How to Make a Fat Burning Green Tea Smoothie for Weight Loss

Smoothies are an excellent way to help yourself lose weight. By replacing a sugar-filled and high-calorie meal – typically either breakfast or lunch – with fruit and vegetable-based smoothie, you’re lowering your caloric intake. You’re also reducing your sugar intake, minimizing various preservatives and harmful chemicals, and generally boosting your health.

One ingredient you may not have thought to add to your smoothies is green tea. Green tea is exceptionally healthy! It’s flavorful. It’s packed with phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, and other compounds your body can use for systemic benefits. It’s also, naturally, zero calories. After all, it’s mostly water! Adding it to a smoothie means giving the resulting drink some caloric content, but it’s still a lot better than a big meal.

If you want to add green tea to your smoothies and turn them into a weight-loss powerhouse, we can help.

To start with, though, let’s discuss how they work.

How Green Tea Assists in Weight Loss

First of all, you might be skeptical. Does green tea help you lose weight? It’s just a drink; how much of an effect could it have?

The truth is green tea has some surprisingly potent health benefits. There are several different weight loss mechanisms as well that you can divide into primary and secondary categories.

Primary mechanisms for weight loss include:

• Metabolism boosters. Green tea has a moderate amount of caffeine in it. Caffeine is a stimulant, which encourages your body to burn stored fat for energy. Additionally, one of the flavonoids in green tea is catechin, an antioxidant and metabolism enhancer.
• General health boosters. Green tea is high in vitamins like C, B2, and E, which help keep your health levels up. Minerals also include potassium, calcium, and manganese, all of which are beneficial for your overall health. Healthy bodies don’t need to stockpile as much energy to battle illness.

Secondary mechanisms are a bit different. They are side effects of green tea that may not be due to the tea itself but due to your habits.

First and foremost, what are you replacing with your tea smoothie? If you’re swapping a 1,500-calorie breakfast for a 300-calorie smoothie, you’re going to lose weight simply by the power of mathematics. The same goes for replacing unhealthy fats and sugars with healthier options.

You’ll also notice that you start to feel better and more energetic. When you get in the habit of healthier eating, you’ll feel better throughout the day. More energy and a better outlook encourage you to be active and moving, which helps you lose weight.

Smoothies with green tea are a great option, so here’s how to get the habit going.

Building a Smoothie Framework

Getting into the habit of making smoothies at home is an excellent thing to do, but you need to decide what kind of smoothie you want to make. Since we’re focusing on weight loss today, you want to aim for something with ingredients aimed at detoxing, boosting your metabolism, and enhancing your energy.

That means shying away from ingredients that are high in sugars and fats; while those can be good for full meal replacements and weight lifting supplements, they might work counter to weight loss.

1. Decide on a type of green tea. The first thing you need to do is decide what kind of green tea you want to use. You have two primary options to pick from; brewed green tea and matcha.

Brewed green tea means brewing a fresh cup of green tea, usually concentrated. You’ll take two tea bags and brew a cup (or an equivalent amount of loose-leaf tea. Your local tea shop will be full of helpful people who can give you tips and recommendations here.) You can brew it stronger or weaker according to your tastes, but the stronger it is, the better an effect it will have. You then use this brewed tea as an ingredient in your smoothie.

Matcha is green tea leaves that are ground into a rich green powder, traditionally from Japan. Many people recommend making sure you’re getting imported Japanese matcha because foreign-produced matcha isn’t as good as Japanese matcha. Be aware that matcha tends to have a more potent flavor, and poor-quality matcha is very bitter. You may or may not enjoy that, so play around with different options to find the one you like the most. Not all matcha is created equal! You can add matcha to a smoothie simply by adding the powder to your mix; no need to brew it as the tea first.

2. Decide on an overall flavor profile. Generally, you can pick between a green smoothie, a fruit smoothie, or a sweet smoothie.

Green smoothies focus on the vegetable aspects of your ingredients list. You’ll include spinach, kale, celery, cress, chia, flax, and broccoli. You can add many different green vegetables, and part of this decision comes down to your taste preferences. These are great if you like the taste of vegetables, but less so if you prefer something sweeter or tangier.

Fruit smoothies, of course, are a more traditional fruit-flavored smoothie formula. Apples, pineapple, grapefruit, orange, berries, banana, and other fruits are all fine. You’ll still have some vegetable flavor from the tea. You can add spinach or another green ingredient to give it more vitamins and minerals. Still, the fruit takes center stage for flavor purposes.

Sweet smoothies are smoothies that work in elements like nut butter, cocoa powder, and other “candy-like” ingredients. They’re richer and more decadent but may not give you as much of a nutritional boost as the alternatives. They’re acceptable for occasional use but not as your everyday recipe.

3. Consider additional supplemental ingredients. There are many other ingredients you can add to supplement the power of a weight loss smoothie. Turmeric is a good ingredient for a golden smoothie. Cayenne pepper is excellent if you can handle the spice and has a range of health benefits. Supplemental collagen is a good protein source.

