Modern society puts a lot of emphasis on physical appearance, making attractiveness one of our most important details. Our desire to be attractive is typically associated with ensuring we have attractive complexions and wear fashionable attire. Even those of us with otherwise "unattractive" immutable features (such as height) can enhance our looks to meet society's conventional standard of beauty.
While these immutable features do not mean we are unattractive, many people would claim our value diminishes when we do not meet their standards. As a result, many people work to change their appearance to align with conventional attractiveness. One of the biggest concerns in modern society is how obesity affects our appearance, which is significantly less important than how it affects our health. Unfortunately, many people fixate on their appearance and take risks to lose weight quickly despite the potential ramifications.
There are countless resources for sale that claim to expedite weight loss and make it easier to reach your goal weight. One of the main products marketed for weight loss programs is flat tummy tea, which is marketed as a serious weight loss tool despite the cutesy name. Hundreds of people use these teas to enhance their weight loss routine. The problem is that not everyone understands what these teas are, let alone how they work and what benefits or risks they provide. Understanding these details is essential to ensure you do not do more damage than you fix.
What is Flat Tummy Tea?
Flat tummy tea is a common weight loss tool marketed as a detox diet program by those who offer the resources. It was created by Bec and Tim Polmear, a couple from Perth, Australia, in 2013. Eventually, the product exploded, and the Flat Tummy Company was founded with its headquarters in Perth.
As the name suggests, flat tummy tea involves the consumption of specialized teas designed to change your stomach's appearance. Unlike teas derived from traditional plants, these flat tummy teas combine multiple herbs and plants to combine their effects.
There are 2 major types of flat tummy tea on the market:
- Activate Tea: Activate tea is promoted as a tool to enhance your metabolism and digestion by incorporating multiple natural compounds.
- Cleanse Tea: Cleanse tea is promoted similarly to activate tea but focuses on supporting our body's natural detoxification process.
The teas are designed to be combined with water and steeped like a traditional cup of tea, but the ingredients provide additional "benefits" that allegedly enhance your health and appearance. As a result, flat tummy tea is more closely related to a dietary supplement rather than a full dietary overhaul. While these teas play a huge role in the results, they are not the only thing you can consume when using them. As a result, they are typically added to normal diets without the user making major adjustments to what they eat.
For example, you could theoretically add flat tummy tea to your diet even if you consume heavy meals with red meat or carbohydrates. While a poor diet can interfere with the effects of flat tummy tea, it is still possible to introduce the latter to your existing dietary habits. One of the main marketing points of flat tummy tea is that it is easy to use and appeals to individuals who want to enhance their weight loss routine without adding more stress to their daily routine. Aside from the reason it is used, flat tummy tea is not particularly special compared to more traditional drinks like green tea or matcha. The question you are likely asking is: how do these teas work?
How Do Flat Tummy Teas Work?
Flat tummy teas are not the most complicated weight loss tools on the market, but their function can be confusing for people who are uninitiated in their use. As mentioned, the tea is added to water and steeped like normal tea varieties. As a result, anyone who has ever made tea can use flat tummy tea without much trouble.
Ultimately, the instructions for your flat tummy tea will vary depending on what brand you purchase. Some flat tummy teas have specialized instructions due to special formulas or recipes requiring more attention to blend properly. Steeping normal tea can be more complicated than people realize since variables can alter the flavor and quality of your drink. For example, steeping tea at the wrong temperature can adversely affect the tea's quality.
Typically, a flat tummy tea program lasts 4 weeks and requires the user to start by drinking one cup of "activate" tea with breakfast. The most common brands have you steep the tea in hot water for 5 to 7 minutes before consuming it. In the evening, you are supposed to drink a cup of cleanse tea but only every other night, whereas the "activate" tea is consumed every morning for the entire 4 weeks.
When using flat tummy tea, you should adhere to any special instructions on the packaging to ensure the tea is steeped properly. When the tea is not steeped properly, it will likely lose effectiveness and not have the desired impact on your body. Which brings us to the question: what do flat tummy teas do? The answer is that these teas take advantage of a quality found in several contemporary drinks that can relieve factors that increase our gross weight.
One of the main concerns with weight loss is that we retain additional weight based on our fluid intake. This is called water weight and can eventually deteriorate with time, so the fluid no longer adds to our total weight. The main method of purging water weight is urinating, a normal bodily function that occurs as our bodies filter toxins from our bodies and expel them via the urinary tract.
Urination naturally chips away at our lingering water weight, but it takes time for our bodies to eliminate it. Urination does not expel all our fluids simultaneously because a large portion of it is kept in the body to maintain hydration levels between beverages. However, some believe inducing urination is viable for purging water weight and reaching their goal. As a result, diuretics have become a common resource for weight loss programs and routines.
