Simple Pre-Workout Drink Greatly Increases Calories Burned from Fat
This is just a simple pre-workout drink that I’ve been experimenting with that definitely increases my fat burning after cardio workouts. When I exercises on an empty stomach in the mornings I can really tell how much fat I have burned, just by looking at my belly an hour afterwards, or using my trusty skin calipers. I find electronic body fat percentage meters to not really be accurate and if I drink a lot of water during my workouts the results vary by a lot, because electrolyte balance affects how they work.
By observation, I have found that this drink increases my fat burning about 3 times. This is based on skin caliper tests after long workouts on an empty stomach, the “warm” feeling after a workout lasting longer, and just plain old weighing myself on a scale. This drink was not my discovery, I found it in a very interesting weight-loss program, designed to achieve maximum weight loss by using simple tweaks and rituals like that, and as every reader of this blog knows, those kinds of things just make my ears perk up.
I have a few more interesting ideas like this one to test, so stay tuned 🙂
The drink
The drink is really simple, it’s strong green tea mixed with two tablespoons of vinegar. In fact, I wish it were more complex and weird so that people would go “Wow, what a unique recipe, this must really work”, but sorry, that’s really it. Simple, but in my experience, effective. Yes, it’s not the best tasting drink on the planet, but it works and anyone can try it, provided they already have those two ingredients lying around their house.
Why vinegar and not lemon juice? Although lemon juice is a classic additive to green tea, which unlike the vinegar makes it taste better and not worse, there are certain properties that make vinegar the additive of choice here. Some people claim it’s the acetic acid, others that it’s the malic acid, which has been shown to shift energy metabolism from carbohydrates to stored body fats in studies and therefore reduce total food intake(1). In the end, we don’t really know why it works, it just does.
How does it work?
We know very well why green tea and vinegar both work separately for weight loss. They both make your body burn more fat and less carbohydrates. Normally, to start burning body fat, you would need to deplete your carbohydrate stores somewhat first, by burning about 600 calories. This is not a trivial amount, and not a lot of people who want to lose weight have the endurance to exercise that long. However, this simple drink enables you to immediately start ‘tapping’ into the fat stores. Supposedly, it’s the combination of green tea’s fat burning effect, combined with vinegar’s ability to slightly reduce the metabolism of glucose and enable you to start burning stored fat, before the carbohydrate stores in your blood and liver are depleted.
- Vinegar reduces carbohydrate metabolism and speeds up fat metabolism (2)
- Vinegar stops fat from being accumulated in the liver, enabling it to be burned off more readily(3)
- Green tea has been shown to prevent fat accumulation and speed up fat metabolism(5)
- Green tea increases fat metabolism by 3-8% when taken alone(4)
Green tea is often used as a fat-loss aid and so is vinegar, but I didn’t find any studies testing the effects of those when taken immediately before a workout.
Just try it
It’s a simple trick that anyone can try, so try it and make sure to report back your results 🙂 I’ll soon be making more tests and posting fat-burning results with and without the drink.
Posted by Angelina on February, 20th, 2017