozens of times more powerful than regular tea, it puts supplementary amino acids such as l-theanine in your system as well, that work to reduce stress. Lowering stress is an excellent step towards containing weight gain.

To those hoping to lose weight, the most important contribution made by green tea lies in its ability to raise thermogenesis — the rate at which the body burns calories. The caffeine in green tea, and the antioxidants called catechins, help in this area.

Green tea, when it is culinary grade (the Matcha Green Tea Powder brand from Kiss Me Organics here is an example) can even be added to recipes for smoothies, bread, cakes and sauces for special flavor. The more you manage to include in your diet, the better the results are.

If you like green tea by itself, rather than as part of a recipe, there is more than one way to make it. The Arabian green tea recipe, for instance, comes with added cumin, mint and ginger for better flavor.

A smoothie with kiwi and pineapple

In general, smoothies tend to be risky, especially the kinds that are commercially sold. They tend to be full of tasty, but fattening ingredients such as white sugar and heavy cream. Vendors sometimes replace white sugar with artificial sweeteners, but those can be fattening, as well. When you make your own at home, you can be sure that what you get is completely healthy, in addition to being delicious.

The secret is to use almond milk, instead of real milk. With slices of pineapple and kiwi added (never the kind soaked in syrup), and notably no sugar or other sweetener, you have a wonderful smoothie in no time.

Pineapple is great for weight loss, because it comes with an enzyme called bromelain that helps stem inflammation of the digestive tract, and helps with digestion. Fighting inflammation is a proven weight loss technique. When the digestive tract is inflamed, it makes the body’s natural weight reduction hormone leptin less effective. Bromelain also helps by lowering the body’s levels of T-cell receptor, that tone down the body’s allergic responses in those who are prone to such health challenges.

There are more familiar weight loss benefits, as well. The fiber content in pineapple, for example, helps with digestive health, and is also very filling.

Kiwi contributes by helping with your vitamin C intake, a nutrient that makes digestion more efficient. It’s most important role in any weight loss plan, however lies in its especially interesting and powerful taste. Kiwi can jazz up any smoothie recipe without being fattening.

Try milk

Scientists have studied the connection between calcium supplements and weight loss for decades, but have come up with little in favor of calcium. With milk, however, there is consensus. A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds that calcium that enters the body through the medium of milk consumed, had measurable weight loss effects. It does need to be skim milk, however, to ensure fat consumption in moderation.

Try a dark chocolate milkshake

Usually chocolate would be the last thing to try in a diet. Yet, in reality, chocolate can help, when taken in moderation. the benefits appear in an indirect way. Allowing yourself some chocolate can help satisfy your cravings for rich foods. Making your chocolate allowance a part of a large, filling beverage like a milkshake can help smother cravings. Such milkshakes can be meal replacements. They fill you up, they are nutritious, and they end up putting no more calories in your system than a meal would.

A recipe book for weight loss beverages is an excellent way to go about a weight-loss diet. You can easily find a different, tasty recipe or two each day. When your taste buds are this happy, you have no reason to crave the fattening foods that you’ve always loved.

Corey Nolan is a personal fitness instructor who, as well as working 1-on-1 with people, runs weight loss classes for groups of 10+ people on weekends and evenings. He shares some of his tips on what to eat and what to avoid in his articles.