Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
March 28, 2024

Why I replaced water with tea, and how I diet without exercise

By SUDGIE MA | September 14, 2017

A8_Tea

PUBLIC DOMAIN Sophomore Sudgie Ma uses tea to diet because it helps to keep her full.

or the past few months, I’ve barely been drinking any water. My fluid intake now almost entirely consists of tea. I’ve been deliberately forcing myself to increase my tea intake. Now, the act of drinking tasteless, colorless liquid feels somewhat unnatural.

My mom had been pushing me to drink tea more often for years. However, it wasn’t her advice that actually led me to this decision. When I came home this summer, she was shocked to discover that I was drinking more tea on a daily basis than she did. She actually tried to get me to drink less tea; Apparently it’s better to start a day off with a glass of regular water rather than a cup of tea.

But as with many things in my life, the decision to change my liquid diet wasn’t based off of advice from my parents but was based on random YouTube videos instead. Drinking tea is one of the most frequently cited methods of weight loss on all those videos titled “Easy Life Hacks to Get a Flat Stomach in Seven Days!!!” which are targeted at people exactly like me.

I’ve probably watched a few dozen of these videos and their slight variations. They contain all sorts of tips, such as keeping the air conditioner at a cold temperature to burn calories through shivering (which I confess to sometimes doing, as well as taking cold showers for a similar effect). I inherited my mom’s slow metabolism, so it means a lot to me when I’m able to stretch my daily calorie limit to include an extra scoop of ice cream by making small changes to things I already do.

While it seems like a difficult and large-scale lifestyle change, it’s actually been a lot easier than you’d think. This is despite the fact that I don’t particularly like the taste of tea, especially because I have to drink it without milk or sugar. After all, the point is to have a zero-calorie drink that I can replace water with.

All I have to do is steep a tea bag or stir some green tea powder into a mug or the bottle of water that I’ll be carrying. I don’t even boil the water beforehand in most cases. I generally prefer cold drinks, but even if I didn’t, I’d still probably be too lazy to wait for water to boil and then cool to a drinkable temperature. I might be missing out on some additional health benefits by drinking my tea cold or at room temperature, but if the water develops some color and taste, that’s good enough for me.

Strangely, my laziness is actually what spurred me to start drinking so much tea over regular water nowadays. When you’re a lazy person and want to keep the pounds off, your main method is going to have to be changes in diet. Exercise takes a lot of time effort for any significant amount of calories to be burned: Half an hour on the treadmill barely burns a single slice of pizza! I also experience this extremely unfortunate side effect after exercising where I’ll immediately eat and drink back all the calories I burned, if not more.

Tea supposedly helps keep you more full, so you’ll be reaching for your snacks less often. To be honest, I’m not too sure if that’s true for me. In my experience, the only way to prevent my snacking has been to avoid buying any snacks in the first place. But I do admit there’s some psychological effect that tea has on me that makes me think I’m filling myself up more, due to the fact that I’m drinking something with color and taste, especially if it’s dark or extremely bitter, like black tea.

I’m still looking for ways to increase my daily tea consumption, such as substituting tea for water in recipes or meals. I’ve even tried using tea in instant oatmeal packets. It sounds gross, but there’s enough sugar in those packets to completely mask the taste of tea, and it makes breakfast even healthier. It doesn’t even change the color!

In the near future, I’ll be looking at using tea to cook rice. I haven’t read or heard anything about too much tea being bad for you. The caffeine might be an issue for some, but caffeine doesn’t really hit me unless I’m literally shoving spoonfuls of instant coffee into my mouth (which I did actually do quite a few times last semester, especially during finals week). It wasn’t pleasant at all, but I’ll probably end up trying it with green tea powder instead this semester. The things I do to pass...


Have a tip or story idea?
Let us know!

Comments powered by Disqus

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The News-Letter.