The truth about the newest weight loss trend

Detox teas are flooding the health food market with claims of easy weight loss. One writer puts tea to the test…

If you’ve been involved in the blogosphere/Instagram/Twitter/not-been-living-under-a rock over the last few months you’ll have heard about a number of slimming teas that will “wow you” with their results. I trialled Bootea’s tea detox program, which claims to help you lose weight and feel

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great in 14 days. Priced at £19.99 for just 21 tea bags, I was a bit sceptical, but I was willing to give anything that’s meant to improve your health a go.

The Bootea programme contains 21 ‘day’ teabags – to drink as soon as you wake up – and 7 ‘night’ teabags to drink on alternate days just before you

go to bed. They contain a whole host of natural ingredients which help your digestive system, remove toxins from the body and restore a healthy sleep pattern. As well as drinking the tea, you’re advised to limit all other liquids to green tea and water – that means no fizzy drinks, alcohol or coffee (obviously the reason why I chose to do this before coming back to Warwick). As the days went on I noticed a few minor changes, but sadly not the amazing weight loss that the product advertised. Fortunately, however, I also didn’t suffer from the ‘laxative effects’ that the tea may induce. I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps when people cut down the amount of alcohol, caffeine and carbonated drinks they consume – as per the rules of the detox – they naturally lose weight, which may explain some of the amazing testimonials.

Since I hadn’t been drinking anything other than water even before I started the programme, the pounds didn’t miraculously fall off me. That’s not to say that I didn’t notice any other positive effects. Over summer I’d been feeling a bit bloated due to my increasingly poor diet. The tea was great at eradicating that bloated feeling, even when I’d had a large meal (hey, a girl’s gotta go to Comso every so often, right?). I’d even go as far as to say that my appetite was reduced.

I noticed a few minor changes, but sadly not the amazing weight loss that the product advertised

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/ Pixabay

All in all, the product is not quite worth the extreme amount of money I paid for what was in the end just a few teabags. This Bootea tea detox package as well as others of its kind has received pretty mixed reviews on social media. For some people the effects are apparently out of this world, and for others (like me), it didn’t really give me what I was looking for. In reality, there are a number of other, much more affordable, teas out there which you can drink to help keep your digestive system healthy as well as encouraging a stable sleep pattern. After my little experiment was completed, I went out and bought some lemon & ginger and peppermint flavours from my local supermarket. Upon closer inspection, some of the ingredients in these teabags were also found in Bootea’s, but at t £1.99 for twenty tea bags they made my tight student purse feel a lot happier. There’s a whole host of teas which you can buy and use on a regular basis to help with what Bootea and other branded tea diets say they’ll help with – chamomile, liquorice, lemon and green tea to name just a few. So, be careful what you’re buying, it may not be worth your money!