I don't hear about it so much anymore but every now and then I'll see someone who is going on some bizarre diet and lately one of my friends who is a regular at one of our favorite bars because he owns it, is now drinking fruit juice almost exclusively in an effort to lose weight.
There are many reasons why juice cleanses and other such fad diets are silly and mostly lies, but I'll detail a few of the reasons here that might be obvious to some folks.
All you gotta do is buy this horrendously overpriced juices and the fat and toxins just fall off your body
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It is a fad diet
First off, fad diets are exactly that - Fads. They tend to not stick around for very long because the lies of the people who started the craze in the first place needs to evolve and information needs to be suppressed. This was a lot easier to pull off before we had the internet and many fad diets were able to thrive simply by paying off powerful celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey to say great things about it. If there was no money in juice cleanses by the people who produce these overpriced products you can bet your bottom dollar that the entire idea behind juice cleanses would disappear overnight.
If something comes along and has some tricky wording to it and a new term appears such as "cold pressed' you can be all but guaranteed that they are making stuff up. Combine this with things you have never heard of like "Shlorella" and "corn silk tea" and you need to be apprehensive since their claims about these magical ingredients are certainly embellished if they aren't just outright lies.
You are throwing money away
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Ever wonder why a particular product that is new and chic always carries a high price tag along with it? When I was a kid orange juice was the only juice we ever had in the kitchen. I don't have any idea how much OJ cost when I was a kid but I can promise you it wasn't $3.99 for a 12 ounce bottle.
These cleanses don't just promise weight loss (which can't clinically be proven without starving the participants) but they also make the dubious claim about detoxifying your body. If you have a functioning stomach, liver, and kidneys, your body is constantly detoxifying your body anyway. Adding some Kale and Dandelion to the mix isn't going to change anything about this situation.
There is no doubt that some foods are better for you than others and forcing your body to overwork your organs is not a good idea for sure but this idea that if you just go on this "cleanse" that you are somehow engaging some warp speed for your body is just a load of psychobabble.
The producers of these products and even the farms behind the products they contain spend TONS of money on marketing and paying off "experts" to testify to their supposed effects and in return they expect to make that money back. Fads are a perfect way to pull that off.
Surprise! Juice is very high in calories!
Your body doesn't know the difference between a 300 calorie Coca Cola or a 300 calorie bottle of juice. Of course the vitamins are meant to help and we all know that a Coke has no vitamins in it unless they are added to it. However, there are many juices on the market that contain MORE sugar than most fizzy drinks on the market. This is one aspect of the juice cleanse that the manufacturers kind of glance over while they harp on about "removing toxins" and other such unprovable nonsense.
Just because you aren't munching on donuts doesn't mean that what you are consuming is actually good for weight loss. If you look at basically any juice out there that doesn't taste like yard trimmings the amount of sugar (natural or added) that it contains might surprise you.
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There are a lot of reasons to not juice cleanse and instead to just be a bit mindful about what it is that you are eating all the time. Try to eat in a balanced sense and avoid the peaks and troughs that a juice cleanse all but encourages. The idea behind these fake cleanses is that you can eat like a dickhead all year but as long as you "cleanse" for a month everything is going to work out fine. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Also, the people I know that decide to do this sort of thing feel as though they need to blow up social media with their progress and it almost starts to seem like a juice cleansing cult since not only is no one impressed and you aren't being paid for it, but you are actually paying a premium for something that doesn't do what it promises and you are looking like a fool to all of your friends at the same time.
It's funny how they don't put posts up about how they immediately gained all the weight back once they left the cleanse, isn't it? Or if they didn't lose the weight at all (because they didn't create a calorie deficit) they talk about toxins and how great they feel or something else that can't be measured.
I don't pretend to be a professional trainer or dietician but I can only speak on what actually worked for me in that i lost over 50 pounds and kept it off after living "dangerously" all through my 20's and 30's
I mainly just have some orange juice at breakfast and don't go for anything fancy. There are a lot of bold claims made for various juices, but it seems like mostly marketing. The play to the dream of miracle fixes as with many things you write about.
Stay well.
I do love a glass of OJ myself. I do remember being really ignoring and falling for the marketing tactics when i was in college. I remember gulping down grape juice thinking i was doing something healthy. Wow how things have changed in 20 years as far as our thinking is concerned huh?