Disclaimer: This post jumps around. A lot. I am not a very concise person when it comes to something I am passionate or excited about (lord only knows how I have a Bachelors degree). Most of the time I have too much information trying to mash its way out of my brain and I go in 50 million different directions. If you have ever heard me speak you know that entire thoughts can come out as one strung-together-with-vowels-and-guttural-sounds word. It’s strange, but I did inherit this way of speaking from my mother (Ceph-a-lone, anyone?) and thankfully Steve has learned how to decode this type of language I have. He has often said that if he did not know me he wouldn’t talk to me because I do not make sense, I pronounce words wrong, and generally say one thing and mean another. And not in like a 2 faced way, its in like a Broca’s Apashia, brain damaged kind of way. (And no I do not have brain damage, my brain just moves to quickly sometimes.) Anyway – to the juicing!
Ah, the Juice Cleanse. This time was way better that when Steve and I tried to do a liquid fast back in June. This time I did some research on different types of juice cleanses that you can purchase and have shipped to your house, but man, are they expensive! About $75.00/day! I own a juicer, a Breville Juice Fountain Compact, and I love it. The juice cup has the foam separator on it and its wonderful (I hate juice foam, yuck!). So I can’t really justify $75.00/day. So I found some recipes* and decided to hit the grocery store and to make 1 day worth of juice on Thursday night to start what I wanted to be a 3 day cleanse on Friday. And repeat the process every night until I finished the cleanse on Sunday evening.
Preparing all of the juice for Friday took 2, yes TWO, entire hours. And that did not include the planning and grocery shopping. But it was well worth it. On Friday morning, I woke up and drank a glass of hot lemon water/cayenne pepper. That was kind of gross but I managed it down. Then with the first juice in hand I put 4 juices in my little cooler and packed it with ice and on my way I went. (the 6th “juice” was nut milk and I had unsweetened, unflavored almond milk in the fridge so I cheated a bit here and “made” the nut milk that evening when I was ready to drink it.)
Work was a breeze. My bosses are vegetarians so there was no appetizing food in the office all day although we do share a wall with a pizza joint, but honestly, I was not hungry at all. I took about an hour to drink each juice and then waited about 1.5 hours to start the next one. In between each juice I chugged water and drank mint herbal tea. Mint is an appetite suppressant and was a wonderful pick me up during the afternoon. All of the juice tasted wonderful, but a disclaimer, I have been juicing for a year and even then when I started juicing I had an extremely open mind to what fresh juice would taste like. And I’m not talking about fresh apple juice here. I am talking about a 3:1 ratio of veggies to fruits (if you are thinking of diving into juicing pick up Kris Carr’s Crazy Sexy Diet – this book has changed my life and its what got me into juicing in the first place and what pushed me over the vegetarian edge). I have tried a bunch of weird greens (collards? mustard greens, anyone?) and at this point I am most comfortable with this combination; 1-2 cucumbers, a big handful of kale, a big handful of spinach, a big handful of romaine, a few parsley nibs, an inch of ginger, and 1 granny smith apple. This is a pretty tasty juice that I have taken about a year to perfect. I started with pears as my fruit, and they were okay but I have found, for me at least, apples make a good fruit to add to juices because it can mask the really gross earthy taste of a lot of the veggies. And the granny’s have enough bitterness to mix well with the ginger.
As I said, work was a breeze, and really that evening wasn’t bad at all. Steve did not partake in this cleanse, and he even got delicious fast food that night and it didn’t bother me at. It was really nice to not feel hungry at all and to know that I was still taking in about 1000 calories and about 15lbs of veggies, so I was still being careful with my body during this cleanse. After we got home from the fast food run and the grocery store for a few more veggies, I prepped my juice for Saturday (took 1.5 hours this time as I did not have to vinegar soak anything and I had to mass juicing down to a science at this point) then I did about a half hour of intense yoga that night and headed off to bed.
Saturday morning I woke up and weighed myself, I lost 3.5lbs. Fantastic. But that was not the goal of the cleanse. Yes I had stress ate everything in sight from the middle of June to about now and yes I had put on about 5-7lbs, but really, I just felt like crap. I needed a big change and for me cleansing is really the kick in the butt I need to get back to eating better/doing yoga/taking better care of myself in general. After that I took down the hot lemon water/cayenne and then started on my biggest juice of the day, 24oz of green juice. It really was hard to get that down while everyone in the house was drinking coffee and eating yummy breakfast foods. But I pleaded with myself in my mind to keep plugging on, and so I did. I started in on my second juice as Steve and I headed out to what I thought would be 2-3 hours of errands. I did not bring any juice with me, although I knew I should have, I just…didn’t for some reason. This was the biggest mistake I made all weekend. We ended up being out for 5 hours! We had some really big, important errands to run that took way longer than we thought. So needless to say, by the time we got in the car to finally head home I had a blazing headache. Which yes, that is a detox symptom during a cleanse, but this was definitely a caloric deficiency headache, as we are no strangers this headache and I. I decided that it was probably in my best interest to break my fast with something that is easy for me to process. I made some whole wheat toast and enjoyed getting some food into my deprived body. This is not the way it is recommended to break a cleanse! This is what I have found is easiest on my body. Soup is usually what is recommended but it has not worked out well for me in the past. Again I am not a stranger to cleansing, this is not my first rodeo.
I was kind of upset that I had to break my cleanse, especially with all of that fresh juice sitting in the fridge, prepared, and ready to drink. But for me, after a mentally taxing day, it was what was best for me. I did not continue on the juice cleanse on Sunday because if you follow me on instagram, you will know that we had an ice cream party for 20 children at our house that day and since my fast was already broken I decided that maybe it was best to call it quits on this cleanse. Even though I did not complete what I had set out to do, I now know that the 3 day cleanse can be done, and that it doesn’t have to be painful as long as the juice schedule is maintained. I think the next time I try this (September!?) I will actually do a 5 day cleanse during the work week. It seems to be much easier for me to stick to the cleanse if I am at work, strange as it seems, but there are fewer temptations and no meat eaters there and that is where I spend most of my time during the week anyway.
So to sum it up – in 1 day i lost 3.5lbs (I am 5’7″ to begin with I weighed 167.5lbs and on the second morning I weighed 164.0lbs. Both weights were taken upon waking and after using the restroom). For what would have been 3 days worth of juice it cost me about $55-$60. I did not keep precise track as I had to go back to the store to get some things I ran out of on the first night. I also shopped at Kroger and bought what I could there (meaning most of it was not organic). I bought my kale/spinach/romaine in bags ready to use to cut down on prep time and their fresh greens were pretty raggedy that night anyway. That drove the cost up a bit, but I was willing to sacrifice the few dollars for the prep time.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment! :) And as always, thanks for stopping by!
*I followed some hacked Blue Print Cleanse recipes. And no I am not going to print the recipes here because they really are a wonderful company and if you can afford the juice from them/live in NY or CA/don’t have a juicer and the blend/paint bag method sounds scary, then you should really look them up. And if you have a juicer/want to try the blender/paint bag method, then some googling can yield the desired recipes.
