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Self-Help: The Juice Cleanse

Three days on the wagon with a liquid diet. A brief experiment in health, sobriety and clean living with Farmhouse Juice's detox program.
Last updated: 2015-11-09

Photographs by Grant Oh! Buchwald. See more of his work here.

In an attempt to reverse the downward spiral of your mental and physical wellbeing, in these Self-Help articles we bring you suggestions of classes, sporty things, team events, volunteering and educational stuff that might just pull you out of that boozy tail-spin.

There's lots of stuff flying around about juice cleanses, mainly because of the opening of Farmhouse Juice, a storefront next to the Avocado Lady that offered a cleanse regime for about 180rmb a day using cold press juicers, which are supposed to work better than the usual centrifugal juicers that everyone else has.

Farmhouse proved so popular that the partners started squabbling and broke up. One guy took the special juicers and the cleanse concept and kept running it as an online thing. The other guy just started selling ordinary juices and ran out the lease on the venue.

After SmSh wrote about that spat, the former guy, the guy who ran off with the juicers, invited us to try a three-day cleanse, that's three days of just fruit and vegetable juice - no caffeine, no alcohol, no solid food, no cigarettes, no drugs - and we said, "Sure. Fuck it. That sounds like fun."

And - surprisingly - it was quite fun.

I started the cleanse on a Monday, coming off a weekend that involved smoking, drinking heavily and eating lots of crap. Most Mondays I feel like shit; this one was no exception. But the lack of coffee to scrape me out of bed didn't help things. This was probably the first Monday morning in five years I'd woken up without coffee.

Instead, I had a Vital Greens juice, which is a blend of kale, apple, ginger, romaine, celery, spinach, cucumber, parsley and lemon. It was pretty tasty - all the juices were. You have six different bottles to drink each day, one every two hours from the time you wake up. There's the Fatigue Fighter (a mix of beet, carrot, lemon and ginger); the Mood Mender (papaya, orange, grapefruit, carrot and ginger); the Quick Quencher (pineapple, apple and mint — this one tasted especially good); a Skin Tonic (apple, celery, cucumber, lime and ginger); and Sweet Greens (another green one with kale, Asian pear, celery, cucumber, lemon and ginger).



For each day of the cleanse, a Farmhouse guy will deliver a bottle of each of those to you, wherever you are. The cost is now 204rmb per day, so the three-day cleanse is going to cost you 612rmb, including delivery.

For the first day, I have to say I never really got hugely hungry, which means the juices must have been giving my body enough sugar to keep it relatively satisfied. Normally, it would be unthinkable to go beyond about 3pm without food. I often skip breakfast but if I'm ever working hard and I try to skip lunch my brain soon stops working. But by the evening of the first day I was still functioning fine. Sure, I was hungry, and that day there was a lot of food going around the office, which didn't help, but the knowledge that I'd committed to this thing made it relatively easy to resist breaking the fast.

I did have a headache all day, one of those that feels like chunks of broken glass are scratching up against your brain. This could have been caffeine withdrawal, but it might equally have just been a Monday thing. Also, I was in a pretty bad mood all day. But again, that was probably more to do with having to stare down the barrel of another week than due to lack of food.

People do a cleanse for different reasons. Some claim it's to detox their body, though the jury is out as to whether this works. Some do it to lose weight, and there's no doubt that not eating for three days will help you do that. Others say they just like to give their body a break from all the stimulants and processed gunk they normally shovel in.

Go online and you'll find people passionately squabbling about all this, doctors and scientists queuing up to tell each other that this is bad for the body and doesn't help cleanse anything, or, on the other side, that raw food is packed with enzymes that can make us all superhuman.

I was in it more for the personal experience, to see if it showed me anything about my habits that I didn't already know. And the idea of a few days without nicotine, alcohol and caffeine sounded like it couldn't possibly be a bad thing. I also hoped I might lose some weight.

By the end of the first day I felt drained and shitty. But I didn't really feel hungry. If anything, the juices were more than enough. I didn't even really need the last one. I went to bed early, partly through sheer boredom. Outside of consuming alcohol or food, there's really not much to do in this town.



