You may have noticed there’s a fad going around, called juicing. What is it? Is it beneficial? Well first off, juicing is where you blend a lot of fruits and vegetables to make juices out of them, without any added sugar. Fruits and vegetables can include apples, strawberries, cucumbers, spinach, blueberries and the like. As for the benefits? Let’s take a look at them.
Many Servings at the Same Time
It is recommended to have 4-6 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Sometimes it can be hard for people to keep track of all these servings and most of the time people don’t even get the recommended servings. By juicing your vegetables and fruits, you are able to consume a larger amount of them at once.
Break the Cycle
Junk food is bad, of course every-one knows that (right?). A benefit of starting with a small-scale juice cleanse, like for three days, is that it helps to ward off the control junk food holds over you. It helps to break the cycle and reset your stomach, making those urges a little easier to fight.
Take Care of Your Liver
The liver’s function in the body is to detoxify. Every single thing that passes through our mouth passes through our liver for a detoxification before it can enter the rest of the body. By doing an organic juice cleanse, you give the liver a little less to process.
Rehydrate Your Body
Most people do not drink enough water, with other more inadequate beverages, like chai and soda, being their main fluid intakes. By partaking in a juice cleanse, the amount of adequate beverages you drink helps your body out in many ways. It helps to ensure your body is working more efficiently, flushes your system and often increases your alertness. Afternoon crash? Say goodbye to that.
Glowing Skin
Going on a juice cleanse will rehydrate you while filling your body with a lot of vitamins, nutrients, flavonoids, anthocyanins. Just being well hydrated positively affects your skin. The result is a glowing complexion.
Reduce Stress
When you juice a variety of fruits and vegetables, you’re able to diversify the nutrients your body receives. Leafy green vegetables are high in magnesium, a relaxing mineral that has a mellowing effect that can help improve sleep quality. That’s not all magnesium does either. Magnesium and vitamin C help to ward of the stress hormone cortisol.
Diversify Your Diet
By juicing, not only are you able to consume more fruits and vegetables, you are also able to add more to your diet that you wouldn’t normally eat. Not the biggest fan of beets? Juice one with some greens and fruits. When juicing, it’s recommended to add a rainbow of produce to diversify your benefits. It is much easier to hide the taste of your least favorite but oh-so-good-for-you veggie with other flavors in a juice than on a plate.
Absorb Nutrients Faster
Solely consuming fruits and veggies does not make your intestines work as hard to break down multiple types of nutrients. In fact, there is hardly anything to break down, so most of the nutrients are easily and readily absorbed. This is great considering most of the vitamins and enzymes our bodies need are found in the juice of raw fruits and vegetables.
Lose the Weight
A juice cleanse is an easy and great way to jump start a diet. As I mentioned earlier, it helps to ward off cravings and control your appetite. Naturally low in calories, yet still delivering concentrated healing and beneficial nutrients, it supplies the body with everything it needs while helping to shed it of water weight, and in some cases, fat.
Increase Your Energy
It may sound backwards that drinking solely juice will give you energy, but it does. After your body adjusts, you will feel more clarity and have more energy. Some feel so much better that they never even miss their daily coffee.
Tip
Although there are benefits to this, a juice cleanse is really hard to do. What’s more, is that with all these advantages of a juice cleanse, I don’t advise that you go on a juice-only cleanse for a week. That’s not conducive to a healthy diet. Mostly because the weight that you may lose during a juice cleanse will be gained back after you come off it. That’s because you’ll be really hungry and will tend to eat more, adding on the calories. Rather, I would advise that you take one week off to do a detoxification that includes fresh juices with fruits and vegetables (with no added sugar), solid fruits and vegetables, salad, and dried lean chicken and/or fish (with no salan, roti or rice).