The Ultimate Tea Diet

I’ve always hoped to be aware of the habits that contribute to good health and making positive choices about what I do with myself. One of those was in regards to my diet and being at a healthy weight and I was hard-headed enough about it that my girl Heather and I even did an entire blog weight loss contest to make getting those pesky pounds off fun. And, I finally got rid of those last pesky lbs and I’ve been in my normal weight range ever since.

Mark “Dr. Tea” Ukra is nothing if not comprehensive and thorough in his Ultimate Tea Diet I reviewed for PBN. I cannot conceive of anything he did not cover that has anything whatsoever to do with tea. I think the only thing missing is a complete listing of everyone who has ever drunk tea. For real. The diet seeking customer wanting a simple explanation followed by recipes to try will get much more than they bargained for here.

I couldn’t possibly recap the variety of topics covered by Dr. Tea. I don’t even want to try. But, getting down to basics, Dr. Tea contends that implementing tea as a huge component of your entire lifestyle is the basis of a healthy diet and a natural way to lose unwanted pounds.

Here’s how far I was willing to go for you guys. I was willing to give up coffee and soda pop, COLD TURKEY, just for you guys. Just wanted to see how eliminating those yucky life-sucking bad-for-me elements and kicking up the tea would fare - I mean, hey, I was going to give this thing the ol’ college try for two solid weeks. (So, mystery solved, NOT pregnant!)

That was a REALLY bad idea. I had some rebound headaches (I get migraines pretty regularly) and they were horrific. Fierce, even, and not in a good way. So, yeah, I’m weak, I added one cup of coffee back into my daily routine by Day 5 because I was ready to kill somebody. But to truly do the tea diet correctly, I would eventually SLOWLY wean myself of coffee and sugary drinks instead of cold turkey.

But, I promise you, I followed many many other tips from Dr. Tea down to the letter. I used tea in rubs for my cooking. I created rubs for both pork and chicken on a couple different nights and it was darn tasty! I had never even considered using tea to cook with in that way, and I’m glad to have been introduced to a new cooking method.

And, I have been drinking tea pretty much nonstop for two weeks. This will officially go down as the most expensive review I’ve ever written, I ordered fifty bucks worth of tea from Dr. Tea and another thirty bucks worth of tea from Savannah Tea Room (which I’d been to in person and knew the tea was great and wanted some more). My favorite new discovery was the Apple Pie Black Tea which is frickin awesome. Don't think me a money wasting freak, I'll drink all this new tea...it's not going to waste, I already enjoyed tea before.

So, here’s the bottom line:

• I already knew about the health benefits of tea, Dr. Tea reinvigorated my joy in drinking tea

• I haven’t had tea this much since my junior year of high school and I would come home every day and have tea and scones with my autistic brother - it was our little routine (he was 2) and having that enjoyable, comfortable feeling again of a lovely cup of tea…well, it was nice

• The book itself is bordering on overkill - there is SO MUCH INFORMATION that your run-of-the-mill ADD dieter is going to skip a lot of the actual important stuff, or even skip buying it altogether. It just seems like people want a quick fix for everything, and that includes losing weight - they won’t want to bother with something that require a huge commitment of time such as The Ultimate Tea Diet. It does take a certain degree of dedication. I very much enjoyed it, but know a lot of people whose patience wouldn’t get them past the third chapter. (And the chapter about the History of Tea is at the end, which my anal, chronological self thought was the wrong place to put it - should be at the beginning! Oy!)

• Like I said earlier, I’ve been in my weight “zone” where my clothes all fit and I didn’t “need” to go on a diet as such, even after the holidays, but I’ll be darned if I didn’t lose a little anyway from all the lovely tea -1.6 pounds to be exact (and without having any time to exercise during the same time frame, which is not in the book but was just a part of my reality). Color me surprised!

It’s a great book and I enjoyed it but some people may be turned off by the constant reference to his own products and the amount of information it takes for him to get to the point.

Sunshine's Rating: