GO GREEN: An All Green Juice Cleanse

A few weeks ago, Organic Avenue (remember, one of my favorite juice places in NYC) sent out an email advertising a sale on their ALL GREEN juice cleanse.  Without thinking much, I hopped on this opportunity!  I was going to be traveling again for work for an extended period of time (Memphis again, four weeks) and thought a juice cleanse would be a great break from the restaurant and hotel food.  I did a juice cleanse the last time I was in Memphis and it was a great experience.

I conned a co-worker into doing the cleanse with me.  We decided to do it during the week, starting on October 29th and ending the day after Halloween. Trick, or treat?


I'm not going to go into all the details of the cleanse, but will summarize my thoughts on this cleanse briefly:

1. There is such a thing as "too much of a good thing" - I love me a green juice (hey, even two green juices), but 6 green juices a day plus a green booster shot?  It is a little much.  I enjoyed most of the juices; however, drinking six 14 oz green juices a day was hard!  Most were completely savory (very little to no fruit).  Savory is great, but it would have been nice to have at least one or two sweet juices in the mix.  Disclaimer:  Two of the juices I considered semi-sweet, but not fruity enough to mask that they were still mostly veggies.

2.  Juice feast, don't juice fast - Due to the low fruit content of this cleanse, an entire day of juices only added up to around 500 calories.  From my research, your body goes into starvation mode with anything less than 1,200.  While it's totally fine to have such a reduced calorie intake for a few days, I didn't like the idea of draining my body.  I needed to work and wanted to work out during this cleanse.  Looking back, this extreme option probably wasn't the best choice based on my situation.

Finally I realized that you need to be fully committed in order to have a successful cleanse (duh, Emily).  As I mentioned, I sort of hopped on this juice cleanse on a whim, and didn't really take the time to think if this was something my body and life could handle at the time.  I don't think that I went into the cleanse fully committed, which is pretty important considering the cost and effort required to do any cleanse.

All this being said, I "supplemented" my cleanse.  Some would call this "cheating," but I knew I wasn't going to get anything out of the cleanse if I starved myself for 3 days and wasn't productive in my professional or personal life.  I listened to what my body needed.  I added some fresh fruit and veggies, and raw nuts.  And guess what?  I still saw great results - my senses sharper, my digestion improved, and, for the most part, I was able to do regular work outs. 

So while I don't recommend this "Go Green" juice cleanse to anyone except the most experienced, hard core juicers, I also do not have any regrets about trying this cleanse.  Next time though (yes there will be a next time), I'll stick with the less intense version.  Drinking all juice all day is enough intensity for me. =)