Juicing: Post-Cleanse Thoughts and Tips

As promised, here are some of my experiences summed up. I learned a lot during this cleanse, and I hope to make juicing a supplement in my diet going forward. It's just incredibly easy to get 100% of your recommended diet of fruits and vegetables in a day by just juicing, even if it is once a day.

• Exercising during the cleanse: I ended up walking around 2 miles per day and did pushups the last 2 nights. Even this little amount of exercise was enough to exhaust me and I didn't regain my strength until I juiced again after my walks (1 mile each). Suggestion: don't workout during a juice cleanse except for walking short distances.
• I never truly experienced hunger pangs of any significance. I juiced 4-5x a day, and would go 2-4 hours between meals. I never woke up starving.
• It's funny how thirsty you get when all you do is juice. Drink lots of water! I probably didn't drink enough since I always felt full after a juice.
• Getting a large variety of organic fruits and vegetables isn't as expensive as people may think; I spent about $20/day on fresh organics during this cleanse. To put that in perspective, one meal in the Loop can cost ~$10 for lunch. 
• It took me 10-15 minutes from start to finish to juice; that includes all of the prep (washing, cutting), the assembly of the juicer, juicing the fruit, and cleaning/disassembling the juicer again. If you've heard it takes you an hour or more...then those people have no idea what they're doing.
• Protip: Line your waste basket with a plastic bag for easy cleanup and disposal! It's one less thing to clean, and picking up a plastic bag and throwing it out is easier than trying to scrape out all of the fruit and vegetable pulp. 

Juicing: Day 3 - Last Day of Cleanse 1

Phew. I made it. And it wasn't really that hard to push through the full 72 hours. As it stands, I went about 90 hours (almost 4 days) without solid food; I'm definitely looking forward to utilizing my teeth for my meals going forward. My final day of juicing is below, and my post-cleanse thoughts on the 3 day cleanse will follow. As I alluded to in my title for today's post, I'll be doing another 3-day juice cleanse next week, but this time through Peeled from a Groupon I purchased a while back.


Breakfast (8am): 5 Oranges
I figured out why they squeeze oranges instead of juicing them; juicing oranges can be bitter because of the pieces of white rind/peel that are left on the orange get juiced along with the flesh of the fruit. They say the rind is the healthiest part of the orange; it's also the least tasty. It was still good, but it was milky in color and bitter in taste. Not overbearingly sweet. It got me through the morning just fine.


Lunch (12pm): 1 Apple, 1 Pear, 1 Crown of Broccoli, 1 Carrot, 1 stalk of Kale, 1/2 Yellow Bell Pepper, 1 Tomato, 1/2 Cucumber

8 different kinds of fruits and vegetables in this power drink. I really enjoyed the sweetness of this one coming from 4 different sources (apple, pear, carrot, bell pepper). I would say that the individual flavors of the tomato, bell pepper, and broccoli were the most pronounced, however. Definitely a good drink. So good, in fact, that I decided to make the same drink for my afternoon snack (4pm).


Dinner (7pm): 1/4 Pineapple, 5 Strawberries, 2 Apples
I went back to an all fruit drink for dinner as I figured I probably wouldn't juice again for the rest of the night. No surprise here; great blend of flavors. As the night progressed, I grew increasingly hungry, tired, and lethargic. My light headed feeling was constantly persistent throughout this juice cleanse, but I noted that it was beginning to turn into a headache again. To move past the laziness, I decided to do pushups to get my blood flowing from sitting around all day after work.

Juicing: Day 2

I went to bed around 11pm last night, which is much earlier than I usually do. I generally have a lot more energy this late at night (probably from eating bigger meals, later at night) so never quite make it to bed earlier than 12am-1am. But not during this cleanse; I was definitely feeling low on energy and decided to hit the sack earlier than normal. When I woke up this morning, I had a LOT of trouble waking up. I was extremely tired, even though I got about 8 hours of sleep. Not good since I had to juice still.

