Juice Detox – Healthy or Hype?

Most detox diet plans include some form of juice detox. I’m talking about proper “juice” here. The kind that is is extracted from fruit and vegetables with a juicer and not smoothies which are made from the whole produce in a blender but are often referred to as juices.

They often suggest that you drink one or two fresh juices every day as well as detox meals or spend a day or two on a juice fast, drinking nothing but juices.

Although a swarm of celebrities have made juicing trendy there’s been a lot of controversy over it recently so you might be wondering if juicing is really healthy.

Benefits Of Juice Detox

Fasting is Not New

Let’s remember that fasting, in some form, has been around a long time, even in biblical days, as a way to cure health problems. Fasting allows the body to go into a repair response. When the digestive system does not have to work so hard to digest food the excess energy can go into helping the body repair itself instead.

Repair Without Starvation

Juicing gives your body a chance to go into the repair mode without starvation, while flooding your body with vitamins and minerals, giving it the building blocks to detox and conduct the repairs it needs without deprivation.

This is why juicing should be a part of your over-all healthy diet. It’s a great way to help your body get over an illness or to simply get back on track with proper eating habits if you’ve gone off the path.

Boost Your Immune System

By hydrating your body with nutrients that you cannot consume any other way than juicing you will improve your body’s natural immune response exponentially. There are particular juice combinations that can help relieve pretty much any problem that you have whether it is inflammation, or acne.

If you’re not a big fan of fruits and vegetables, it’s a good way to get more of them them into your diet although in this case smoothies would be better as you get the whole fruit or vegetable.

Aids Digestion

When you juice fruits and veggies you take out the fiber, so your body doesn’t have to work as hard to get the nutrients into your system.

If you are experiencing problems in your digestion, from irritable bowel syndrome to constipation, to indigestion or heartburn, you can get relief with thoughtful juicing.

Drop Extra Weight

You absolutely will experience weight loss when juicing if you do it long enough. Typically, at least 14 days. Did you see Fat Sick & Nearly Dead ?

However, it is more important to get your long term eating under control than to fix your weight with a juice fast. It’s a great way to kick start weight loss, cure medical issues, and gain control over your eating, but like any type of diet, if you go back to the unhealthy eating patterns that made you gain weight in the first place, you will gain the weight back.

Juicing will also help you become more mindful of what you are eating the rest of the time. Done properly, while paying close attention to your body’s response, juicing can be a healthy way to ensure that you get the nutrients your body craves – allowing your body to repair itself, lose weight and become energetic and vital again.

American idol host, Ryan Seacrest, who revealed that he was tubby as a youngster, put himself on a strict health juice diet a few years ago in a bid to stay slim and healthy. He credits his green “Brazilian Thunder Green Juice” a mix of collard greens, kale, coconut water, green tea and broccoli to give him the energy he needs for his busy schedule.

Green juices are best

The current craze for guzzling gallons of fruit juices is not a healthy one. Fruit, although relatively low in calories when compared with many other foods, is high in the natural sugar fructose. When you drink the juice although fructose does not increase blood sugar it has to be broken down by the liver.

Higher intakes of fructose have been associated with insulin resistance in the liver as well as fatty liver disease but clinical trials have yet to show that it causes them.

In the meantime I feel it’s better to err on the side of caution and drink mainly green juices when you juice detox.

Don’t have a juicer? Then I would read Juicerkings.com or TheWireCutter.

Have you done any juicing? I would love to hear from you. Why not share your experiences with my readers in the comments?

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