Is a Juice Fast Right For Me?

May 24, 2021 | Learning, Nutrition | 1 comments | Author: Zach Bohannon

Thanks to internet streaming and some great documentaries, the popularity continues to rise on the juicing craze. But is it right for you? Well, it really depends on how you categorize juicing.

Is juicing a diet or is it a cleanse?

Before I get too ahead of myself, some of you may be asking what juicing is and may think this article is going to turn into a debate of which home run hitting baseball players from the last 15 years should get into the hall of fame. No, not that juicing. Juicing is when you use a juice extractor to make a raw fruit and vegetable juice. The benefits of juicing are endless. The average American diet is very lacking in nutrient dense, whole, vital foods and instead many people turn to convenient, heavily processed foods to fill their day-to-day needs. Juicing is a quick, fairly convenient way to inject a large dose of nutrient dense green vegetables and, most importantly, fruits into your system. In addition, your body does not have to work as hard to digest the juice either as it would with the whole versions of those foods, so your body is able to more quickly absorb the different vitamins and minerals the foods that you juice offer. One juice typically contains more whole fruits and vegetables than you could typically eat in a single setting. For instance, the popular “Mean Green” drink is made with 1 cucumber, 4 stalks of celery, 1 bunch of kale, 2 green apples, a thumb size of ginger, and half a lemon. That is a lot of food if you think about eating that off a plate whole! You can get all the benefits those different foods have to offer in one 24 ounce drink!

Fasting has become a big trend with juicing. But is a juice fast right for you? Well, would you want to do a juice fast as a way to cleanse your system or as a short term diet where you can lose weight? If you are wanting to use juice fasting as a short term diet, I personally think you should re-evaluate why you want to do the fast. The problem with this, and I have met people this happened with, is that you can lose a lot of weight very quickly with no intention of thinking out your diet after the fast. These people typically gain any weight back that they lost and are left to wonder what went wrong.

I feel that choosing to juice fast as a cleanse and committing to readjusting how you eat once the fast is over is a much more logical way to go and more beneficial to you in the long run as you will be able to sustain any weight you lose as well as how you will feel during the fast. And it feels great!

In February of 2012, I did a fast that consisted of 10 days of eating whole foods and vegetables along with juicing for one meal a day, then 10 days of juice fasting, then another 10 days of eating whole fruits and vegetables along with juicing for one meal a day. It was the most life changing 30 days of my life. I am almost 100% sure that I consumed more veggies in that 1 month than I had in my entire life! In addition to losing 38 lbs. in those 30 days, I felt incredible! I eliminated my daily stomach problems. I was sleeping and breathing better. I was healthier. The cleanse lead to me completely revamping how I looked at food and lead to me losing a total of 95 lbs. in the 2012 calendar year. Today, I still juice for a meal every now and then but just have various fruits and vegetables as the foundation for how I eat.

At Life Fitness Academy we put nutrition first and feel that juicing can be a great tool to supercharge your system and it’s such a great way to get a large serving of energy filled goodness! Juicing can be beneficial for anyone who is willing to go into it with the right mindset and not as a quick fix. So give it a shot-and find me at the gym! LFA and I can get you some good recipes and you are guaranteed to like at least one! Also, we can assist you in planning your fast and evaluating what length of time would be good for you depending on your past exposure to chemicals and your current level of health.