Let’s start out with a reality check. There are plenty of skinny Asian women that drink boba everyday. To ask the question, “Can bubble tea make me fat?” means that the excuse, “Well, they have a fast metabolism?” goes out the window.
Since asking the first question answers the second question — that excuse isn’t allowed to be used to swat away the reality that skinny people can get fat too. Bubble tea doesn’t make anyone fat, but having way too many calories than what your body burns daily, will eventually make you fat. Why would someone get fat from drinking bubble tea if they replace one food (boba tea in this case) with another? This replacement should be happening either consciously or unconsciously when we add something new to our diet.
Unless we have made the decision to ignore this and not listen to our bodies.
If you’re thinking about eating the amount of food you normally eat and also adding your new found love (bubble tea) to your diet, then you are going to start gaining weight.
From personal years of experience and testing with weight loss and weight gain, I can certainly tell you that it is easier to start at the kitchen than the gym when it comes to dropping the calories.
Rather than pointing out every sugar, fat, and carb and playing the blame game on them, we will take a more practical approach to this.
Because the fact is, you can get fat eating the most nutritional foods too. How? By eating too much.
So here we will look at the practical ways to fit bubble tea into your diet without gaining weight.
In my article “healthy bubble tea options” I broke down the calories of each component that makes the boba tea what it is. We found out that a 16 ounce pearl milk tea contained around 357 calories. I highly recommend checking out that article for many ways to even reduce bubble tea to almost 0 calories.
That means that a pearl milk tea only contains a little more calories than a bowl of oatmeal in the morning, which sits at around 305 calories. This is considering that your oatmeal doesn’t have added sugar.
I love my oatmeal with sugar, so I do add sugar to it. Brown sugar is one of my favorites. Two tablespoons of sugar, and it already goes past the pearl milk tea in calories.
This means that bubble tea is no more ‘fattening’ than a bowl of oatmeal in the morning.
Of course we are talking about the raw calories here.. The point is that, if you only have a bubble tea in the morning, instead of your other breakfast, the possibility of gaining weight is slim to none. It may even result in a loss of weight if your morning meal is normally bigger than that.
So don’t have McDonald’s breakfast Egg McMuffin, with a boba tea to wash it down on the side, and you’ll be fine. Have one or the other.
If you do decide to have both, then cut down on what you’re eating during lunch or dinner. Now of course McDonald’s isn’t the healthiest choice of foods, but it is great for illustrating the point for individuals that do eat like this. It paints the bigger picture of how those Asian women are still small after all these years. If you’re drinking bubble tea at lunch time, then cut a side or two out of your main dish.
It is ok to skip a meal all together for a boba drink instead. This really is the secret to skinny people staying skinny (or muscular if that’s you). Two meals a day with a small snack may improve your diet.
I found my weight to drop after a week or month of doing this. I was able to treat myself at set times of the day, while still getting my food in.
Drinking Bubble Tea On A Diet
Here is a helpful tool to calculate all of your calories from your food for the day, along with the calories for a 16 ounce bubble tea.
A boba drink without modifications would be 17.85 percent of the daily calorie intake for women, and 14.28 percent for men to maintain their weight.
So drinking 5 small boba tea drinks would still leave room for both males and females on the daily calorie intake without gaining weight. This is considering that nothing else was consumed for the entire day.
The average male and female would actually experience a weight loss (based on 2000 calories for women and 2500 for men).
So it is definitely possible for both males and females to consume bubble tea on a diet. If you are below the average human in terms of height, then your daily calorie intake would be lower. The average height of a man is 5’9, and for women it is just under 5’4. If you are above this height, then the calorie intake would be higher.
I’m not recommending that you drink only bubble tea all day, but just giving a guide to help you drink the boba tea you love without gaining weight.
Is a Bubble Tea Empty Calories?
Now for the people who want to over achieve, we ask this question: “Is bubble tea empty calories?”
A bubble tea isn’t junk food. It has milk, tea, fruits, veggies, and tapioca pearls (a starch) in its usual ingredients. However, if sugars are added in large amounts, then this can have empty calories that may be turned into fats by the body.
This doesn’t immediately mean that you will get fat in the sense that you will gain weight, but the sugars can be stored as fats in your body.
It is definitely possible for an individual to appear slim to the naked eye, but be fat too from consuming junk foods for years. The article mentioned earlier provides useful information on making your own healthy great tasting bubble tea drinks with less sugar and calories.
Making your own drinks can also prevent getting fat from high calorie boba tea ordered at boba shops. Not every boba shop makes their drinks the same.
Exercising and staying active should be a part of your life whether you drink bubble tea or not.
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