6 Things I Learned From My Post-Thanksgiving Juice Cleanse

After four days of indulging myself in ham, dressing, buttery Shubert’s rolls, and my Nana’s chocolate pie, I couldn’t stomach the idea of eating any more food (pun intended). So I decided to do a juice cleanse.

About three months ago, I stumbled upon a cleanse that seemed doable. It required three days of juicing and supposedly caused the juicers to lose about five pounds. You simply drank eight ounces of a different juice combination for eight hours everyday and then ate lean protein and veggies after 6pm. A juice cleanse that allows you to eat? Sign me up!

So I bought the veggies, made the juice concoction for Day 1 and headed off to work. I was hopeful. I totally had this. The juice wasn’t that bad.

I drank four of the eight glasses before I started to crack. When lunchtime rolled around, my coworkers brought out their Thanksgiving leftovers, and ate at their cubicles. I sat in my little square with my bright purple beet juice and tried to continue drinking it. I quickly learned that you can only drink so much beet juice when the person in the next cube is describing to you how amazing her deviled eggs taste.

My cleanse may not have lasted long, but I can’t say I didn’t learn anything.

1. Drinking a juice full of vegetable and fruit sugars is kind of like drinking crack.
   After the second glass I was high as a kite. I was wired. I couldn’t focus on a single task without being distracted by some random thing that I thought was really funny, but my coworkers definitely didn’t laugh with me.
    
2. When you say you’re doing a juice cleanse, people will gladly remind you of what you’re missing.
   My team members reveled in wrinkling their noses at my juice, laughing as my tongue slowly turned pink, and telling me about the drool-worthy items they were eating.
    
3. I’m not meant to taste the same thing over and over again.
   I love food. I delight in a wide-variety of flavors. Let me tell you, beet juice gets old real quick.
    
4. Humans were made to eat.
   If you can complete a juice cleanse then I think you’re an alien, because how do you not eat for an entire day? I need food, and I need it all the time. I'm calling BS on that whole "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" movement. 
    
5. There is nothing better than eating pizza after a failed juice cleanse.
   I already loved pizza, but I have never eaten anything as life-changing as the 10-inch cheese pizza I ordered from US Pizza. It. Was. Amazing.
    
6. Oh, and beets are gross.