paulradcliffe.me

“Total Cleanse” Juice Cleanse Review

As part of my ongoing recovery and health improvement journey, I went to see a naturopath a few weeks ago. He made a lot of really good suggestions, and gave a lot of really valuable advice. One suggestion was for me to try a juice cleanse. I’d heard about this before, but never tried it myself, until now.

I told my wife about this plan and she agreed to do it along with me. Honestly, this would have been much, much harder if I was doing juices while smelling her eating regular food.

We ordered two packs of the 3-day “refresh cleanse” set from Total Cleanse. We paid for this ourselves: This is not a sponsored review of this Total Cleanse product, though we did use a discount promo code forwarded to us by the naturopath.

There are no absolutely necessary preparations to make for the cleanse, but Total Cleanse did recommend eating less sugar in the days leading up to it. Not eating regular food for 3 days provided an interesting logistical situation: We emptied the fridge of some perishable foods prior so that nothing would spoil. And we didn’t buy anything perishable. The cleanse set was kind of expensive, but we also wouldn’t need groceries for 3 days, nor have to cook or clean. There’s something to be said about that!

The process of ordering online was very smooth. They took PayPal and even offered to send delivery updates via email, SMS, and Facebook Messenger. It arrived Sunday evening around 10:30pm the night before we were to start the cleanse. They even sent a text saying it was delivered!

It came in two large boxes. The boxes had some ice packs, and the tops of the bottles were labelled with numbers to make the sequence more foolproof. As instructed, we placed all the bottles into the fridge. 

• 

• 

• 

The first one we tried was the “Green Energy” bottle. The contents had separated so it was pretty important to shake the bottle. At first, the taste wasn’t so bad, but the celery hit you a few moments later. It “tasted HEALTHY”. 

About 2 hours later, the second was “Lemon Rush”. Looking at the ingredients I suspected it would taste like lemonade. It was more like iced tea. But the cayenne hits you a few moments after drinking, which is unexpected for a sweet drink.

The 3rd was another Green Energy. Then a ” Very Berry” fourth. That one definitely tasted the best since it was all fruit. This is one I’d like to drink regularly, but probably had the fewest health benefits.

We continued the process and had 6 bottles each for the 3 days. And other than water, that’s all we ate.

Do not go grocery shopping during a juice cleanse! We went to grab something from Wal-Mart and just the sight of the produce section was tempting.

To my surprise, I wasn’t overly tired. We did get hungry shortly before each bottle, so about 2 hours between each was just right.

The process was really easy, just drink. When we were out and about, we packed what we expected to drink during the day in a little cooler. If anything, it made things easy on busy days: Instead of having to stop for lunch somewhere, and wait to be served, we just drank the appropriate bottle in the car between appointments. Saved time and money that way!

I feel like the juice cleanse helped change my relationship with food. I thought you need to eat lots to function and survive, but this cleanse taught me that you just need nutrients: everything else is for leisure or pleasure. 
Coming off the cleanse, we were advise to eat mostly vegetables for the first day, then introduce simple to digest meats the next day.

I wound up losing 7.5 pounds! Yes, it did all come back in about two weeks, but I was pleasantly surprised by the rather painless progress in such a short time.

I would recommend people try this cleanse. It’s a good way to reset your system and/ or start a new health regime! I think it would be especially good to do after coming back from a vacation. Besides, you probably wouldn’t have any groceries in your fridge anyways!

Special thanks to our friend Glenda Mulligan! We asked for recommendations on a good juicer, and she GAVE us one in the box she had lying around! We have set it up on our “small appliance station”! Thank you again Glenda!