Tea Time For My Diet

While I may have started drinking coffee to survive nursing school, I've always been a tea girl. My childhood memories are filled with tall glasses of iced tea on hot afternoons. I drank tea more than anything else as a child since my mother always kept a pitcher of it in the fridge.

In college, I met friends who had tea stashes that I had never dreamed of - I was strictly a Lipton girl, but was then introduced to the wide variety of teas out there. Now I have my own tea stash, filled with all sorts of black, green and herbal teas, to be picked through and savored based on my mood.

The Parent Bloggers Network asked me about a month ago to review a new book: The Ultimate Tea Diet by Mark "Dr. Tea" Ukra. My first thought was "What? A tea diet? Is this some fad like the grapefruit diet?" However, I don't need an excuse to drink tea, so I gladly agreed to review it.

I'll start with this: the book does not advocate drinking only tea to lose weight. Instead, it advocates a sensible diet with the simple addition of drinking tea. Mark Ukra gives a brief history of tea, then discusses the chemical compounds present in tea that can aid in burning more calories and suppressing your appetite each day. He also covers how to choose the right teas for you, and how to prepare it to produce the best taste.

The diet is simple and straightforward. Drink all the tea you can drink each day, and eat a sensible diet. The more tea you consume, the more it will help you, and so Dr. Tea includes several healthy, tasty recipes that include tea in the ingredients.

I tried a few of the recipes. The tea-infused oatmeal was good - it tasted pretty much like my regular oatmeal, with a slight hint of tea. The best recipes, for me, were the Frosteas - imagine a fruity tea slushy - yummmm.

I haven't followed the diet, but decided to kick my coffee and soda habits in favor of only tea for over a week now. I've noticed my evening food cravings aren't as strong when I'm drinking lots of tea. If I'm craving something sweet, a nice cup of chai is a good substitute. And some of the different tea recipes suggested can help with any craving you might have. (Just try Dr. Tea's Candy Bar Black Tea.) Worried about caffeine? Decaf still delivers a lot of the healthy benefits, too.

The Ultimate Tea Diet is worth a read if you're trying to lose weight or have found yourself stuck in your efforts to lose weight. While tea isn't going to magically make you thinner, it may serve as a helper to any dieting efforts you undertake. And we'll take every advantage we can get, right?

Win a copy! I received a preview copy of the book as well as the final product, so I'd like to share my extra copy with one of my readers. If you'd like to win this book, leave a comment on this post, and I'll choose a winner one week from today. (January 16)