If you are serious about your health and wellness the odds are very good that you’ve heard about juice fasting, juice cleanses, and juice detoxes before.
Really popularized after the movie Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead was released – showing just how easy it is to use a juice fast to lose upwards of 80 pounds less than 60 days (while getting off of all medications, leading a happier and healthier lifestyle to boot) – we are here to tell you that juice fasting just might be the smartest decision you make to “reboot” and refresh your health and wellness.
Best of all, juice fasting is about as simple and as straightforward a dietary shakeup as you could imagine.
It only takes between three and five days to successfully complete, will help your body in both the short and long-term, and can help you generate a lot more energy, a lot more enthusiasm, and a lot more excitement about leading a healthier lifestyle as well.
Let’s dig right in!
At the very core of things, a juice fast is simply replacing ALL of the foods that you would eat on a regular basis with juice for a stretch of between three days and five days (and very rarely any longer than that).
Fruit and vegetable juices are going to flood your body with healthy nutrients, trigger a cascade of biochemical reactions that flush toxins from your body, all while working to essentially reset your digestive system from the ground up.
On top of that, you’ll be feeding and fueling the good bacteria in your digestive system, lightening the load on your liver and your kidneys, and helping to push out a lot of the toxic waste matter that builds up in our digestive system (particularly in the upper and lower intestines) that could have been building up there for years if not decades.
Recent research into the toxicity levels of the human intestines has shown that we are pretty much born with a toxic environment in our bodies. Researchers just discovered that the average newborn baby has 287 known and identified toxins located in their umbilical cord alone.
Think about that for just a moment.
If babies are exposed to 287 known toxins before they are ever exposed to any external environment or consume any “normal” food, think about the toxins that you have built up in your body as an adult.
By choosing to move forward with a juice fast you are choosing to take control and ownership over your body, your health, and your wellness. You’re able to reboot your system, help your body work more efficiently, and leave the kind of healthy and energized lifestyle you deserve.
The way that a juice fast works is pretty simple and straightforward.
After replacing all of your normal daily foods and beverages with nothing but healthy fruit and vegetable juice you’re going to be able to starve your body of toxins, more efficiently eliminate otherwise on eliminated waste from your intestinal tract and your colon, and you’re going to be able to improve the health of the good bacteria living in our stomach and our intestines responsible for breaking down key nutrients and fueling our bodies.
This is going to in turn reduce the amount of stress you put on your small intestine (responsible for 90% of all nutritional absorption) while at the same time reducing the stress and pressure you’re putting on your liver and kidneys.
Our liver and our kidneys essentially act as “overflow” for our intestines and our digestive system, weeding out toxins that weren’t otherwise removed from our nutrients. But if enough toxicity builds up – which is inevitably what happens over time – the efficiency of our liver and our kidneys starts to dwindle as they become overwhelmed.
This inevitably causes quite a bit of inflammation, a full-on assault on our immune system, and also can cripple our short and long-term health while exposing us to significant risk factors. We see increased instances of heart disease, certain times cancer, stroke, and more all because our liver and our kidneys aren’t working the way they could or should be.
By leveraging a juice fast, your instead able to:
Plan Your Juice Fast
The first step you’ll want to tackle when getting ready for a juice fast is to obviously plan as much of it out in advance as possible.
Not only are you going to want to consider how and when you are going to tackle juice fasting, but you’re also going to want to consider the recipes you’re going to enjoy, a meal plan that you can follow with different juice recipes for different meals, and any other details that might pop up in advance of your fast.
It’s also not a bad idea to begin weaning yourself off of caffeine and sugar at least a week before you are going to be jumping into your new juice fast.
Knockout Your Grocery Shopping
Shopping for all of your juicing ingredients I had of time is a huge piece of the puzzle and one that is going to help you enjoy a lot more consistency with this dietary decision. You won’t feel like you have to reach for a snack when you have everything you need to make healthy and delicious juice right on hand.
Start a Cleanse on a Weekend
As we highlighted above, it’s always a good idea to try and start your fast and cleanse on a weekend if at all possible. This gives you plenty of control over your schedule and the foods you eat, allows you to rest when you want if you are feeling a little tired, and generally just is a whole lot easier to navigate compared to starting a juice fast in the middle or beginning of a workweek.
Ease Back Into Your Daily Diet
At the conclusion of your fast (which should only ever take two or three days at first, and maybe five days at the longest) you’re going to want to gently ease yourself back into your daily diet.
By all means, eat all meals filled with healthy foods, but try to stick to meal plans that are rich in fruits and veggies (similar to the ones that you were juicing) rather than diving right back into something like fried chicken, big steaks, or nachos.
Get Ready for the Next Juice Cleanse
Lastly, you’ll want to know down how your body feels after the fast as well as how much weight you were able to lose over this stretch of time.
