I’m aware of all the controversy around crash diets, fasts, and most importantly, juice cleanses. Coming from Los Angeles, I was constantly surrounding by people trying the latest trendy way to lose weight. Whether it’s Soul Cycle or Pressed Juice, there’s always some way that companies are trying to make health “trendy.”
I like to tell myself that I eat pretty healthy. Yeah there are those Saturday nights where I order pizza and I know I shouldn’t, or have froyo way too often a week, and I know that I’ll inevitably gain the Freshman 15. I didn’t do the juice cleanse because I hate my body, mostly I did it because I wanted to challenge myself and see if I really could do it. I’ve had friends who have done them and had heard the rumors about them, so I did my research and picked one that looked easy enough for me to do. It was 18 juices—three days with six juices per day, each containing fruits and vegetables that were supposed to provide me the daily nutrients I’d get from food.
I planned ahead of time to have those three days be days where I knew I could take naps throughout the day, have low stress, and not be tempted to go out at all so I could get rest. So what is it really like to be on a juice cleanse? Well for starters, you’re going to be cranky. I found myself having low energy for the first day and a half, and lashed out at people for no good reason. I spent a lot more time by myself or in small groups of people because I was a lot more irritably than normal. Like I said, I had low energy. I worked hard to get a lot of my work done ahead of time so during that three-day period I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time reading and thinking. I ended up having to write an essay one of the days, and had to take a break because I was dizzy and got a headache from trying to analyze a piece of literature.
I kept telling people that I felt like it was a trial run for being pregnant—there was a point where I simultaneously craved pickles, a cookie and mac and cheese all together.
Food was constantly on my mind, but in a bad way. Especially for beginners “juice-cleansers,” eating low calorie snacks is encouraged especially if you’re in a high stress point in your life. Seeing as I’m a first year college student in an academically rigorous school, I figured that having a handful of nuts or a carrot in between juices wouldn’t be a bad thing, until my mindset got very warped.
My go-to snack during the cleanse was carrots; if I was doing work and it had been an hour since my last juice, I’d let myself have a couple of carrots, and I saw this as a way of me adapting the idea of a cleanse so it was suited for my lifestyle. Most people who go on juice cleanses live in their own home where they can take three days for themselves to meditate, nap, relax and cleanse. That isn’t my situation, so I figured that eating carrots would help me get rid of my cravings for other foods because it’d satisfy my hunger. Except the longer I got into the cleanse, the more I started to grow animosity towards food.
I’m not Cassie from Skins, and I don’t have an eating disorder, but my concept of food got so twisted that I started to judge myself for eating carrots. It wasn’t until my friend pointed out that carrots are healthy that I realized that I had learned a valuable lesson from the cleanse.
Juice cleanses aren’t a lifestyle choice; you can’t go through a normal day to day life getting by on juice. On the juice cleanse, I was obsessed with food. I became obsessed with what I was putting in my body to a ridiculous extent; I was angry with myself for eating carrots. Forcing myself to go through this experiment of solely eating fruits and vegetables for three days made me realize that I can tend to have an unhealthy relationship with food.
I’m a teenage girl, and I’m a first year college student, so it makes sense that food is a trigger point for me. There have been way too many points here where I’ve used a pint of Ben & Jerry’s to deal with my emotions of transitioning into the college experience and then gotten upset afterwards about how many calories I’ve consumed.
And being on the juice cleanse made me aware of the ways I’ve been abusing food to deal with problems in other areas of my life, and how I should go about fixing my relationship with food. So all in all, what were the outcomes of being on a juice cleanse? Being on the cleanse also helped clear up my skin, made my hair shinier, and by the third day I felt a source of energy that felt like I had just run six miles.
But most importantly, it made me conscious about what I’m putting in my body—in a good way. I’m noticing myself making an effort of trying to eat healthy and allow myself small treats…because everyone needs a Wiggins cookie every now and then. I definitely had been going overboard with the excitement of living on my own, and how my mom isn’t here to tell me that I can’t have ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So all in all, the juice cleanse helped me realize how to have a more healthy relationship with food so I’m not overly-obsessed with either eating healthy or using food to deal with other problems.
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