Consuming a diuretic substance supercharges our urinary tract and causes us to urinate more frequently. As a result, we lose extra fluid that might contribute to our weight. A similar process is used with laxatives, which enable us to defecate more frequently and in greater volumes to alleviate extra weight stored in our digestive tracts.
While flat tummy tea might seem like a beneficial product at first glance, it has several issues that make it risky. Therefore, one of the most important questions is: what are the risks of flat tummy tea?
What Are the Risks?
Flat tummy tea is a powerful diuretic that uses its characteristics to help us shed waste that might be keeping our weight higher than we would prefer. There are several drinks and foods that have diuretic properties that we consume regularly. The problem is that consuming a substance that contains multiple diuretic ingredients can adversely affect our overall health due to overuse.
Overconsumption of flat tummy tea means you are oversaturating your body with diuretic compounds and are purging fluids your body needs to survive. Many people advocate this function as a method for losing weight since it allows us to drop large quantities of water weight in short periods. Unfortunately, purging too much fluid has repercussions on your overall health that could turn flat tummy tea into a dangerous product. The biggest concern is that overuse of diuretics causes us to lose potassium, an essential nutrient.
Low potassium levels generate several health complications that can be fatal if you do not take steps to resolve the issue. A large drop in potassium, as seen in diuretic abuse, can cause cardiovascular issues such as abnormal heart rhythms, which are more common in people with an existing heart condition. This can cause lightheadedness or loss of consciousness, leading to serious physical injuries depending on where you are and what you are doing when the symptoms hit.
In severe cases, the drop in potassium can cause your heart to stop, leading to serious health issues and even death if it stops long enough. Ultimately, purging that much potassium in a short time is unhealthy and puts you at risk health-wise.
Furthermore, using diuretics has a series of side effects and risks that can add to the risk of potassium depletion. Another major issue is that diuretics purge the fluids keeping your body hydrated, meaning you could induce dehydration from using flat tummy tea. Dehydration is extremely unpleasant, with the weakest symptoms being dizziness, headache, and nausea. If dehydration persists for too long, you could die from a lack of fluids.
You would need to consume diuretics consistently for several weeks to die of dehydration from them (more than the flat tummy tea program requires), but the simpler symptoms can be debilitating if they become advanced.
The side effects and risks of the flat tummy tea program are unlikely to yield fatal consequences. Nevertheless, you should exercise caution when using flat tummy tea since you are still introducing a powerful diuretic to your body and will still be purging essential fluids from your body for weeks. If you are truly interested in using tea to enhance your weight loss routine, there are other options that are more beneficial and have less risk associated with them.
Consider Alternatives
The reason flat tummy tea is one of the main products for weight loss is tied to the fact that many teas provide weight loss benefits. Therefore, using a more traditional tea in moderation is possible to amplify your weight loss routine. One of the most effective teas for weight loss without oversaturating your diuretics or adding other potentially conflicting ingredients is plain green tea.
Green tea is one of the most common tea varieties and is one of 5 cultivated from the Camellia sinensis plant. Green tea is renowned for its health benefits and can provide additional cosmetic benefits for people trying to improve their appearance. Consuming green tea has been linked to improved fat burning, meaning it can be used to change your body's fat content.
A review from 2022 discovered that green tea's nutrients positively affect our metabolisms and can improve how our bodies break down fat. While this will not cause significant weight loss alone, it can enhance your workout regimen and diet to make it easier to avoid accumulating excess fat. Relying on green tea's metabolic enhancements alone will not generate positive results, and it must be combined with additional lifestyle enhancements.
Green tea shares the diuretic traits of flat tummy tea, but it is less concentrated and does not include additional substances that could further alter your body's behavior. Additionally, there are tea blends designed to maximize the effects of green tea without oversaturating it with the compounds that present a risk. The trick is figuring out how to get these blends.
Finding the Right Blend
Flat tummy tea programs have existed for over a decade and have been sensationalized by celebrities like the Kardashians as a shortcut to "beauty." Unfortunately, the risks of such products tend to outweigh the benefits since these programs are results-oriented and will make hidden adjustments to the formula to enhance the effects.
While these adjustments are not malicious, they can make the side effects more prevalent and enhance the risk of using them. Using a natural blend of green tea can benefit weight loss if you are willing to take additional steps like exercising. The key is finding a vendor who can provide a reliable tea blend without hidden ingredients.
We at Teami have always used natural substances to improve health and appearance. Tea is one of our preferred resources, including our popular Skinny Tea Blend, which uses tea derived from C. sinensis to provide the associated benefits. We encourage you to peruse our full catalog and see which blend appeals to you. After all, finding the right blend is a Teami effort.