Does Green Juice Help You Lose Weight

The internet is rife with fat loss guides and magic pills to help you lose weight.

Most of that is nonsense. And it’s designed to pray on people who are desperate to lose weight.

Now, my blog isn’t designed around weight loss, so I don’t normally address this topic.

However, I do see lots of questions regarding juicing and people asking if juicing green juice can help you lose weight.

That is in my wheelhouse, so I feel comfortable answering this question.

 

What This Blog Post Won’t Do

I want to be very upfront here. This blog post is not designed for people who are looking to crash diet and lost x number of pounds in a week. Sorry, that’s not what I’m interested in discussing.

This blog post also won’t be a collection of links to fat loss guides, energy pills, or any of the other things you see online whenever you search for fat loss info. Just not my thing.

What I Will Do Here

What I am going to do here is to make a brief review of green juices and their nutritional importance in the grand scheme of your diet and weight loss goals.

We will breakdown what a green juice can and can’t do. And why you might want to drink green juices if you’re planning on losing weight.

I’ll also cover some other things you might want to do while you’re on a diet. Things that might assist you with your dieting needs but which don’t necessarily fall into the juicing category.

How Can Green Juice Make You Fat?

This is a bit of a reversal, but I wanted to discuss if juicing can make you fat.

This boils down to basic chemistry and physics. You get fat when you consume too many calories. If you eat or drink too many calories then you will gain weight. It’s that simple.

Drinking green juice is no different in that regard. If you drink an extra thousand calories of green juice, and you don’t do cardio to burn off that extra 1000 calories, then you’ll get fat.

However, it’s not typical that you will drink an extra 1000 calories in green juice. That is quite a lot because green juice is not that calorie dense.

So, while it’s theoretically possible to get fat off of green juice, it’s highly unlikely.

Does Green Juice Help You Lose Weight?

Ok, so if green juice is unlikely to get you fat, can it help you lose weight?

Yes. But it’s not a magic bullet. Green juice is not going to just melt off the fat. That’s not something that it’s able to do.

A lof of the bad info online regarding dieting and weight loss is centered around losing weight super fast with some sort of magic bullet.

That magic bullet might be in the form of a pill, or a special tea, or some other concoction.

Whatever it is, rest assured that it’s not what I’m going to talk about.

Green juice isn’t a magic bullet. It’s not something that can be taken and just work to shed fat. Nothing safe will do that (and I won’t discuss steroids since they are not safe).

However, if you structure a diet to be under your daily caloric maintenance, then you can lose weight. And green juice is a great way to do this.

How I would advise people to use green juice in order to lose weight (especially bodyfat) is to design a diet where you eliminate one meal and replace it with a green juice.

For instance, you might skip breakfast which might normally be eggs, toast and butter, or oatmeal and replace it with green juice. That will cut out a few hundred calories right there. And you won’t lose out on any nutrients.

I do prefer to do a lunch replacement with green juice as opposed to breakfast or dinner. That’s simply because people tend to get tired during the middle of the day and oftentimes that tiredness is tied to eating food. So by skipping the meal and having a juice instead, you achieve two goals.

What Kind of Green Juice Should You Drink?

If you’re looking to lose weight, then you should aim for juices that are low in calories. That means that you need to focus on green juices, not fruit juices. And when you make a green juice, you should not add too many sweet fruit to it. These can boost the sugar content and also the calories.

So, while I like to make pineapple juice and will mix in raw pineapple with greens like spinach or kale, it’s not something that I’m going to advise you do if you are on a weight loss and fat loss diet.

My ideal green juice to help with losing weight would be as follows:

Cucumbers (low in calories, high in water content, and neutral tasting)

Kale or Spinach (greens are high in nutrients which is important when dieting)

Lemon (citrus oil helps with controlling hunger and the lemon skin is super rich in this nutrient)

How To Make The Perfect Green Juice For Dieting

First off, determine how you’re going to diet. Pick a number of calories that you want to eliminate from your daily diet. That will set the number and it will be your daily goal to keep that number in check.

So, if you need 2500 calories to maintain your current weight, and you’ve decided to cut out 500 calories a day, then you can figure out how much you will save by swapping out lunch for a green juice. It’s all a matter of math.

My best advice would be to download an app like MFP on your phone or simply estimate what your typical lunch is (and you can find calorie estimate online everywhere –I will link to a few at the end of this blog post). Then swap in a green juice.

That will cut your daily caloric intake by around 500 if not more.

 

Putting It All Together

The final thing I’d like to add here is that it’s not enough to simply drink a green juice and expect to lose weight.

You’ve got to take action and reduce your caloric load.

So, I would start by cutting out all of the “bad” calories that you have in your diet right now.

Soda? Get rid of it.

Sugary Coffee? Get rid of it.

Beer ? Out

Lemonade drinks or fruity drinks? Gone.

There is a saying in the weight loss community. Don’t drink your calories. And that’s certainly good advice.

You don’t want to make it more difficult than it needs to be. So, drink black coffee, herbal tea, black or green tea or water as your beverages.

Use the green juice as a sort of meal replacement. That’s the only way that drinking a green juice is going to help you lose weight. By reducing your total caloric load.

And the reason that drinking a green juice can help you lose weight is that in addition to cutting calories out of your overall diet, it controls hunger. Fresh green juice satiates hunger.

If you make juice fresh at home it’s going to contain fiber (bottled juice and store brought juice is normally filtered and pasteurized) and enzymes that help you feel full.  Store brought juice is basically just a sugar bomb.

 

Helpful Links

Calorie Counter-Helps You Figure Out How Many Calories A Day You Need

TDE Calc– This is another helpful calculator that can help you determine your total daily caloric needs.