The Power of Tea

One of the tools I use to help both my weight loss and recovery from my workouts is tea. Teas give you a flavourful drink with no calories, which means you can have as much as you want. Many people trying to lose weight don’t take into account (or vastly underestimate) the calories they get from the juices, blended coffee drinks, sodas and alcohol they drink on a daily basis. I would rather eat my calories so I try to stick to teas, especially during the day when I am working.

My first cup of the day is a large black tea. Pretty much all teas contain antioxidants, substances that help clean up the free radical damage caused by exercise, sunlight and general ageing. Black tea also contains tannins, the same compounds found in red wine, which help to protect against heart disease, and quercetin, a substance that can help to stop viruses from replicating in the body. In other words, it helps your body to fight off colds and infection. Unfortunately, adding milk to black tea significantly reduces its antioxidant capacity, so even though I prefer my tea with milk and sugar, I’ve switched to plain black tea.  

My next cup of the morning is usually an herbal fruit tea, often a Raspberry and Echinacea tea. Echinacea has been shown to help prevent colds and reduce the severity of symptoms if you do get a cold. I’m not quite paranoid enough to buy Echinacea pills, but I’m not averse to having it as part of my normal herbal fruit tea when I can buy it at the supermarket for the same price.

After lunch I try to have a cup of green tea, which has just enough caffeine to combat the afternoon slump. Green tea is the latest thing in weight loss as it contains a compound that reacts with caffeine to boost fat burning and resting metabolism by 20%. It also contains catechins, antioxidants which help ward off heart disease and cancer, and they can reduce the muscle damage caused by exercise and speed up your recovery. So I try to have at least one cup of green tea per day.

I like to think of tea as cheap, calorie free health insurance!

The Score:

Calories:	Protein:	Carbs:	Fat:	Alcohol:	Fibre:
1760.09	96.16g	222.52g	52.56g	0	23.84g
	22%	51%	27%
Calories burned through exercise:		Rest Day

What I ate:

Time	Item	Amount
09:30	Vitamins - Centrum Advance A to Zinc, 400iu of Vitamin E, 1000iu Vitamin D3 and 500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 each
	Cold water	200mL
	Whole Scrambled egg with 2 egg whites	3 eggs
	Heinz Beanz, reduced sugar and salt	175g
	Mushrooms	110g
	in butter	5g
	Raw tomato	85g
	Sainsbury's orange, mango and passionfruit juice	200mL
11:00	Black Tea	500mL
12:15	Raspberry and Echinacea tea	250mL
13:00	DS frozen gluten free Mozzarella and tomato deep pan pizza	1/2 pizza
	with Sainsbury's Be Good to Yourself thick cut ham slices	34g
	and Dole pineapple slices in juice	46g
	Autumn Slaw (Leon's Recipe book)	100g
	Alpro Soya Original	200mL
15:00	Green Tea	250mL
16:30	Seedless Red Grapes	100g
	Brazil nuts	6g
	Cashews	17g
	Lindt Excellence 70% cocoa dark chocolate	20g
19:45	Sainsbury's light sweet & sour cooking sauce with chicken and extra vegetables	316g
	on long grain and wild rice	50g (dry)
21:30	Ellactiva Chocolate Calcium Chew	1 chew
	500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 pill

Plus 500 to 1500mL of cold water sipped from a water bottle throughout the day.