People are always looking for a new magic diet or some other tool that will help them to lose weight fast without spending time exercising or properly monitoring their nutrition. Sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are bursting with before-and-after pictures of people who have gone on a juice or tea detox.
Juicing, or a short detox regimen comprised exclusively of fruit and/or vegetable juices, is especially popular during the summer. As such, so-called ‘juicing’ is big business around the world. This concept is especially popular in the fast-paced corporate cultures of the USA and Russia. Many busy professionals may not have enough time to make or stick to healthy eating plans, but have money to pay for two or three days of a juice detox program delivered straight to their home or office. Typically, the juices consumed as part of a juicing regimen are healthy, raw and not pasteurized. There’s also generally no added sugar, which means most of the juices have a very short shelf-life, usually a maximum of five days.
Juica is a Swedish juicing company that produces cold pressed, unpasteurized, ecologically friendly juices. A two-day juicing program costs SEK 870 (USD 105) and includes twelve varieties of raw juice: four green juices, two red, two orange, two yellow and two white.
Juice detox
The green juice is a blend of wheat grass, spinach, apple, sunflower sprouts, celery, romaine lettuce, cucumber, lemon and ginger. The red juice includes beetroot, carrot, apple, lemon and ginger. The orange one contains carrot, fennel, apple, lemon and turmeric. The yellow juice is lemon, ginger, agave syrup and cayenne pepper. Finally, the white juice is a mix of almond, filtered water, vanilla, dates, cardamom, cinnamon, and Himalayan salt.
My own juicing experience was mainly induced by curiosity. I heard so much about it that I decided to find out whether it really works, so I purchased a two-day program from Juica.
Pre-juicing: Tasting. The juices were delivered by Mathem in the middle of the day, so I decided to start juicing the next morning. They arrived with a pamphlet explaining the order in which to the drink juices, and also advised to drink a lot of water with lemon during the program. Lemon water in itself has a lot of health benefits (read about them here), so I was initially very excited to get started. Life as an Investment author and nutrition specialist, Oxana, came by and we tasted all of the juices together. My initial enthusiasm about juicing disappeared with the first sip! The green juice tasted like grass and was surprisingly spicy. The red was very sour, while the orange was okay. The yellow juice, well– look at what that one consists of! There is cayenne pepper in there. HOT. SPICY. PEPPER! If I thought the green one was spicy, the yellow juice demonstrated to my taste buds what spicy really means. The white juice was the only one I found tasty and not entirely awful to drink. Oxana pointed out that many of the ingredients are quite sour, which might make it uncomfortable to consume on an empty stomach. Wow, was she right…
Juice detox
Day one: At the beginning of the day you are supposed to drink a bottle of juice almost every second hour. I was worried about the intensely-colored blends staining my teeth, so I decided to drink everything through a straw. Because I didn’t like the taste, it took me a very long time to consume each bottle. I quickly fell about an hour behind schedule. The green one was reasonably difficult to drink, while the red and orange were easier. When it came time for the yellow juice, I just couldn’t do it. It made me want to throw up. But, being determined, I tried to finish it. I could. Not. Do it. Around 7 p.m., I started thinking about pizza. Beautiful Italian pizzas names were popping into my head; pepperoni, Napoletana, Viennese, Capricciosa – it was a nightmare. The white juice, the only palatable one and the last bottle of the day, did not help. The almond taste was nice, but not nice enough to erase this new pizza obsession from my mind.
Day two: Strangely, the green juice didn’t taste as bad as it had the day before. In fact, all of the juices seemed to taste more normal, and my body seemed to agree with them better– except for the yellow one. I ended up giving it to a friend of mine who loves spicy stuff. Despite not even finishing all of the juice, I did not feel hungry at all, and even went for a swim.
Day three: the juicing program was over. I did not feel any change in my body. I read several testimonials on the Juica webpage, many of which claimed that they felt like a new person after finishing the program. A number of people reported that they had more energy, clearer skin or had lost weight. Personally, I do not have any problems with acne, nor do I tend to feel fatigued. I did, however, lose close to a kilogram during the two-day program. Realistically, if one excludes all carbohydrates and basically all solid food for two days, most people will lose weight, without the help of expensive juices.
Nevertheless, I am not opposed to the Juica concept, and I wouldn’t mind trying it again in a couple of months, even though I really disliked the taste of the yellow juice and found the other ones generally quite unpleasant. Oxana’s upcoming article on healthy, cold pressed juices that you can make at home and adjust to your own taste preferences is sure to fully restore my enthusiasm for juicing. Be sure to watch this space for my forthcoming review about tea detox programs from YOUR TEA and Skinny Bunny Tea.