So I’m not a big believer in juice cleanses.
But while many of the cleanses on the market can, in my opinion, be both physically and emotionally detrimental (I’m not being hyperbolic; read this if you’re interested in hearing about my experiences with cleanses) in addition to being inexcusably expensive, I completely acknowledge that the addition of juices to your diet – by which I mean all those fresh fruits and vegetables that provide nutrients that you might not otherwise get – is probably a good thing.
I wouldn’t call myself a healthy eater, exactly. I mean, I eat okay – I cook about 75% of our dinners, and they always include all the major food groups because a) I like cooking, generally speaking, and b) this makes me feel like a responsible wife and mother capable of remarkable feats of adulthood…but during the day I’m more of a wild-woman forager, grabbing things like Polly-O cheese sticks and slices of bologna whenever I pass the refrigerator, scavenging my son’s leftovers, and downing goblets of coffee like it’s water. And I probably consume way more red meat and way less salad than Dr. Oz would advise. But the fact is, my own nutrition is sort of the last thing on my mind during the hours between 7AM and 7PM (those would be the waking hours of Guess Who), so…so be it.
But a health boost for the new season sounds nice, and I had a coupon for something called a Detox Kit from Pressed Juicery, so I thought: hm. (I’m not one to throw a hundred and ten bucks in the trash.)
Mini-experiment time?
So what is a Detox Kit?
I don’t know, exactly.
I called the company to ask, but they were sort of fuzzy on the details, too (it’s also possible that I was being dense; such a thing has been known to happen). From what I could gather, it’s like a mini-cleanse, except not a cleanse because the juices are all citrusy, so they don’t provide enough nutrition to allow you to drink them exclusively.
Are they meant to be meal replacements? Supplements?
Just yummy? (The Aloe Vera one, FYI, is not yummy.)
Dunno.
Anyway, I decided to do an experiment of my own, and threw them all in the freezer, ready to be defrosted two at a time (they only last three days in the refrigerator, and I wanted to space them out more). For the past week I’ve replaced my morning coffee and my afternoon snack (usually the aforementioned Polly-O, although sometimes I branch out to Mint Milanos) with juices, using the fact that they’re convenient and (mostly; step away from the Aloe Vera) pretty delicious to create an easy way for me to up the health quotient of my diet.
And it was kind of great, actually. I didn’t miss my coffee at all (weird), and feel fantastically virtuous about the vitamin boost of all those extra fruits and vegetables.
Would I advocate this as a matter of course? Not at over a hundred bucks a pop. But it was certainly a convenient way to kickstart a new attitude towards nutrition; having them right there, ready to go, makes it hard for even the busiest person not to make a little extra time for health.
In sum: juices are good. Fruits and vegetables in your diet are good. And if you’re busy and have extra cash laying around, go ahead and order up the prepackaged version to add balance to your diet.
Or you could just DIY it.