It’s never too early to start getting ready for your next juice fast cleanse, either – though you’ll want at least a couple of weeks between fasts for them to have the kind of consistent and measurable impact you are looking for
If this is your first time moving forward with a juice fast you’re going to want to make sure that you pay very close attention to only inside information we highlight below.
The details we break down in this quick guide can make or break the success of your juice fast, but can also help you to have a fun and enjoyable experience as opposed to getting the “juice fast flu” that can have you feeling tired, worn out, fatigued, and broken down.
Let’s get right to it!
One of the most important things you can do when tackling a juice fast is choosing to start it when you have plenty of time to rest, recuperate, and stick strictly to the juice fasting protocol.
For obvious reasons, it’s a good idea to start a juice fast on the weekend (or on a Friday) where you’ll have a lot more time to rest, a lot more time to kind of chill out, and a lot more consistency and control over the foods that you eat.
Secondly, it’s not a bad idea to pause your regular workout activity, your cardio sessions, or any other serious physical fitness efforts you otherwise practice. A juice fast is going to do plenty of heavy lifting all on its own to reset and refresh your body and your well-being. Adding extra exercise on top of this restrictive dietary decision is only going to have you feeling tired, fatigued, and agitated.
Hydration is such a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to leading a happy and healthy lifestyle, and it’s especially important when you are thinking about juicing. You want to make sure that you are drinking as much water as you possibly can alongside all of the juice that you are consuming, keeping your body hydrated – even over hydrated, at times – to make sure that your body is really able to reboot and reset.
Every single one of the popular juicer options out there are going to remove 99.99% of the pulp from the juice that you are producing for you, but it’s not a bad idea to add at least a little bit of that pulp and that fibrous material back into your juice for the bump in nutrition it provides.
Fiber is especially important when you are doing a juice fast. This allows you to more effectively and efficiently flush solid toxins from your body, particularly on the eliminated waste that has been building up for quite a bit of time.
Lastly, you’ll want to try and get as much high-quality sleep as you can every single night of your juice fast. Your body is going to be going through some pretty wild changes while you go through a juice cleanse, and resting and relaxing is a big piece of the puzzle to overwhelming success.
On the flip side of things, you want to make sure that you aren’t pushing your body too hard or too fast when it comes time to juice.
You want to make sure that you gently ease off caffeine, that you gently ease off processed sugar, and that you gently ease off any of the high in fat foods you may have been eating on a regular basis. Going into a juice fast cleanse like this cold turkey can be too much of a shock to your system to have the kind of beneficial impacts you are looking for.
Secondly, it’s important that you not ignore any serious hunger pains or lightheadedness that you might be feeling. If you experience any of these sensations it’s not a bad idea to eat a handful of nuts or something similar, or to make yourself another glass of juice and put it down the hatch.
Finally, it’s critical that you not try to stretch your juice fast out any longer than between 3 to 5 days. Three days is really where most beginners should focus on for their first couple of juice fasts, with only experienced veterans that can pick up on all of their bio signs stretching things out to four or five days.
Absolutely – but you need to make sure that you are doing it the right way.
Follow the tips and tricks as well as basic guidelines we highlighted above and you shouldn’t have anything to worry about when it comes to juice fasting moving forward. Runoff script with a juice fast and your experience may not be quite as successful.
It’s hard to imagine there being any type of juice fast that isn’t fantastic for weight loss.
Not only are you going to be eating at a significant caloric deficit when you are on a juice fast, but you’re also going to be speeding up your metabolism, flooding your body with key nutrients necessary for weight loss, and starving your body of any fat building compounds.
We made mention time and time again throughout this quick guide that you aren’t EVER going to want to stretch a juice fast beyond five days. That kind of timeline can really tax your body in ways that go from beneficial to dangerous pretty quickly.
Instead, stick to a 3 to 5-day juice fast and you shouldn’t have much to worry about at all.
It’s possible to lose a tremendous amount of weight when you start up a juice fast, but the amount of weight you lose specifically is going to be tied to a variety of individual factors. At the end of the day, however, it isn’t all that uncommon to lose anywhere between five and 15 pounds with a juice fast.
If you’re really looking to take wheatgrass juice to the next level you might consider mixing up “shots” of wheatgrass into some of the other natural fruit and vegetable juices you’ve been making.
Folks that have a tough time at first with the somewhat strong flavor of wheatgrass are encouraged to do exactly that, mixing raw wheatgrass juice in with vegetable juice or fruit juice (or even just adding a little bit of water) to make it a little bit more palatable.
Truth be told, though, a lot of folks find wheatgrass to be downright delicious – and most are even happier to drink a glass of wheatgrass juice made with their juicer each and every day thanks to the myriad of health benefits they enjoy thanks to it.
It doesn’t get much better than this!
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