Fifty Shades of Green: Our 5-Day Juice Cleanse

If you’ve watched ‘Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead’, you’ll have a clue as to why we decided to do a five day juice cleanse. If not, then do read on, and add that documentary to your watch list.

After months of solid travelling, our everyday diet was full of junk and snacks that are easy to pick up, and cheap to buy. We overindulged on inclusive buffet breakfasts, and sometimes struggled to find shops selling fruit (depending on where we were at the time). So, after watching a documentary filled with people juicing to turn their health in a better direction, we decided to give it a go.

The rules are simple. Juice up all those veggies, with fruits thrown in for sweetness, and fill your body with goodness. No solid foods, just juice and water all day. If you know me, you know that I wasn’t happy about giving up diet coke, but nevertheless, it was a matter of solidarity and so, I agreed.

Though you may lose weight on a juice cleanse, you’re very likely to gain it back once you start eating solid foods. Losing weight or fad dieting was not our goal. We aimed to inhale all of the healthy things we could, to give our bodies a break from processed foods and snacks. I’d never ever recommend anyone start a fad diet because they’re almost always counter-productive, and often harmful. So just be careful with how you go about this / what your expectations are – ask your doctor if you’re unsure about anything.

We look like the healthiest humans to ever walk out of a supermarket – with bags of spinach and kale, broccoli, celery, beetroot, cucumbers, and lettuce, not to mention the pineapples, berries, oranges, and pears… we fancy ourselves worthy of some imaginary medal. Not a snack or bottle of diet coke in sight.

Every time someone on TV says a word that even sounds like food, I miss food. There are so many food commercials! All of the juices taste so… green. We’re making them ourselves but no matter how much pineapple I add, the kale reigns supreme. I wonder how many days I will last… it’s tougher than it sounded.

I crave all of the foods. Apparently you’re supposed to do a pre-cleanse week where you still eat solids, but cut out processed foods, sugary foods, sodas etc. They say it makes the juicing easier. It was a bit late for me to read that. I tried masking beetroot with lots of other ingredients. Apparently I don’t love beetroot juice. I really thought a pink juice HAD to taste good.

Getting into the swing of things, but really struggling with energy levels. They say that your energy really picks up after day 3 but I can’t imagine that at all. I add the occasional smoothie into the mix so that I don’t feel too depleted. I tough it out, dream about food, and have actual hunger pain in my stomach later that night. Ouch. I think food misses me too.

We’re feeling a bit poorly (not related to juicing) and we’ve already decided to have soup for lunch. We juice around meals to half stick to our plan. Then we make tacos for dinner. Oops. Food is amazing.

Well, we’ve already given in to food, but we carry on juicing (we did, after all, buy a lot of ingredients for this). Maybe juicing alone isn’t for me – it’s just something I could add in to my life to get some extra healthiness. All of the people in that documentary are actual heroes. Go watch it.

We mainly just made it up as we went along, based off of juice recipes we’ve used in the past. Example: Lettuce, half a cucumber, kale, spinach, three carrots, and an orange. Yum. Right? I also borrowed some recipes from Joe Cross (Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead). His site is so handy – he even lists substitutions for if you don’t like a particular ingredient *cough* celery – I’m looking at you.

If you’re going to give it a go, just be careful and do it because you want to look after your body, not because you want to lose some quick pounds. And probably speak to a doctor… or start eating on day four like we did.

Have you done a juice cleanse before? What were your goals/reasons, and how did you find it?