Chickweed: Herbal Help for Weight Loss

Learn how drinking chickweed tea can aid in weight loss as it increases nutritional intake.

More and more people are facing the fact that obesity has never been magically conquered by taking a pill while continuing to avoid exercise and consuming high calorie foods. Fortunately, there's all natural help in the form of herbal tea that can help to speed up the process of weight loss for those who have corrected their diets and taken up exercise.

Chickweed is a most wonderful herb to add to a low fat diet for various reasons. One of the most important of those reasons is the advantage that chickweed offers in its usefulness to reduce excess fat. The herb is not only a medicinal plant, it's also a vegetable. Therefore, it may be consumed as a food. However, since it's a weed, it's advisable to consume it in small quantities before increasing to larger amounts to check for any allergic reactions.

If chickweed is not eaten as a food such as an herb mixed in with a vegetable salad, it should then be consumed in the form of an infusion. It's imperative that only the bulk herb is chosen to make the infusion. Sales representatives of health foods stores have a tendency to try to persuade customers to buy costly forms of herbs that aren't always natural. Some of the forms of herbs often offered are tinctures, extracts, tablets, capsules, and herbal blends. The reason for rejecting these forms of herbal medicines is because they may be polluted with dangerous solvents such as benzene and propyl alcohol. Companies are permitted to employ solvents to clean machinery used to bottle edible products. Even the trace amounts that leech into foods and beverages slowly poison the body. The individual is put at risk of developing a host of diseases and cancers. Unfortunately, trace amounts of deadly solvents have been found in vitamins and other "health" supplements (Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D., N.D., The Cure for All Diseases [San Diego, CA: New Century Press, 1995], 354, 428).

How is a chickweed infusion (tea) prepared? One cup of boiling water is poured over a heaping teaspoon of the dried herb. The container should be covered and the infusion allowed to steep for at least 5 minutes. Chickweed tea doesn't have the most pleasant taste so it may be sweetened with stevia extract to make it more palatable. The advantage to using stevia is that it has practically no calories.

Chickweed is very versatile because the tea can be drank before, during, or after a meal. In addition to its action to reduce excess fat, chickweed also offers nutrition. It contains significant amount of vitamin C and the mineral phosphorous (Penny C. Royal, Herbally Yours [Provo, UT: Sound Nutrition, 1988], 104-105).