The delivery occurs some time before 2 a.m., when someone comes to your house or apartment and drops off the same kind of black insulated cooler you might ordinarily use to take a turkey sandwich to work. There is no food in this soft-sided package, however. Instead, each contains six bottles of freshly made juice from Total Cleanse, a service offered throughout the Greater Toronto Area, Vancouver and Montreal. Like its American counterparts, Blueprint and Cooler Cleanse, the program touts itself as a healthy way to detoxify the body through the convenience of home delivery.
Think of it as liquid breakfast, lunch and dinner – and three liquid snacks in between. Also allowed: herbal teas and water. Forbidden: solid food.
There is no particular magic to juice cleanses: Countless websites and blogs offer instructions and recipes for do-it-yourself approaches. But their recent association with celebrities – Salma Hayek is a partner in Cooler Cleanse, Oprah has pushed green juices – and availability via credit card have propelled the regimens from fringe phenomenon to fad.
On the surface, they seem like the yin to KFC's Double Down yang. That's not to say juice cleanses aren't controversy-free, especially among nutritionists and medical practitioners who worry that women will resort to the fast as an extreme way to drop a dress size. Juice-cleanse advocates, on the other hand, defend them as wellness tools that allow our overworked digestive systems a much-needed rest, the internal plumbing equivalent of spring cleaning.
Since everyone can use a tune-up now and then, I decided to give the Total Cleanse program, which launched last summer, a try for three days. Its entirely liquid “meals” alternate between a Green Energy cocktail (romaine lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, parsley, celery, kale and apples), “Lemonade” (a cayenne-infused citron beverage sweetened with maple syrup) and something called “Very Berry” (a filling blend of blueberries, pineapple, apple and wheatgrass).
Rebecca Malen, who started Total Cleanse as an offshoot of her Nutrition in Motion diet delivery service, estimates that one day's allotment of the juices (including the three snack bottles) contains more than 15 pounds of raw fruits and vegetables. The six juices provide anywhere between 900 and 1,100 calories per day, which is a significant reduction for most people but sufficient enough to maintain some degree of energy.
“The goal is to have the body do the least amount of work as possible,” she says, noting that weight loss is inevitable but should not be the focus.
In my case, I made the mistake of starting the program during a week that was packed with evening engagements. On day one, all was fine until dinnertime, when I had to tote two juice bottles to a restaurant where my book club was meeting. When my friends' food – pizza and burgers, natch – arrived, I was sipping green juice out of a highball. Not fun. To avoid further torture, I cancelled my plans for the following night.
Most of all, I did not want to become one of those people who gloats incessantly about being on a cleanse. In their company, the sharing of frequent bowel-movement updates is bad enough, but the holier-than-thou, “my body looks awesome” self-praise that has a way of making everyone else feel guilty for eating a salad is intolerable. As it turned out, gloating wasn't a problem for me: Increasingly weak and progressively starved, I could only congratulate myself on small victories like getting off my sofa.
Marni Lokash, a Toronto real-estate agent who tried Total Cleanse in November, had a similar experience. “I just felt that there weren't enough calories to keep me going,” she says. “I couldn't get through yoga class the same way I normally do. And as much as I liked idea of doing it, it didn't accomplish what thought it was accomplish.”
