T
he new year is a time for fresh starts, resolutions and—
above all—diets. So what could be more of-the-season than
a juice cleanse, which mixes a little bit of all three?
The lore of the juice cleanse tells us that subsisting on nothing but fresh, natural juices for a few days gives your digestive system a chance to slow down, repair itself and expel the
year’s built-up junk. Meanwhile, you supercharge yourself with
a flood of vitamins, which leads to rejuvenation and greater
energy.
But these benefits come at a cost: hunger; increased toilet-time; a vampiric, liquid-based existence that makes you feel
like you’ve left behind the world of the living; and seriously
ridiculous prices.
Last January, I wanted to jump on the trendy juice cleanse
bandwagon so much that I actually paid $180 for three days of
Life Juice (http://www.lifejuiceshop.com), which is expensive
enough that I felt a little stupid as I chugged my morning dose
of Himalayan sea salt and lemon. But on top of that, I also paid
for the juice to be express shipped here—to Hawai‘i—across a
continent and an ocean.
How much did that cost, you ask? Enough that, a year later,
I still don’t really want to talk about it.
So this year I vowed to cleanse on the cheap, supporting local
businesses where I can, and keeping my own tab a lot smaller.
Luckily Honolulu’s grocery stores actually have a lot of options for building your own cleanse out of juices made in-store
out of organic fruits and veggies. Kokua Market makes fresh
“Red Drink” and “Green Smoothie” every morning for maximum freshness and vitamin content. These drinks are not
messing around. The beet- and carrot-based Red Drink looks downright
gory, like someone massacred a veggie
family and bottled their remains. The
Green Smoothie has exactly the gritty
“green” flavor you’d expect.
I’m also a fan of the stomach-settling
effects of Govinda’s “Ginger Rush” and
Whole Foods’ “Melon Mint.” Both feature a hefty amount of ginger, which
seems important because professional
juice cleanses feature it a lot.
Whole Foods has a rotating array of
in-house juices that are worth checking
out. They include a variety of green and
red juices such as a cleanse-worthy mix
of pineapple, carrot and ginger called
“Shootz” or spinach, celery, and apple
called “Iron Clad.”
In crafting my cleanse, I took Life
Juice as my model, with its reliance on
lemon, ginger, and parsley as cleansing agents in every juice, supported
by a daily regimen of two green juices,
two red juices (one beet, one carrot) a
morning lemon water and an evening
nut milk. The difficulty I encountered
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