Can Herbs and Spices Help You Lose Weight?
Maintaining a healthy weight is essential for a long and wholesome life. Just think about how obesity and being overweight are linked to conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes.
Additionally, excessive weight gain can cause psychological problems such as mood disorders or sexual dysfunction as well. With these considerations, everyone needs to ensure that they lower their weight within healthy ranges.
Often, it’s difficult to lose weight through simple exercise and diet management. The pharmaceutical approaches to weight-loss have many unintended side-effects and so, many people substitute natural remedies for these artificial ones.
As such, many people ask what herbs can help with weight loss. This blog will identify what herbs can help you lose weight, how these herbs work, and how these are made part of your regular diets to lose weight. Find out all you need to know about herbs and weight loss!
What Are Herbs?
Although various plants and herbs are very similar, there are subtle differences that separate the two. Certain plants are called herbs because the human body can digest them. Most plants are poisonous, but herbs don’t become toxic regardless of how much you consume.
One additional characteristic of herbs is that these can be used to help treat illnesses through a completely organic process without inducing long-term side-effects.
For the above-mentioned reasons, herbs were a significant part of traditional medical practices and are now a part of modern weight-loss strategies as well. These herbs work in three distinct capacities, each helping cut down weight in different ways. These are:
- Suppressing the appetite to help cut calorie counts
- Increasing metabolism to help enhance weight-loss
- Acting as anti-diuretic to help lose water weight
When used in regular dietary regimens, these herbs present a myriad of health benefits, including weight-loss. Herbs are also rich in antioxidants, which can help protect the nervous system, prevent cancer, provide you with your daily nutrition requirements, and also help lose weight.
Many dieticians and nutritionists also recommend moving towards herbs to help you lose weight because these have little to no side-effects, besides the occasional allergic reaction. As such, shifting to a herb-rich diet can help you achieve your health and fitness goals much more conveniently than surgical or pharmaceutical methods.
Your healthcare providers will necessarily require you to shift to herb-rich diet regimens until and unless drastic measures are needed. A herb-rich diet forms the first line of defense in preventing excessive weight gain and helps lose weight without presenting any additional health risks.
Of course, not all herbs can help you lose weight; some are more effective than others. There is a certain kind of herb that’s good for weight-loss and we’ll tell you which that is in the next section.
What Herbs Help With Weight-loss?
You’ll find herbal formulas on the market or even isolated herb products which can help you lose weight. You can go with either of the two options, although many people don’t use formulas because of the increased risk of an allergic reaction from one of the ingredients.
We can’t say which herbs will be effective for you because everyone’s body has different metabolic requirements. Therefore, you should consult with your doctor about the best approach.
Weight-loss is a pretty scientific method and you should always keep track of how many calories you’re losing with any given herb. If you’re wondering what herbs and spices can help you lose weight, you should consider the following options to help you with your weight-loss.
Artichoke
Artichoke is a fairly popular weight-loss herb in the treatment of obesity and to prevent the development of diabetes. Research on the subject points out that the active ingredient of Artichoke leaves (Luteolin) can suppress the production of fat tissues in the body.
This Luteolin enhances the metabolism of the body to ensure that the body doesn’t have any excess energy which needs to be converted into fat deposits. With the work of Luteolin, you will experience boosts in energy and increased intensity in your workouts, because the chemical helps you bear a greater degree of physical exertion.
With these effects, Artichoke essentially speeds up the use of nutrients in the body and slows down the accumulation of fats, which can increase the rate of calorie expenditure. With this extra energy and with much more intense workouts, you can easily achieve the calorie deficits required for quick weight-loss.
Green Tea
Green tea is widely used to help move the weight-loss process along. People have argued over whether there is some truth to the claim that green tea can help you lose weight and we finally have an answer.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing amount of evidence that indicates the herbal concoction’s effective use in weight-loss. Green tea contains caffeine and catechins, which have antioxidant effects and can induce feelings of fullness to reduce food intake.
Studies conducted to assess the effectiveness of green tea in weight loss point out that drinking 4 cups of green tea a day can significantly reduce body weight. The people being studied in this experiment reported that they felt a lot more energetic and could work out much more intensely than before.
Although their diets were restricted at the same time, the subjects didn’t feel that they wanted to eat more because the green tea was suppressing their diet. As such, green tea represents much potential as a weight-loss aid.
Apples
When asked what natural herbs can help you lose weight, many medical practitioners speak of the effectiveness of apples as a weight-loss supplement.
The nutrients and chemicals in apples have long since been linked with affecting chemical processes in the body to help with weight-loss. These effects include changing the way the human body processes excess energy to produce fats and antioxidant effects that can improve metabolism.
Furthermore, apples also have a low-calorie count, which helps you feel full much quicker compared to other foods. The appetite suppressing and metabolism altering effects of apples are often an integral part of weight-loss strategies suggested by nutritionists.
