DIY Juice Cleanse

Guest blog post by Jessica Gee:

I was going to do a cleanse from Just Organic Juice but their 3-day cleanse is $199 a person. IfGarrett and I were both going to do it, I figured its cheaper to buy a rockin’ juicer and do it myself. I actually really enjoy the juicing aspect. I love to cook, so I enjoyed being in the kitchen, as opposed to being handed 6 juices.

I’d like to quickly give a huge shout out to Bountiful Baskets. Garrett and I go through tons of produce and I use them every Saturday I am in town. This week I bought 2 juice kits… only $8.50 each. In the bag it had kale, spinach, ginger, parsley, pineapple, lemons, limes, apples, carrots, cucumber, celery and beets. PERFECT! Because it was a 3-day cleanse I ran to Winco to pick up a few more things. I bought a bag of oranges, a bag of apples, watermelon, mint, sweet potatoes and some more lemons and limes. It came to around $20. The Bountiful Baskets really is a steal. So for 32 juices(6 juices/day, 3 days, for 2 people), I did it for around $40.

I had initially planned on preparing all the juices at once, but that didn’t work because I hadn’t done my Winco run yet. I’m glad it didn’t. It was SO helpful to have tried it out one day to see what juices I like and didn’t like and what I could fix for the next few days. For example, my second juice I had put in WAY too much ginger. It was hard to get down. Another juice I thought that adding lime would help take away from the taste of the beets… it was also hard to finish because it was so limey.

Here are the recipes I used. I researched a bunch of different cleanses and found what I thought would fit me best.

Juice 1

5 carrots

3 apples or oranges

1 small lemon

Juice 2

6-8 kale leaves

2 handfuls spinach

1 green apples

2 stalks celery

1/2 cucumber

1 lemon

Juice 3

1 beet

2 carrots

small piece of ginger

1/2 pineapple

Juice 4

2 roma tomatos

1/4 onion

1 carrot

1/4 red pepper

1/4 avacado

1 green chili

2 handfuls spinach

1/4 T garlic

1 handful cilantro

2 c hot water

Juice 5

1 sweet potato

1 small box blueberries

2 peaches or pears

dash of cinnamon

Juice 6

1 c almonds (soaked in water for 8-12 hours)

2 c water

1 vanilla bean

2 T agave

5 strawberries

The cleanse wasn’t that bad. The hardest parts for me were:

1. Staying busy. If you’re like me, you think about food a lot. Next time I do a cleanse, I will plan it on days where I’m SO busy I don’t have time to think about wanting to eat something. If you’re like my husband, who never thinks about food… then this shouldn’t be an issue. Our last night we were so bored and just wanted to forget about it, we left the house and went to see a movie to make the time go by faster.

2. Social situations. Our first afternoon we met up with family for a picnic. They were eating grilled cheese sandwiches, french fries and milk shakes. Honestly, that sort of junk food isn’t that tempting to me (except the shake ;) ) But if you can avoid being in places where other people are eating other stuff around you as much as possible, it helps!

3. Needing to chew something. I just missed chewing food. The second day, I decided that to satisfy this craving I would have a few bites of watermelon. Call it cheating or whatever. But I figured it was the closest thing to juice and it satisfied the need to just chew.