Foodie Swellness: Cedar Juice juice-cleanse review

I let my love of cold-pressed juices convince me to agree to try a three-day juice cleanse from Cedar Juice. I think I forgot how tough they are (I did a two-day juice cleanse a few years ago and had a very tough time with it). Plus, truth be told, I don’t really believe we need to juice cleanse. I think our bodies need actual food every day, that our liver and kidneys take care of cleansing the body, and that juice cleanses encourage disordered eating. In this article from Slate (Juice Cleanses: It’s not healthy, it’s not virtuous and it makes you seem like a jerk) writer Katy Waldman describes it much better than I could quickly here.

And yet I was still curious. With so many people swearing by them (including my friend Sasha, you can read her review of the cleanse on her blog SoSasha.com here) was I missing out on something? I sure like the sounds of glowing skin, feeling very focused and alert, and having more energy. And so I agreed to try the cleanse for three days, although I planned from the get go to eat salads throughout the cleanse.

The cleanse

There are six bottles to drink each day. You get a welcome email in advance of starting your cleanse with directions on how to prepare for your cleanse and then you get the box of juices, which includes:

1. Kale Made Good (kale, swiss chard, romaine, cucumber, lemon, parsley, ginger, pear)
2. Pineapple Head (pineapple, pear, mint)
3. Kale Made Good (yes, same as the first juice you drink in the morning)
4. Lemon’s Your Lucky Day (lemon, mint, coconut nectar)
5. Skip to the Beet (beet, carrot, apple, lemon, ginger)
6. Cracked It (cashew, hemp, coconut nectar, vanilla bean)

The six juices total 1,100 calories and you’re supposed to drink them in this order above. The order to drink the juices is meant to reflect our normal eating patterns during the day, I was told by Cedar Juice.  “For breakfast you get Kale Made Good, and therefore a hit of nutrients, at lunch you get this as well. For dinner, you are getting more caloric and heartier juices with Skip to the Beet, and the final juice being Cracked It, which has the protein & fat to keep you satiated throughout the night!” In addition to the juices, you’re told to drink plenty of water and herbal tea in between the juices.

I had some difficulty finding the right time to do the cleanse. It had to be at a time when I didn’t have any important dinners (and January was busy as I had a week-long trip to the Caribbean and my birthday to work around), plus I wanted to complete it before my marathon training started getting into longer distances. I eventually settled on doing it right after the holidays in early January.

How I fared on the cleanse

Like my first juice cleanse, I had a very tough time. Wait. That’s a huge understatement. It was an extreme struggle. I love food and I probably think about food more often than the average person. I think you can tell from my Instagrams here that I wasn’t having much fun on the cleanse.

I also didn’t plan very well: on day 1 of the cleanse, I didn’t have any salad ingredients at home and it was so cold out that I couldn’t bear the idea of walking to the grocery store. On day 2, with my growling tummy, I braved the freezing cold to get kale and other veggies because I missed having food and felt woozy. Eating salad helped a great deal. I like chewing food and feeling food in my stomach.

On day 3, I met a friend at a restaurant where I sipped on a juice as she had wine and fried calamari. By this point, I think I was so resigned (or maybe just plain tired) to just having juice and small salads that it didn’t bother me too much to be in the presence of food and wine. (That said, day before I may have bitten her head off when she told me she was enjoying an espresso…). This being the last day, I also started drinking the juices in any order. Since I found Cracked It (the almond milk that you’re to drink last) the most filling, I drank that early in the day.

Similar to my first cleanse experience, I had trouble keeping up with drinking all the juices. I tend to drink slowly so I really didn’t have time in between juices to also have tea and water. On day 2, I only ended up drinking five of the bottles. Plus, since I don’t hydrate often generally (bad habit of mine), this huge increase all at once of hydration had me in the washroom all the time (which meant I also had disrupted sleep during my cleanse).

