A month ago I went on a juice cleanse. You know what it cleans out of you best? The will to live.
This is not entirely fair, because I didn’t strictly play by the rules. But I was trying this increasingly popular purge after realizing there was perhaps room for improvement in my lifestyle choices. When did I know this for sure? Was it when I was a bar one evening, having eaten nothing all day so I could enjoy my repast of three mojitos, five bowls of popcorn and six deviled eggs? Or was it the day I realized that I was about 9 kilograms overweight as I rounded out my 40s?
I had to start somewhere. Why not here?
The idea of consuming only water or juice to rid the body of so-called toxins is not new. Virtually every major religion has some fasting and cleansing ritual that supposedly allows the body to heal, regenerate and, in a sense, apologize for being such a jerk. But everything old is new again, which may be why juice cleansing has been on the rise.
Cleansing’s more recent popularity is traceable to the 1990s, when Peter Glickman, the Scientologist and entrepreneur, repackaged a 1940s diet called the Master Cleanse (Stanley Burroughs wrote the book “The Master Cleanser” in 1976). The Master Cleanse involves lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and 10 days of your life. Celebrities swear by its energizing and weight loss effects.
In the last few years, the idea of cleanses has again evolved. Now there are kinder, gentler alternatives. The new cleanses contain about 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day; there is generally a nut-milk component for fat and a little protein, and vegetable juices for vitamins and minerals and live enzymes. I decided to go with BluePrintCleanse, founded a few years ago by the raw-foodist Zoe Sakoutis and Erica Huss in a kitchen, and now the big macher of cleanses in Manhattan. I chose the company after extensive research, which consisted of liking the clever copywriting, the pretty sky-blue labels and the friendly font. I felt healthier just looking at the spare design and architecturally satisfying containers, which – not coincidentally, I believe – are reminiscent of baby bottles. In the way I believed my Vitamin Water instills in me a pure shot of nutrients and hydration (rather than, say, the trace amounts of vitamin and 12 teaspoons of sugar a bottle that the Food and Drug Administration recently noted), I believed that for $65 a day, BluePrintCleanse would set me right.
There were three levels of intensity in these cleanses: Renovation, Foundation and the ominous-sounding Excavation. The difference in intensity has to do with the number of green juices consumed every day. While common sense should have dictated that I take the beginner’s Renovation level, I opted for Foundation, since Renovation involved drinking beet juice. Maybe beet juice is considered a fruit, or fruity, or something. But in my mind beet is a fruit in much the way Joe Lieberman is a Democrat.
Before I ordered I asked the service representative, delicately, if a cleanse meant that I wouldn’t be able to be more than 3 meters from a bathroom for three days. She laughed. “No, not at all,” she said.
In fact, a juice cleanse is not cleansing in the sense I feared it would be. You’re drinking about 9 kilograms worth of produce a day, Sakoutis told me later, but not roughage. The cleansing component comes mostly from the other part of the program, the part that, in my enthusiasm, I didn’t really consider: At the beginning and the end of the three-day program, the BPC people highly recommend a colonic. A colonic is better known as many litres of water shot into your rectum through a tube, only to pass out of you again, this time with the contents of your intestines.
So, colonics: a big “No thank you.”
Colonic or no, BPC advises its juicers to prepare their bodies for fasting by spending a couple of days ahead of time eating lightly. Anyway, I really did stick with the pre-cleanse program, and by the time my juices arrived in the morning, I was already feeling so pure and good that I wondered if all this fuss was really necessary.
But the six juices, numbered and meant to be drunk in a particular order, looked so tasty. What’s not to like about spicy lemonade, or pineapple with mint? Cashew milk flavoured with vanilla and cinnamon was a little cloying, but … I mean, c’mon, cashews, the George Clooney of nuts. When it came to the green juice, I read the label and tried hard to concentrate on the “lemon” and “apple” parts of the equation: romaine, celery, cucumber, green apple, spinach, kale, parsley, lemon. Bright side: no beets.
Here’s the thing. That green juice? It was like drinking everything bad that ever happened to me in high school.
Yet I knew there was a reason I’d gone with BPC: I was buying a little therapy with my juice. On the first day I got an encouraging e-mail: “By now, you have probably made it through your first juice and asked yourself at least once why you decided to embark on this somewhat strange and green journey. The answer lies ahead – your body will thank you at the end of it all!”
The next three days could be summed up thus: 1. I need food. 2. Hey, this isn’t bad! 3. Kill me now.
Let me rephrase that. By the third day I felt great in the way I’m told that the imminently drowning feel great right before they give up and inhale that last mouthful of water. My juice-aficionado friend Gilly told me I was on an endorphin high. Later, Dr. David Colbert, the New York internist, dermatologist and author of “The High School Reunion Diet,” told me I was in ketosis. “That giddy feeling you get is what diabetics get when your body runs out of sugar and starts using other products for energy,” he said. “I had a model come in recently, clutching the furniture, explaining to me that she’d been juicing for a week. Your sugar metabolism is completely out of whack.”
So, what’s so bad about juice cleansing? Done occasionally, for a few days at a time, apparently nothing. Done regularly, for a week or more, quite a bit.
Colbert said: “You have to ask yourself this question: With a juice cleanse, what are you really cleaning? Really, nothing. The bowel self-cleans. It’s evolved over millions of years to do this.”
If you’re going to have liquids, said Colbert, a staunch believer in unprocessed foods, there is certainly good to be had from eating fresh vegetables and fruits and nuts pulverized into liquid. “But most people aren’t Einsteins,” he added. “Often their idea of a juice fast is having nothing but orange juice or apple juice for a week. In which case, you might as well call it the Toblerone diet, because that’s how much sugar you’re pouring into your system.”
This is pretty much what I did. And it’s dumb.
Moreover, many doctors see juice fasting as just another form of American extremism – as Colbert put it, “somewhere between religiosity and craziness.”
And me? What did I learn from all this? I’ve decided there is nothing wrong with the placebo effect now and then. What’s so bad about feeling a little better, even if there’s no demonstrable proof that you actually are better?
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