Ginger is a common ingredient in ‘fat burning’ supplements but freshly made ginger tea can be even more effective for losing weight than popping pills.
There are 5 main ways that ginger can help with weight loss:
- Enhances digestion.
- Suppresses hunger.
- Moderates blood sugar.
- Increases the thermogenic effect of the food you eat
- Acts as a natural diuretic to flush away water retention.
Here’s a closer look at each 5 of these ginger tea benefits to help you reach your ideal body weight.
1. Improves Digestive Function
When your digestive system is working properly it’s much easier to get slimmer naturally.
This is not just by combating stomach bloat or intestinal inflammation that can temporarily make you look fat either.
Once you are absorbing more energy and health-giving nutrients from your food, your body has less need to stimulate hunger in an effort to get what it needs.
Ginger tea’s ability to combat the causes of constipation is also highly beneficial for weight loss. When you are regularly constipated your liver has difficulty breaking down lipids and they can clog up your system and get stored as body fat.
2. Enhances Satiety and Improves Appetite Control
Keeping your hunger under control and eating less sugary and fatty foods is vital if you want to lose weight. A natural appetite suppressant, ginger can help lower the urge to eat all the time and even keep you feeling fuller for longer after a meal.
This study on overweight men found taking a ginger powder beverage resulted in “lower hunger, lower perspective food intake and greater fullness”. The researchers also stated that there was a “significant effect of ginger on the thermic effect of food… vs control”.
Drinking a cup of strong ginger tea, such as one made from this Traditional Medicinals organic brand, before or during a meal has to be one of the simplest and most enjoyable ways to moderate hunger naturally.
3. Beneficial for Blood Sugar Control
This study found “ginger supplementation significantly reduced the levels of fasting blood sugar versus placebo”.
Other research trials have also found ginger moderated fasting glucose levels, lowered bad LDL cholesterol and increased beneficial HDL cholesterol.
Eating ginger or drinking ginger tea may be helpful in controlling blood sugar if you are diabetic as well, but discuss this with your physician.
Ginger tea shouldn’t be used at the same time as diabetes medications due to this otherwise positive side effect.
For those without diabetes, controlling high blood sugar and increasing HDL levels of cholesterol is always going to be a positive step towards healthy weight loss.
4. Elevates Thermogenesis
As well as enhancing digestion, moderating fasting blood sugar, and suppressing hunger cravings, ginger appears to increase diet-induced thermogenesis and the rate at which your body burns calories.
Alongside the study above, this meta-analysis of ginger randomized controlled trials noted that “supplementation with ginger significantly decreased body weight… waist to hip ratio… fasting glucose… and insulin resistance index”.
While powdered ginger capsules are usually used in clinical trials, there’s no reason to suspect that fresh ginger tea wouldn’t be just as effective. Both for weight loss and increasing the rate at which calories are used and body fat is burned.
5. Natural Diuretic
A diuretic is a substance that helps flush away excess water weight and sodium trapped in tissues, promoting a slimmer body and healthier appearance.
Ginger tea is recognized as a beneficial herbal remedy for water retention and, since diuretics work quite quickly, it could provide fast and noticeable results if you have edema (a puffy body) from retaining excess fluids.
Longer-term though, the digestion improving, blood sugar lowering, hunger fighting and fat metabolizing properties of ginger tea will be much more important for helping you lose weight naturally.
Regular use will significantly improve the effectiveness of ginger root tea for weight loss, so enjoy sipping on a warm cup of it daily, especially before or during larger meals high in fats.
3 Ginger Tea Blends to Help You Lose Weight
While ginger tea is an excellent weight loss aid on its own, certain herbal blends can enhance its thermogenic properties even further. Let’s have a look at 3 of the best:
1. Green Tea and Ginger
Like ginger, green tea is known to be a highly effective weight loss aid. Combining the two, with their different compounds and actions, can provide noticeable results more quickly than using just green tea or ginger root on their own.
This highly rated and organic blend is the best I’ve found, with high levels of gingerol and beneficial epigallocatechin gallate and other antioxidant polyphenols from Camellia sinensis (green tea).
2. Ginger Tea with Turmeric
Golden turmeric aids digestion and boosts fat burning, though in different ways to ginger tea. It’s curcumin compound is also a premier anti-inflammatory and, combined with ginger, it would be particularly beneficial for weight gain and obesity associated with inflammation.
These bleach-free and organic tea bags of ginger and turmeric are an excellent combination in a spicy tea blend that customer reviews seem to really like the taste of.
As an added benefit, it will also help treat other inflammatory conditions in your body, like joint pain from arthritis, skin diseases and even improve cardiovascular health.
3. Lemon Ginger Tea
Ginger and lemon taste great together and this delicious digestive blend is a really enjoyable tea to drink. Aside from its stomach benefits, it is also great for a sore throat, soothing a cough and lessening the symptoms of a cold.
Lemon helps you lose weight through alternative channels to ginger tea, particularly detoxification, so these two are a good combination to have as the same time.
While tea bags are convenient, for even faster results try squeezing fresh lemon water and having it together with slices of ginger root in a hot tea.
This lemon juice and ginger blend is particularly effective first thing the morning for detox and increased metabolism.
More Beneficial Effects of Ginger Root Tea
Ginger is a natural remedy for bloating and gas and drinking it in a strong tea can also help relieve heartburn, indigestion and nausea. It even helps protect your stomach from ulcers.
There’s a special method for making ginger tea at home here from the fresh rhizome for a cheap and delicious way to enjoy it.
Though be aware of a few potential ginger side effects, especially for people taking prescription drugs.
It should be clear from all these articles just how beneficial ginger tea is, not just for weight loss, but as a natural treatment for many common health problems and digestive issues.
If you’re not already using it, in freshly brewed infusions of the root, or high strength tea bags like these, I hope you’ll give it a try.
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