Breakfast (8am): 1 Apple, 4 Pears
Because I was short on time, I decided to just make a simple juice that required little prep. Plus, mornings should be heavier on the fruits anyways, so I made this one and got a little over 20oz of juice. Tasted great, as you can expect, but it's essentially sugar.

Lunch (12:30pm): 1 head of broccoli, 1 cucumber, 4 carrots, 4 stalks of kale, 1 red bell pepper, 2 apples
The apple and pear juice from the morning actually powered me through quite easily until lunchtime. I actually had a friend over for this one so I made a bit more than usual. This probably made closer to 32oz of juice, and the combination of the sweet produce (carrots, apples, and bell pepper) really blended nicely with the greens for an all around satisfying lunch drink. Luckily, my friend enjoyed hers as well.

Afternoon Snack (3:30pm): Orange and Carrot Juice
I forgot to make an afternoon snack and I was reallly starting to fatigue and get that "cloudy" feeling back. Luckily, there's a Jamba Juice across the street and I called to ask about their purported freshly squeezed juiced. I confirmed that the OJ is 100% freshly squeezed oranges, and carrots freshly squeezed so I decided that it would be a good snack for the afternoon. And it was; definitely freshly made in front of you, but for $5 for 16oz, I'll just make it at home where I can spend less than half of that on organic ingredients and get more juice.

I had to stop by Whole Foods again on the way home to pick up some more fresh produce for the rest of the week and probably weekend. I spent another $40, so that brings my total up to $90; that should be enough to last me about 5 full days of juicing. At around $20/day

Evening Snack (7pm): 1 Apple, 1/3 Pineapple, 6 Strawberries

Wow. This concoction was more like a smoothie than a juice, and it was amazing! Definitely recommend this one since it leaves you pretty full and satisfied. Good thing too, because I was definitely getting really tired and the mental cloudiness was back with a vengeance, and I was feeling a headache coming on, too. But after drinking this one, I was back to normal for the most part. I even had enough energy to get some work (grading) done which I was able to focus on to get finished before making my "dinner" juice.

Dinner (9pm): 1 Cucumber, 1 Broccoli Crown, 1 large Kale Stalk, 1 Red Bell Pepper, 2 Apples,  1 Tomato
Another good blend. I was apprehensive at first to throw in so many different fruits/veggies, but the end result was a refreshing juice that contained lots of different "things" that are good for me. I ended up going to bed around midnight without feeling too tired.

Day 2 Summary
Looking back on the day, I probably juiced too many fruits. I'll scale that back for Day 3 and utilize a vegetable heavy juice for my afternoon snack so that I'll have 3 vegetable rich juices and 2 fruit rich juices to wrap up my cleanse. I did get 11 different types of produce, so that's always a good thing to see. Let's see how Day 3, the last day of this cleanse goes.

Juicing: Day 1

Now that I had the basics down, today was my first official day on my 3-day juice cleanse. I stopped eating at around 6pm the night before, so I was ready to start juicing.

Juicing during the work week can be a bit difficult; waking up early to clean your fresh produce, juicing it, then cleaning up can take some time. Luckily, I had enough practice so I can generally wash, juice, and clean everything in about 15 minutes in the morning. Not bad.

Breakfast (8am): 6 Carrots, 2 stalks of Kale, 2 cups of Spinach, 1/2 a Lemon
I forgot to go to the store to restock on my fresh produce. So I used what I had left in my fridge to make my morning juice, which resulted in about 16oz; good enough. This was probably the worst tasting juice I've had so far; this is the juice that made me realize just how much good taste and sweetness even one apple brings to the mix.

