Using Aloe Vera Juice and Apple Cider Vinegar for Weight Loss
If you’re looking for a hot way to lose weight, you’ve probably heard of aloe vera. Known for its many potentially beneficial biological effects, most people are familiar with aloe vera in the topical format. Humans have used aloe vera to soothe themselves since before recorded history.
When applied as a gel or cream, aloe vera offers cooling and soothing sensations which can sometimes help with burn healing and wound healing. When drunk, aloe vera has a variety of other effects. These effects range from allegedly reducing inflammation to helping with weight loss by inducing bowel movements.
Apple cider vinegar is a more common chemical to find in the home. Derived from apple cider which bacteria have converted from alcohol into a mixture of acids, this vinegar is an effective cleaning product with an apple-like scent.
Though apple cider vinegar also has a history of human use dating back to 3300 BC, its use as a weight loss supplement is only within the last few decades.
What Is Aloe Vera?
Aloe vera is a cactus. People typically consume several parts of the aloe vera plant: the latex, the gel, and the skin. Aloe vera juice is made from either latex or gel.
When made from latex, the latex is extruded from the plant then diluted with water. You should avoid aloe vera drinks derived from the latex of the plant because they contain aloin, a compound that is known to cause colorectal cancer. Importantly, the FDA banned dietary supplements containing aloin in 2002.
When made with gel, the gel is separated from the plant and then typically passed through a chemical process known as decolorization. The decolorization makes the gel safe to consume orally. The gel is then diluted with water. The decolorization process removes the cancerous chemicals for the most part.
The skin can be consumed directly or blended into a shake. Most aloe vera drinks do not include the skin.
What Is Apple Cider Vinegar?
Apple cider vinegar is exactly what it sounds like. Apple cider is derived from crushed and pressed apples. Then, the cider is left to ferment with the help of yeast. This changes the sugars from the apple cider into alcohols up to the point where the yeast are harmed by the alcohol that they produce.
Then, bacteria slowly convert the alcohol into acids. These acids include acetic acid – vinegar – and malic acid. Eventually, these acids kill off the bacteria which created them and any remaining yeast. The result is apple cider vinegar.
Apple cider vinegar is used in various food products. Like normal vinegar, apple cider vinegar is indeed an effective antiseptic owing to its acidity. Nonetheless, it is safe to consume in the quantities associated with foodstuffs.
Can I Lose Weight By Using These Two Drinks?
Recently, people have claimed that it is possible to lose weight by drinking apple cider vinegar and aloe vera juice.
While there is no scientific or physiological basis for either drink to genuinely reduce the amount of fat stored by the body and thus reduce mass, there is an explanation for why people might think that the mixture helps them to lose weight.
Let’s say that someone weights themselves and is unhappy with the result. This weight includes the contents of their digestive tract by definition. Looking to lose some weight quickly, the person creates a mixture of aloe vera juice and apple cider vinegar. Holding their nose, they quaff it down.
Within a few minutes, the person decides to hit the bathroom. After a bowel movement, they go about their business. The next day, they weigh themselves to find that they weigh less than the day before. They’ve proven that the solution they drank helped them to lose weight, right?
Not exactly. Because aloe vera juice increases gut motility an extreme amount and also makes it, so the gut has a harder time absorbing water, the bowel movement that they had after drinking the solution cleared far more mass from their body than it would have otherwise.
Then, for the rest of the day, their bowels couldn’t absorb water as easily, so more of it was excreted via urine rather than being incorporated into stools as usual. The bowels are thus dehydrated relative to normal, meaning that they have less water weight. Likewise, stools are slightly lighter even when they are formed.
So, the person does weigh less the day after they drank the solution of apple cider vinegar and aloe vera juice. But it’s a very deceptive effect that only results due to the full bowel clearance and subsequent lack of water uptake.
Put differently, the weight that they lost was not weight lost by liquidating fat and decreasing the physical size of fat reserves in the body. Nor was muscle mass lost. The number that the person read on the scale went down, but the shapely figure and healthier body are still as far away as they were the previous day.
Importantly, the same trick won’t work on the second day. There’s a limit to how much of the vera and apple cider vinegar solution you can drink without getting sick. Likewise, your bowels will never become so incapable of absorbing water that they are reduced in size – at least, you’d better hope they don’t.
So, if you’re in desperate need of losing a little bit of weight for a brief period of time with minimal effort in order to make some kind of external standard, aloe vera and apple cider vinegar might be the ticket for you.
But if you’re looking to lose weight on a permanent basis for the purposes of better health, you should probably look elsewhere.
Neither apple cider vinegar nor aloe vera has any genuinely proven ability to increase the rate of fat liquidation in the body. Likewise, neither drink can stem your appetite, shrink your unsightly areas, or somehow make it look like you lost weight.
The combination may be a useful tool for you, but keep its limitations in mind.