Remember, a smoothie is a highly customizable meal replacement. You can tweak it to suit your tastes and your purposes.

Specific Green Tea Smoothie Recipes for Weight Loss

To give you an idea of what kind of smoothies you can make, we’ve curated a handful of recipes from around the web. These are just examples; you can adjust them to your tastes or go with something completely custom. Treat these recipes as inspiration.

Option 1: Fat Burning Smoothie from Recipe Cart:

• One cup baby spinach
• Two tablespoons fresh mint leaves
• One stalk of celery, chopped
• ½ cup of cooled brewed green tea
• ½ grapefruit, peeled and seeded
• One cup pineapple chunks, frozen
• ¼ avocado
• One dash of cayenne pepper

This simple recipe makes a sweet and tangy green smoothie with a bit of a spice kick from the cayenne. The one thing to watch out for is the grapefruit. Grapefruit can interfere with certain medications, so go with another citrus or leave it out if you’re taking one of those meds.

Option 2: Matcha Smoothie from Matcha.com:

• One ¼ Cups frozen banana (about two bananas)
• Two tablespoons matcha powder
• ¾ cup cashew milk or other dairy milk alternative
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• One teaspoon chia or flax seeds
• One cup spinach
• Ice cubes for consistency

This recipe is a sweeter and thicker smoothie with a lot of superfood ingredients. Some people don’t like the chia/flax seeds due to their consistency, so you can grind them into powder first if you prefer. Since this recipe uses matcha, there’s no need to brew and cool your tea first, and you’ll get a powerful tea punch.

Option 3: Green Tea Weight Loss Smoothie from MakeDrinks:

• ½ apple, cored
• ¼ cup broccoli florets
• ½ cup celery, chopped
• ½ cup cucumber
• ¼ cup watercress
• One tablespoon mint leaves
• One cup green tea, brewed and cooled
• ½ cup ice

This recipe is a simple one for a green smoothie with tea to give it the weight loss punch. Adjust the ice up and down to get the desired consistency you want out of your smoothie. You can also add in some fruit juice to make the whole thing sweeter – if you prefer.

Presenting an Easy Alternative

A lot of what we’ve talked about above is giving you hints and tips for making your smoothie recipes. Sometimes, though, you don’t want to have to put in that work. Who wants to make decisions first thing in the morning, anyway?

If you’re looking for a way to lose weight through the use of smoothies, well, you’ve come to the right place. While you can work at developing your recipes, it’s easy to fall off the wagon if you find yourself putting too much effort and time into it. Instead, we make it easy for you by providing you with a simple recipe plan. All you need to do is buy the ingredients and blend them up.

Managing Expectations

One thing to keep in mind with any weight loss plan is that weight loss is slow. It isn’t easy. The human body is not designed to shed weight effortlessly! Evolution used the process of storing fat for energy to insulate us against famine and lean times. If it were easy to shed the pounds, that wouldn’t work very well to keep us alive during scarcity, would it?

One way to look at it is with math. One pound of weight is about 3,500 calories. If you typically eat a 500-700 calories breakfast, and you replace it with a 200-calorie smoothie, you’re cutting out 300-500 calories a day. Five hundred calories a day, seven days a week, is 3,500 calories, or one pound of weight loss in a week.

This is conventional wisdom, though the truth is a lot more complicated. You can work out and get healthier and gain weight initially. Why? You’ll build muscle quickly when you go from no activity to moderate activity, and muscle is denser than fat. You lose fat, gain muscle, and your weight might not change or even increase. Weight gains can be disheartening, but in this case, it’s a good thing! More muscle means more calories burned when you work out, which means more fat loss. It ramps up over time. If you want to play around with a detailed calculator, this bodyweight planner is a nationally recognized and high-quality tool.

Solid, permanent weight loss means a permanent adjustment to your lifestyle. Eat fewer carbs and sugars, eat more vegetables and fruit. Consume fewer calories overall, and burn more through exercise. It doesn’t matter if you’re going on long walks every day, doing intense cycling, or lifting weights; any activity is better than nothing.

Smoothies Can Help

Smoothies can help, and they can help you lose a little weight in the absence of other lifestyle adjustments. How much weight? That depends a lot on what you’re replacing with the smoothie.

Our smoothie plan is highly recommended and proven by thousands of satisfied customers. It works best if you can use it as a base for adjusting your overall lifestyle, and it has the best effect if you pair it with increased amounts of working out, but even just replacing a meal or two with a smoothie every day is an excellent place to start.

More importantly, swapping breakfast for a smoothie is an excellent way to change habits slowly but efficiently. Smoothies are variable, they taste good, and they’re easy to make and consume. That’s a perfect storm of easy patterns to adjust! It’s easier to stick with a smoothie diet than it is with many other weight loss options.

Whether you’re using smoothies as a gateway to start a weight loss journey, or you want to use it to break past a plateau in your existing weight loss program, they’re a great option. All you need to do is give it a try.

Which recipe do you like the most? Is there anything that you add to your smoothies for a little extra kick or to improve the flavor? Please share with us in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.