Lemons
Lemons are a rich source of vitamins and polyphenols which offer great nutritional value while assisting weight-loss by suppressing the appetite. Studies conducted to determine the effects of lemons on metabolism found that the polyphenols in lemon juice reduced fat accumulation in the body.
These chemicals worked directly on the enzymes involved in fat metabolism to inhibit the production of fat and also increased the burning of fats to enhance weight-loss. With the extra energy from the burning fats, the subjects exhibited greater physical activity and had lower levels of cholesterol as well.
Stinging Nettle Leaf
When used as an ingredient to make tea, nettle leaves have two different effects to help lose weight. The leaves are a natural diuretic helping flush the body of toxins and it also enhances the production of serotonin.
In its role as a diuretic, nettle leaves can help you lose water weight really fast and with increased serotonin production, it can reduce the appetite. Stress eating is a fairly common condition; people under consistent stress often exhibited low levels of serotonin, which causes stress.
Having nettle tea can reduce stress eating and as such, can also be used as a diet suppressant to help lose weight.
Peppers
Chili peppers are chock full of chemicals which can help with increased oxidation of fats in the body. Capsaicin is one of the active ingredients found in chili peppers that help with increased fat oxidation.
Chili peppers also have two separate effects on the body to help lose weight. Firstly, they increase body metabolism, and secondly, they suppress the diet.
Once the capsaicin from chili peppers enters the bloodstream, it raises the body temperature and increases fat oxidation in the body. The higher body temperature is seen as an effect of high oxygen consumption in the body, which also points toward the extra fat oxidation.
People treated with capsaicin exhibited a large decrease in weight-loss compared to people who didn’t. Additionally, there were no adverse effects from the treatment beyond mild indigestion across all age groups.
The same people also reported that they didn’t feel as hungry as they usually would when they went on the capsaicin therapy for weight-loss. This points us toward capsaicin’s capacity to help cut calories from our diets to sustain weight-loss.
Parsley
Parsley is commonly used as a condiment in many everyday food recipes. Many people don’t know this, but the herb can help improve and enhance glucose metabolism in the body; increasing the rate at which fats burn throughout your anatomy.
Additionally, it can also help reduce insulin resistance and lower cholesterol levels in the body to promote health and wellness.
How To Get Herbs Into Your Diet
It’s pretty easy to make these herbs as part of your diet. You can use them as spices to add some flavor to your food, make them a part of your salads, or make juices out of them.
For as long as you’re consuming these herbs in appropriate quantities these will continue to prove beneficial for your health and it doesn’t matter how you’re eating them. Some ideas that you can try out include the few listed below.
Salads
There is really no rule for how you should make salads; salads are really a collection of vegetables with some dressing that tastes good. It’s really a matter of taste and there is no overdoing certain elements of a salad which could have adverse health effects.
You should try adding apples, lemon juice, berries, and other kinds of fruits or vegetables to make for a wholesome filling salad that can help you lose weight and fulfill your hunger at the same time.
Infused Teas
Many of the herbs we’ve listed above, especially artichoke, green tea, and nettle leaves, can be used to make teas which can help you cut weight. These teas are usually very refreshing and you can always add some honey or lemon to them to improve the flavors.
The added benefits of drinking tea include low-calorie counts and these can be used as part of clear fluid diets to help you lose weight.
Use these Herbs as Spices
Herbs like parsley and pepper can become an active ingredient in all sorts of recipes that you could try out. South Asian recipes, in particular, use these herbs as part of many recipes, and even though that’s mostly to enhance the flavor profiles they can help lose weight.
Instead of using artificial spices in your meals, you could use these herbs to achieve the same flavors and lose weight at the same time.
Make Soups
Liquid diets are an effective way to lose weight because these generally have low-calorie counts and are easy to digest. Artichoke soup, for example, is a very tasty dish high in nutritional value and easily supplemented with parsley and peppers to give it more flavors.
See if there are other vegetables or herbs that you can use to make soup out of and try to see what herbs can help make these recipes more tasteful.
It’s one thing to wonder what herbs and spices are good for weight-loss and completely another to use them in recipes. Since you can hardly eat these herbs in isolation, look up different websites to find recipes that use weight-loss herbs to help transition into a healthier diet plan that facilitates weight-loss.
Over time you will develop an eye for the flavors and it will become easier to enjoy the food while also taking advantage of the health benefits the ingredients have to offer.
Conclusion
Herbs have great potential to offer as tools for weight-loss and these can be easily added to your diet to achieve your weight goals. It just takes a little bit of research to figure out what herbs are good for weight-loss. These herbs offer immense nutritional value and won’t leave you with nutritional deficiencies when you substitute these for other foods in your diet.
As such, this blog has discussed what herbs will help with weight-loss, what the effects of these herbs are, and how they achieve these effects. In this process, we have told you what herbs will help you lose weight and how you can use these in different ways to take a step towards a healthier lifestyle.
