New ways to lose weight can throw up some surprising methods and probably none more so than the simple act of drinking green tea. The Chinese have been drinking green tea as a health supplement for many hundreds of years but it's only recently that the west has begun to understand how it can aid weight loss.

It is already known that normal tea is packed full of anti-oxidants which help protect against free radicals in your body (oxygen molecules which are released during digestion and are linked with many diseases such as cancer and heart disease), but during the manufacturing process many other qualities are lost. Green tea is not heated during the process which means that to drink it is an acquired taste, but all the healthy benefits remain.

Green tea can help you lose weight because it contains substances which act upon different parts of your body. It works to increase your metabolism, suppress your appetite and regulates the glucose and fat take up.

The metabolism is a major driver of how quickly you will lose weight. A fast metabolism is able to use the food it gets and burn it off in every day activity while a slow metabolism won't be as efficient at using all the food and it tends to store it as fat instead. Also, if you embark on a calorie controlled diet your body may adapt by putting you in to survival mode which slows your metabolism down and uses less energy. In a report published in 1999, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that green tea helped to improve the fat oxidation and thermogenesis in the body, or in other words it increased the metabolism to burn more calories.

Controlling your appetite is a big factor when losing weight – infact if we could control what when and how much we ate we'd probably never be in a position to have to lose weight. Green tea extracts contain a substance known as epigallocatechin gallate (ECCG) which is known to help reduce your appetite and desire to eat. One study on lab rats showed that animals were eating up to 60% less than normal with no ill effects.

Finally, the Tang Center for Herbal Medical Research, at the University of Chicago found that green tea is high in a substance called catechins and this may help regulate blood sugar levels and reduce the amount of fat and glucose that is taken up by the body. This substance also helps to reduce the amount of bad cholesterol in your body.

All the human studies have shown no side effects from drinking increased levels of green tea or taking green tea extracts other than the well known diuretic effect which tea has on the body. Although there haven't been enough large scale studies to conclusively say that green tea will help you lose weight, the smaller studies all indicate that this could be the case and since it has no side effects if you start drinking it you really have nothing to lose but your weight!