I have enjoyed incorporating a juice cleanse into my life 1-2 times a year to reset my cravings and digestive system, but it can get very pricey when buying the juices pre-made. A friend and I recently decided to do try at-home juicing to get the benefits without the price tag. Was it worth it? In today’s post I am sharing my experience and whether I would do it again.
We started planning out our cleanse by pulling juice recipes from Pinterest. These are the ones we decided to go with: Sugar Detox (above) and Colon Cleanse (below).
I headed to Trader Joes for all the ingredients and as you can see it takes a TON of fruits and vegetables to make the juices for just a few days. I think my ingredients were about $50 – $75
After washing and chopping all the ingredients, it was juicing time. The act of juicing was super fun but the mess was NOT. As you can see in the bowl below that was all the waste from the juicing and that was only one recipe and then all the juicer parts had to be hand cleaned. I may or may not have pawned that step off on Mac.
When I have done store-bought juice cleanses, I got 6 homemade juices per day (which was plenty to keep me full) but at-home I was disappointing to find that all of those ingredients only made me 2-3 mason jars of juice per recipe.
Those few glasses of juice were delicious though! I love the taste of fresh juice and the recipes were the perfect mix of sweet/tart.
Pro Tip: If you miss chewing, add some chia seeds to your juices to mix up the texture
So how long do you drink juice and do you eat any food?
These are the most common questions. I have done a few kinds of juice cleanses in the past and I find 3 days is my happy place. One time I did a 5 day juice only cleanse and it was MISERABLE by the last two days.
The most successful times I have done juice cleanses, I worked with a local juice shop and did 6 homemade juices a day combined with 1 super healthy salad that I could eat for lunch or dinner. This combo + TONS of water and tea always leaves me super full each day and to be honest I was rarely able to finish all 6 juices. I also never give up coffee haha. This leaves me feeling full, and happy – aside from missing chewing.
The hydration part is REALLY important. I find I get awful headaches if I don’t drink enough water while juicing.
For this experience, we decided to do a mix of juices and salad. We ended up with about 3 juices per day and 1 salad which to be honest left me very hungry! I think if I had made more juice I would have been more satisfied.
So, how did it go? Would I do an at-home juice cleanse again?
PROS
- Juices were customized to my liking and less sweet and/or bitter than ones I have bought
- The actual juicing process was fun (aside from the mess)
- Expensive
CONS
- SOOO messy
- Hard to produce high quantity
- Time consuming
- Still expensive
To be perfectly honest with ya’ll based on the time commitment and the cost and quantity of fresh fruits and veggies needed, it wasn’t worth it for me. I would go back to buying my juices from my local Juice Vibes over at-home juicing any day. It is a little more expensive to buy the juices but for me it’s just easier to pick up a bag of fresh made juices each day and skip the hassle and clean up. Learn more about my Juice Vibes cleanse experience.