Tuesday I woke up early, feeling good. I wasn't hungry. I dutifully drank my juices and got through the day without ever seriously needing food. My habits cried out for stuff, just any stuff to stuff into my body - coffee, muffins, carbs, fried food - but if I paused to think, I really didn't need any of it. I genuinely wasn't that hungry. Nor did I crave cigarettes, though that's not unusual because I only really smoke when I'm drinking.

The Farmhouse Juice guy says that more than one kilo of produce goes into each bottle, and that there are enough nutrients in those six bottles to keep your body working fine. That's what it felt like. I was missing food but really just the tastes and the sensation of it, rather than being ravenously hungry.

By that evening, I felt a bit dazed and slow, a bit stoned, though it was not altogether an unpleasant experience. If anything, my mood was unusually good, like I had taken a Valium. Everything seemed a bit distant. Maybe my body was conserving energy by shutting down the irritable-bitch cortex in my brain.

With nothing to do, again I went to bed early and slept well.

200rmb a day sounded expensive when I first heard about this. But for those three days I spent almost nothing else. No money on coffee, breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner, cigarettes and the greatest drag on my bank balance, going out and drinking. I think I spent 30rmb in three days, and that was on some cat food and a new inner tube for my bike. I figure it pans out about even: 200rmb is probably about what I spend on three meals and alcohol per day, during the week.

The Farmhouse guy told me the third day would be the worst. I did have another headache for most of it, which felt like it might well have been caused by hunger, but that pleasant dazed feeling continued. I was thinking about food a lot, looking forward to all the things I could eat when this was over, but I was never seriously tempted to cheat or sneak a bag of chips. When I got really hungry or really dopey I drank a juice and that sorted me out for a while.

By now, the idea of eating three meals a day, three huge piles of rice and noodles and great slabs of meat and bread - it seemed crazy. I clearly didn't need that much food. If I could function almost normally on 2.5 liters of fruit and vegetable juice a day, it seemed I could almost certainly get by on much less food than I habitually consumed.



Okay, on Wednesday night I was seeing food everywhere. The thought of Greek or Mediterranean food made me dizzy with anticipation. Lumps of feta cheese. Guzzling olive oil straight from that nipple spout thing on top of the bottle. It all seemed like heaven. I wasn't starving but I did feel drained.

But then the next day I woke up and I felt great again. So good that I bought another day's worth of juices and decided to keep that shit going until Thursday evening. I had a boozy appointment that evening and I knew I would be eating before the day was out, and knowing that the end was almost there made that last day easy.

By that night, I was coming up on four full days without eating any solid food. I'd clearly lost weight, I could see and feel it. That night I went out, and while I was still not particularly hungry, I drank four gin and tonics, smoked a bunch of cigarettes and ate a plate of fried rice on the way home. The next morning I woke up, drank two cups of black coffee and it was the weekend again, so that meant two or three more days of drinking, smoking and all the rest.

So, nothing changed permanently. The epiphanies were forgotten and the bad habits returned, but the experience was edifying, if only to make me aware of how little food I could get by on and how much more I valued and anticipated flavors when I had been without them for a few days. Add in the weight loss and even if the cleanse did nothing to detoxify my body, it was still a beneficial thing to do. Plus, if you factor in the savings on food and other stuff, it probably cost me nothing more than I would have spent anyway.

Sure, this was not the most scintillating week of my life. I didn't meet any new people or have any mind-blowing nights out. I did some reading. I lost some weight. My mood was pretty even. I felt good. And it forced me to think about my habits of consumption. Waking up and drinking two cups of black coffee, that's not especially bad for me. In many ways it's good for me, it gets me out the house. But I guess it wouldn't kill me to skip that once in a while, and skip the odd meal in favor of a glass of tasty fresh juice.

To do the juice cleanse that we did, go through the Farmhouse Juice website, which can be found here, or email the juice guy here.


Photograph by Brandon McGhee.

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