How the cleanse affected me

Well, after three days of juice and veggies, I was super, super relieved to eat more than salad again. I didn’t ease back into eating, which is what they recommended, to eat light meals for a few days. I went back to my usual diet of mostly well balanced meals. Oh, and by the way: if you want to cut back on a pricey cold-pressed juice habit, do a juice cleanse and you won’t want to touch a cold-pressed juice for weeks. True story. I had zero desire for a single sip of one for quite awhile.

As for the benefits you’re supposed to reap, well, I kept hoping I’d look in the mirror and be so taken aback by incredible skin, or that I’d feel a mental clarity like never before. But none of those benefits ever happened for me.

The Cedar Juice juices are definitely tasty and I’d certainly happily drink them as part of my diet (I do love cold-pressed juices, and I now often use my Juicepresso at home to make them); my favourites from Cedar were Skip to the Beet, Cracked It (so creamy and delicious) and Pineapple Head.

But as for juice cleanses in general, I think that’ll be the last one for me. If they work for you and you genuinely find you reap health benefits from them (and you’re not using it as an excuse to drop weight quickly), well, then your experience is very different than mine, and that’s your choice and more power to you! Personally, with my love of food and active lifestyle, this girl’s sticking to real food every day.

Leave a Comment March 3, 2015

Foodie Swellness: Juicepresso review

You may have noticed I’m a fan of cold-pressed juices (they make an appearance now and again on my Instagram). But, wow, do they cost a chunk of change! And so I decided that I wanted a juicer. I tested out a friend’s to see how I liked it and how fussy it was to clean (not so bad, no more work than cleaning my blender), and decided it was a worthy buy. And then I was asked if I wanted to test out the Juicepresso juicer (Was it my mere wishes of wanting a juicer that brought this about? If so, I’d really, really like to escape the rest of winter and be on a beach, SVP).

The Juicepresso (silly name, but I guess it tell you what it does…) is what’s known as a slow juicer, or masticating juicer. Masticating juicers feature a lower RPM compared to centrifugal juicers (the Juicepresso is a very low 40 RPM) and this cuts down on the oxidation of the juice (you don’t want your juice to be oxidized — this reduces the nutrition level of it). Masticating juicers also apparently produce more yield (I don’t have a ton to compare it to, but this is what I’ve read).

Juicepresso unpacked, I loaded up on veggies and fruit. I gravitate towards juices with ginger in them, so I started with a recipe for a beet, apple, ginger, carrot and lemon juice that I got from GOOP. And it was delicious, and cost a fraction of what a single bottle of the same would cost at a juice bar.

With a few months of use, here are the pros and cons I’ve experienced with the Juicepresso:

PROS

• juicing at home costs a fraction of buying cold-pressed juices (yes, there’s the initial cost of the juicer, of course!)
• Juicepresso takes up much less room than other juicers I’ve seen, which is important when you have a small kitchen like I do
• Juicepresso is quiet, important when you decide you want to make juice at 2 a.m.
• the pulp comes out pretty dry, so it does seem to extract juice well
• because the juice is being masticated instead of being whirred up in a centrifugal juicer, the juice comes out at a regular temperature (it can be a bit warm when you use a centrifugal juicer)
• Clean up is fairly simple. I often hear people saying how juicers are a pain to clean, but I don’t find it any different than having to clean a blender.

CONS

• when I juice leafy veggies, they sometimes get stuck and clog up the spout
• the tube where you enter your produce is narrow (this is typical of masticating juicers) so you do have to chop your veggies smaller than you would for a centrifugal juicer
• There are two small rubber pieces that you must remove and clean. They’re about the size of a nickel and I promptly lost them about a week after using the Juicepresso and had to have them replaced (I was sent replacements, but if you lose yours, they’ll cost $5 to replace). I think I placed them on the cutting board and then ditched them when I threw out the veggie peels and such. Doh!

All in all, I’m super pleased with the Juicepresso and my new juicing habit. It makes me happy to make a juice…there’s something oddly satisfying of feeding the veggies and fruit into it and watching the juice emerge.

Now, to do something with all that pulp. Such a waste for it to go in the bin. I’m going to need to start baking with it or something.

Leave a Comment February 25, 2015