Lunch (12pm): 1 Cucumber, 1 stalks of Kale, 2 Apples, 1 head of Broccoli, 1 Tomato

On my way home for lunch, I made a quick detour to Whole Foods in the Gold Coast and stocked up on fruits and vegetables. Total bill came out to around $50; not too bad for a couple of days worth of fresh, organic produce. Here's the haul:

With my new-found bounty, I made a cucumber, kale, apple, broccoli and tomato juice. Not bad! This was my first time juicing broccoli, and I have to say that it does produce a lot of juice. Definitely get the full stalk of broccoli, not just the crown; the stalk is where the majority of the liquid comes from. I was feeling a bit light-headed and definitely low on energy before this juice, but drinking it definitely rejuvenated me almost immediately. The taste was also great, and definitely had a noticeable flavor from the broccoli.

I decided to make a quick juice for the afternoon before I cleaned up and headed back to the office and made an afternoon snack (3:30pm) of  2 apples, 2 pears,  and squeezed juice from half a lemon. I put it in my bottle and planned to drink it around 330-4pm which I succeeded in doing as I was able to make it through most of the afternoon without feeling too tired. As expected, this was a great tasting juice.

Dinner (7pm): 2 Carrots, 2 stalks of Kale, 1 Cucumber, 1 Apple, 1 Yellow Bell Pepper, 1/2 a  Lemon

I picked up some bell peppers on my friend's recommendation and I'm amazed at how delicious and juicy they are. Just one bell pepper makes a great amount of liquid, and contributes a lot of sweetness to a drink. You can see that I used 1 apple, 1 cucumber, 2 carrots, 1/2 a lemon, 1 bell pepper (yellow), and about 2 stalks of kale. Enough to make 22oz of juice or so. Another great tasting juice that was helped by the addition of the bell pepper.

Day 1 Summary:

10 different types of fruits and vegetables today! Day 1 was done and I made it through without much difficulty. I never experienced any significant hunger pangs or extreme fatigue or weakness; just some mental "cloudiness" around 2-3 hours after drinking a juice and noticeable energy declines. I'm looking forward to Day 2!

Day 0: The Preparation

Juicing. From fruits and vegetables, and not steroids. For some reason, people kept on thinking that I meant steroids when I would say "I'm thinking about starting to juice." On second thought, I could have probably phrased that better. After hearing about juicing for a while now from my sister and from various friends, I started to get more and more interested. It wasn't until I watched Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, a documentary about the benefits of juicing, that I really became interested. 

I bought a refurbished Breville juicer from Amazon for about $100 (they seem to be sold out on Amazon for the moment). I took what I learned from the documentary, friends and family and headed out to Whole Foods to get some fresh fruits and veggies. I started off getting a variety of produce; apples, carrots, kale, cucumber, spinach, lemons, and celery to start. I cleaned and assembled my juicer for the first time, and then I started experimenting. 

My first juice was over the weekend on a Saturday. I made an apple, carrot, and celery and it turned out orange:

It was pretty good! Apples give a lot of juice. Carrots are very sweet. Celery smells the strongest. Just a few things I noticed with my first juice.

The next day, I tried an apple, carrot, celery, lemon, kale, spinach, and cucumber juice. This one was mean and green:

I was a bit apprehensive about the kale since I heard how bitter it could be, but it all worked out well. This one smelled a lot like fresh lawn clippings, probably thanks to the kale and spinach (which give the least amount of juice I've seen yet). I really enjoyed it.

Here are some tips I've learned and wanted to share:

1. Buy organic. The point of this is to eat cleaner, so why waste the effort on fruits and veggies that have a bunch of pesticides and other "nasties" (as Pret would call them). However, fruits that need to be peeled/skinned (e.g. pineapple, oranges) don't need to be organic. 
2. Wash all of your fruits and veggies and prep them beforehand.
3. Clean your juicer as soon as you're done juicing!
4. If you want to store your juice for later, get an airtight container and refrigerate for up to 8 hours. Of course, drinking the juice as soon as its juiced is optimal. 
5. Don't juice berries except for strawberries. You won't get much out of them and its a waste of $$$.

Now, it's onto Day 1!